Tutorials/Zombified piglin farming

A zombified piglin farm attached to a mob grinder.

Zombified piglin farming is a method of obtaining gold nuggets and rotten flesh renewably by using spawn platforms or nether portals to spawn zombified piglins and moving them to a killing zone. The rotten flesh and gold nuggets can be traded to cleric villagers in large amounts to gain emeralds easily.

Nether

To construct a farm in the Nether, one can build platforms for zombified piglins to spawn on, with trapdoors on the edge, and place slabs on the floors of all surrounding areas (or just fill them in), so zombified piglins only spawn on those platforms.

The simplest zombified piglin farm is to dig a 3x3x1 trench and make a layer of dirt leaving a 1 block space. Shoot zombified piglins and swipe at them with a sword on their legs after they jumped into the trench. Turn on subtitles, so you can hear when you can come out. To get maximum spawn rates, slab off the blocks in a 128 block diameter. It is done! You can also use magma blocks which only zombified piglin can spawn on(if you are on 1.16)

Put hoppers connected to a large chest to collect the loot more easily rather than attaching a door to the trench since more zombified piglins might jump in and attack.

If the player wants to take this to the next level, they can get to the top of the Nether ceiling and build this farm:

Tutorial Gold Farm (view on YouTube)

Or, a player can make a quick, and more work intensive, farm by creating a safe, walled off, area for the player. Then small windows with a half block gap be added to the walls. By attacking the zombified piglins, they will try to attack the player, but the player will instead be able to kill them safely from inside the enclosure.

Another strategy is to place cactus in the nether, and then stand on a block on top of it. Shoot ranged weapons at zombified piglins to anger them, and they converge on the cactus, which helps to kill them.

Overworld - Java version

For Bedrock specific farms see the next chapter below.

To build a farm in the Overworld, one can build a lot of large nether portals, interlocked to save obsidian, and put signs or open trapdoors on the edges of the bottom obsidian blocks, so that zombified piglins (ZPs) will walk off. From here, one can use water to collect them into a fall or suffocation trap. Snow golems can be an alternative for pushing them around, or at least getting them moving.

One fundamental problem with Overworld gold farms is that it is occasionally possible for angered ZPs to return to the Nether through a portal, and perhaps anger others while there. Without proper precautions, you may be ambushed by one or more angry ZPs when they return to the Nether though a nearby portal. You will need to make sure that all your farm portals lead into a containment area where the ZPs will be isolated. (Do include a couple of fence gates, just in case you stumble in yourself!) Similarly, one must be careful not to use a portal in the Nether which takes them into the farm for the same reason. Returnees can be minimized by use of turtle eggs to lure zombified piglins out of the portals. This ensures they will move and fall even without players nearby.

Since the availability of larger portals, it is no longer necessary to make a prism of portals as large portals can do as well. However, the same practice can still be used to make a hyper-efficient farm by building portals in concentric rings (one open to each cardinal direction) from a small inner ring (usually 5x5, to have a single center block) out to the maximum of 23x23. Note that even the inner ring can be 23 blocks tall (more portal blocks mean more spawns). a ring of size n and height h will take 8(n-1) +4(h-2) = 8n+4h-16 obsidian, with 4(n-3) =4n-12 trapdoors (3n-9 logs) needed to line the inside. If all the portals are to be 23-tall, the obsidian can be reduced to 8n+76.

• The extreme here is to put the nether portals directly adjacent, with a 5x23x5 square of portals surrounded by a 7x23x7 square, and so on out to a 23x23x23 cube (the tops and bottoms will merge into a solid ceiling and floor, with the portal sides forming diagonals). This can culminate with 10,080 portal blocks, using 1,800 obsidian for a maximum space efficiency of 82.8%. Walling off the outer side of the largest portals and placing trapdoors on the edge of the smallest inner portals will allow ZPs to spawn and wander into the drop or push each other into it. Both the turtle eggs and the containment area in the Nether become very important here, as the ZPs from outer portals will be moving through the inner portals, and if they haven't reached the center to fall out within 15 seconds, they will be going back to the Nether. That said, once they do reach the middle, they're already nicely confined to at most a 3x3 shaft, which can easily be narrowed to 1x1.
• A slightly less expensive scheme is to alternate portals with empty rings, with the inside bottoms of each portal lined with open trapdoors. That is, the 5x5 portal is surrounded by a 9x9 portal, then 13x13, and so on, all of them up to 23 blocks high. This way, ZPs will fall much more quickly, and a large water pan can collect them to a central point.
  • The build can be done in stages, according to resources:
    • 5x23x5: 40+92-16=116 obsidian, 6 logs
    • 9x23x9: 72+92-16= 148 obsidian, 18 logs
    • 13x23x13: 180 obsidian, 30 logs
    • 17x23x17: 212 obsidian, 42 logs
    • 21x17x21: 244 obsidian, 54 logs
    • total: 900 obsidian (14 stacks and change), 150 logs.
    • If you still want more, you can ditch the trapdoors and upgrade it in place to the "solid" version above.
  • The simplest collector is a 27x27 water pan, with two levels.. You will need 676 blocks and/or slabs (most of them can be slabs) plus 104 for each perimeter block (each layer in the outer wall), not counting any doorways or decorations you may add.
    • Start with a classic 9x9 pan surrounding the 1x1 drop chute. Move up a level to surround it with the rest of the large pan -- slabs or blocks will do for most of this, but at the inner/outer border you'll want real blocks, so you can place water on them.
    • The outermost ring of the pan should be a 25x25 square of walls or fences on the same level as the pan bottom -- that is, you'd have a half-step up from the outer pan to the fences. Iron bars or glass will also work, without the half-step.
    • Surround this with the 27x27 outer wall.
    • Now the water sources:
      • As usual, the inner pan gets a water source at each corner, which should send the flow in to surround the hole.
      • For the outer pan, water sources go every other block on top of the fences (place them against the outer wall), but not in a complete ring. First place the sources every other space along two opposite edges (north/south or east/west); you will see the flow running exactly to the edge of the inner pan, straight across the entire outer pan. For the other two edges, place 5 sources on each side, covering that dry middle third. (Still every other space; one at the midpoint, and two on each side.) This will send the water flow to the other edges of the inner pan. Warning: If you do try to finish the ring of water sources, you will get new water sources forming from the corners, and your nice neat collector will turn into a sheet of sources that floods over the inner pan.

Regardless, the mobs will be gathered to a central point, generally a 1x1 dropshaft. At the full scale of this farm, a complex grinder is unecessary: The farm can produce enough spawns that simply forcing them all into a single space will start killing them off through crowding ("suffocation"). They can be dropped onto a bottom-slab exposing their feet to you, with a hopper beneath that which can go to an item sorter. This setup has three main modes of operation:

• The crowding damage will let the farm run unattended as long as a player is close enough to keep the mobs from despawning, producing a stream of gold nuggets and rotten flesh.
• Alternatively, you can take your Looting III sword and kill the ZPs manually, for about three times the gold and some grindstone experience.
• Or, the two can be combined: Wield the Looting sword, but don't use it (much). Let the ZPs accumulate in the catcher, but occasionally punch one of them to aggro the group, then immediately go back to the Looting sword. Once the crushing damage sets in, their deaths will be considered your kills, yielding experience and the more generous gold drops. The catch here is that you need to stay mostly in front of the ZPs, to maintain the aggro -- if you move out of line-of-sight, their forgiveness timer starts ticking and they will eventually calm down.

This farm will reward at least a minimal item sorter setup, if only to divert the rotten flesh away from more valuable stuff. After that, separating out nuggets leaves the occasional gold ingots, and unstackable golden swords (and occasional armor). For the rotten flesh, it's likely worth setting up some system to automatically destroy overflow from the system. (Bringing in a cleric villager is also an option.) For gold nuggets, you'll just need to regularly check the chest, and craft the take into more compact ingots or blocks. Swords can be sent to a blast furnace by way of a double-chest; every so often check the chest and hoppers for enchanted swords you can feed to the grindstone (and then put back to be smelted). When enough swords have accumulated, drop some fuel in the blast furnace to clear out the chest.

Channeling trident:

A different way to spawn zombified piglins is to have a pig struck by lightning, meaning a trident enchanted with Channeling can be used in combination with pig breeders for an Overworld gold farm that requires no obsidian such as the design in this video: Note that this method will yield no swords.

Overworld - Bedrock version

For Bedrock Edition there is only one way to make a portal system function properly in the overworld. You need a portal of 23x23 with an activation + deactivation system and a catch system for the zombified piglins to fall in.

We have two options at our disposal for the activation system.

1. A dispenser with flint and steel in it, with a redstone clock attached to ignite the portal every self set amount of ticks. Positive: A cheap way to light portal. Negative: You need lots of flint and steel, because they wear out pretty quickly.
2. With lava on top of observers, that update trapdoors next to it. This will try to ignite the portal every game tick. Positive: System will always work, without extra supplies. Negative: Observers are not cheap to craft and you generally need 6 to start with.

The deactivation system has to be done with a dispenser containing a water bucket. A redstone clock will let the dispenser, dispense the water every self set amount of ticks.

Manual farm

You can make a cheap and simple manual farm, where you just catch the mobs as they spawn from the portal, then transport them to a kill chamber for manual killing. This would be the cheapest way to construct the farm.

With the maximum looting on a sword, you'll get XP, gold nuggets, gold ingots, rotten flesh and gold swords. The swords can be smelted down to gold nuggets as well.

Some swords are also enchanted and before smelting them, you could use a grindstone to un-enchant them and receive extra XP from them.

This video shows how to make a manual killing farm:

Falling farm

The next option that is fairly cheap to construct a farm, is a falling farm. We catch the zombified piglins after spawning and transport them to a drop chute. Where after a fall of more then 24 blocks they will die and drop gold nuggets and rotten flesh.

Fall breaker farm

Instead of letting the zombified piglins fall to their death, we can also use a fall breaker to make sure they get damaged, but don't die. This allows us to use a looting sword to get XP, gold nuggets, gold ingots, golden swords and rotten flesh. Depending on the height of the drop, you can make sure that you could kill the zombified piglins with only one blow. Making it easy to kill and less hard on your sword in terms of durability.

Automatic farm

When we place a trident killer at the bottom of the drop chute, we instantly have a farm that kills the zombified piglins automatically. The trident killer consists of a kill chamber with pistons and a trident in the middle. The pistons push the zombified piglins around and against the trident. This way they get damaged each time they hit the trident, until they die. This then gives us XP, rotten flesh, gold nuggets, gold ingots and golden swords. If we hold a looting sword when in the area of the farm, the looting will be transferred onto the trident and we get more loot with each kill.

This video shows how to make a fully automatic farm with a complete sorting system underneath and furnaces for smelting the swords:

Item filtering

It is also possible to make a fully automatic farm using a more advanced setup.

Main article: Tutorials/Hopper

Since many of the zombified piglin farms produce a significant amount of golden swords, which may quickly clog up a player's storage system, an item filtering system can be used to filter out the rotten flesh, gold nuggets, and gold ingots. A redstone clock can be installed to a dispenser, and if hooked up correctly, the item filtering system can be used to spit the swords into a furnace which can then be smelted into golden nuggets.

Impulsesv shows his simple item filtering design at 8.15 in Hermitcraft 6.