This tutorial seeks to teach you, the player, how to farm blazes, a mob found in nether fortresses.
Why Bother?
Blazes drop twice as much experience as a normal mob; while only having 20 health points, the same amount as a zombie or skeleton. This makes blazes ideal for XP farming. On top of that, blaze rods are the most efficient stackable furnace fuel obtainable in Survival Mode.
Basic Parts
Blazes can spawn in two main areas of a fortress. Each place needs its own system to deal with them.
Spawner
This is possibly the easiest farm to build. This is because the area around a blaze spawner will only spawn blazes. These farms have the following parts:
- Spawning Space - Blazes can spawn midair. This area must be enclosed to prevent the blazes from floating up and potentially avoiding the second area. Blazes can spawn within a 9x9 flat platform centered on the spawner, and one layer above and below the spawner block.
- Funnel - There must be a system to move the blazes into a small space, where they can be killed.
- Killing Chamber - To make a killing chamber more effective, the player must kill the blazes quicker. This is because of the hostile mob cap.
Open Fortress
These are possibly the most difficult to build because the open fortress will also spawn wither skeletons, normal skeletons, zombie pigmen, ghasts, and magma cubes. Building an open-fortress design meant solely for blazes is completely impractical. However, if the player wishes to exert the effort to do this, these are the basic parts:
- Spawning Space - Blazes can spawn anywhere in the individual nether fortress room structures, or on any nether brick anywhere within the bounds of the entire fortress. Using nether brick as the platform can allow for the farm to have eight or more platforms.
- Collector - Running around aimlessly killing blazes is extremely inefficient. Constructing an automatic system to collect the blazes in one area makes the killing process more efficient.
- Killing Chamber - The killing chamber is the same, except the player will have to sort the mobs such that they do not accidentally provoke a pigman, and so that the other mobs are killed faster.
Designs
There are many blaze farm designs. Here is a sample of them.