We built a public gold farm recently that we call Pigmentus, and I’ve been getting asked how to make it. You asked; I answer.
I recommend going 96 blocks up in the air. Why? Simple. You won’t have to deal with slabbing, lighting or flooding the surrounding area for 96 blocks in every direction from the farm’s edges to control the entity count. You should also build this farm 1024 overworld blocks away from any other portal. Unless you understand the mechanics of making a perfect portal match/link. That is beyond the scope of this tutorial. Google it. Point being, don’t build this farm next to your base’s main nether portal. The next time you come through it from the nether, you might wind up inside your gold farm with an army of angry piggies.
The gold farm is actually a really easy build. Getting the obsidian is tedious. You will need roughly 75 stacks of obsidian. The farm itself consists of 4 “units” of 14 max size portals (23×23 on outside, 21×21 on inside). To save on obsidian, use a building block of your choice for the portal corners, and share the middle wall between 2 units. Start off by building your base frame like the picture below.
Once your base frame is complete, creepers and other nasties will start spawning at night and getting in your way. Use temporary torches to keep them out of your way. Now that you ran down for the torches that you completely forgot to bring up with you (no one saw me do this, really, you’ve no proof whatsoever), extend your frame to make it 3D. See the 2 pictures below. 2 units side by side with a 3 block gap between the other 2 units is what you are building.
Note that the obsidian goes between the stone brick.
Now you fill in the obsidian!
Can you light the portals yet? NO. Do not light the portals. Keep repeating to yourself “do NOT light the portals”. Lighting the portals is the absolute last thing to do. Must.Resist.Lighting.The.Portals.
Next up is the packed ice and aggro-walkway. Leave a 1×3 gap in the packed ice at the center point.
Enclose the packed ice sides in material of your choice. I like glass so I can see inside easily.
The “aggro-walkway” goes 1 block above the portal floors. Again, I like glass so I can see through it. You could use any full block so lock as you provide lighting for spawn-able block types. The iron fence goes 1 block up from the walkway. It serves as your walkway guide to keep you from falling. I do recommend sticking with using the iron fence. It seems to be easiest and gets in the way less.
Now grab some ender pearls and pearl onto the packed ice with some signs and water buckets. Go to one end of the gold farm. Add a bucket to the right and to the left of the 3 wide area. Where the water ends evenly, place 3 signs. 1 sign on the glass, a sign on that sign (hold shift while clicking to do this), and yet another on the 2nd sign. Then place 2 buckets of water again just like you did before. Rinse and repeat until you get to the center where you forgot to place 3 signs so you didn’t flood everything underneath and get washed down there by accident. No one got a screenshot, you have no proof this has ever happened to me.
Rinse and repeat on the other side of the farm also.
“Can we light the portal yet?” NO.
Continuing on, next you’ll want to add a piggy retaining wall to either side on the outside of your farm. This will prevent any piggies from straying off an edge somehow to come kill you after you make them mad. If there is one thing I regret about the Pigmentus gold farm build, it’s that we used fences for this instead of solid blocks. Baby pigmen were glitching through the fence somehow. Using solid blocks or at least glass blocks is a far better idea. Do this for both outside walls with blocks of your choice.
Now to build the kill chamber of your gold farm. Don’t even ask about lighting the portals yet. See the picture on the left below to get the placement of the kill chamber done correctly. The red wool blocks are only there to illustrate the correct slab placement.
On the right is the kill chamber with the floor correctly positioned and an obsidian ring placed around it the top of the kill chamber so baby piggies don’t escape, and so you don’t accidentally break a block with a sword and kill all your farm testers. Lies and photoshoppery. That never happened.
NOW you can light the portals! They all get lit, so be careful not to skip and miss one. One unit at a time, remove the temporary torches. Then light them up working your way back towards the walkway. Take ender pearls with you and 4 lighters (flint and steel). After all portals in all units are lit, hit a pigman from the walkway to start off the fun. (Please note that this gold farm works by aggravating the pigmen. If you install a strength beacon for a 1 hit kill, you’ve just broken your farm.)
Enjoy your new gold farm 🙂
Blog post by Empire Minecraft player khixan.
Post-blog addition:
1. The outside pigman retaining walls should go all the way to the top. A rare odd glitch can happen allowing a pigman to wind up on top of the wall and escape. No one likes homicidal escapee pigmen.
2. You can crash your minecraft and/or cause horrible with this build if you are not constantly killing pigs. It is absolutely essential that you never ever hang around this farm or go AFK at it. Kill fast and get out of spawning range (96 blocks on emc, 128 blocks in pure vanilla).
I would suggest a quick drop to jump down and leave fast (water block or pool at bottom, etc), and a “cart-o-vator” to get up quickly. Never heard of a cartovator? ChumMiner introduced me to them, and they are awesome. Here’s a youtube on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShSeP5q6zs
Good job fam