Expert Builds

Why these eight are rated expert

Expert here covers two kinds of build. The skyscraper, the full beacon pyramid and the mega base platform are mostly a matter of materials and hours. The other five only work once you know one mechanic well: where witches may spawn, how guardians spawn in a monument, what starts a raid, how a map picks its colors and what a flying machine can carry.

Counting the materials

The lists on each build count finished blocks. This is what some of them come to before any crafting.

Iron blocks

The full beacon pyramid takes 244 iron blocks. At nine ingots a block that is 2,196 iron ingots, so the iron golem farm is worth building first.

White concrete

The skyscraper needs 1,024 white concrete. One craft of four sand, four gravel and a white dye makes eight white concrete powder, so that is 128 crafts: 512 sand, 512 gravel and 128 white dye. The powder sets into concrete when it touches water.

Glass panes

The skyscraper's 512 light blue glass panes come 16 to a craft from six light blue stained glass, so 192 stained glass. Eight glass around one light blue dye make eight stained glass, which comes to 192 glass and 24 dye.

Sea lanterns

A sea lantern is four prismarine shards and five prismarine crystals. The skyscraper's 48 need 192 shards and 240 crystals, and the 128 in the mega base platform need 512 shards and 640 crystals. Guardians drop both.

Deepslate bricks

The platform's 4,096 deepslate bricks are exactly enough for one 64 by 64 layer. A stonecutter makes one brick from one cobbled deepslate, and the crafting table gets the same count in two steps through polished deepslate. Deepslate mined without Silk Touch drops cobbled deepslate, so that is 4,096 blocks to mine.

Witches and the swamp hut

In Java the only monster that spawns in the space around a swamp hut is the witch. That space is 7×7×9 blocks: the size of the roof plus one block over the porch, from one level below the floor to two blocks above the roof. It only works when the whole hut stands inside the swamp biome. The spawning platforms still need a sky light level of 7 or lower, and one hut has room for three of them. In Bedrock a witch killed in the hut respawns on a single block, on the floor two blocks in front of the crafting table.

Mobs only spawn within 128 blocks of a player, and a monster with no player inside 128 blocks despawns on the spot, so the AFK spot has to stay close to the hut. Dark caves inside that sphere fill the mob cap with other monsters. That is why the witch farm clears the area around it.

Do not kill them with fire. A witch that is burning, or took fire damage in the last two seconds, has a 15% chance every tick to start drinking Fire Resistance, and one below full health a 5% chance to drink Healing. Fall damage works in both editions, and entity cramming works in Java. A Java witch always drops 4 to 8 redstone, plus one to three rolls on glowstone dust, sugar, spider eyes, glass bottles, gunpowder and sticks, each roll giving up to two of that item and sticks coming up twice as often.

Guardians and the ocean monument

Guardians only spawn in water inside an ocean monument, in a 58×24×58 box that runs from the monument floor, usually Y 39, to just above its top at Y 61. In Java a spawn attempt fails 95% of the time when the water above it runs straight up to sea level under open sky, so farms drain the monument and put a roof over the water the guardians spawn in.

Sponges only come from ocean monuments. Each monument has three elder guardians, one at the top and one in each wing. They never respawn, and each drops a wet sponge only when a player kills it. A wet sponge dries in a furnace, or at once when placed in the Nether, so the 128 sponges on the guardian farm list can be used again and again while you drain.

A guardian drops 0 to 2 prismarine shards, then a raw cod or a prismarine crystal at 40% each, and nothing the other 20% of the time. It gives 10 XP when a player or a tamed wolf kills it. Magma blocks have only hurt guardians since 1.15.2; before that a bubble column over magma moved them without doing damage.

Starting raids on purpose

Since Java 1.21 a pillager captain no longer gives you Bad Omen when it dies. A captain that is not part of a raid drops an ominous bottle of level I to V instead, and drinking it gives Bad Omen for 100 minutes. Walk into a village with that effect and it turns into Raid Omen, and the raid starts when the Raid Omen runs out 30 seconds later. Killing the captain still earns Voluntary Exile.

In Java any subchunk with a bed, job site block or bell that a villager has claimed counts as a village, so one villager and one bed are enough, which is all the raid farm uses. A raid has 3 waves on Easy, 5 on Normal and 7 on Hard, plus one more when the Raid Omen is level II or higher. Java raids start in every dimension except the Nether, and a raider leaves the raid once it is more than 112 blocks from the raid center or in another dimension.

An evoker drops a totem of undying every time, however it dies, and Looting does not add a second one. Emeralds are different: vindicators and evokers drop 0 or 1 only when a player gets the kill, which is why most Java raid farms bring the raiders down to a player with a sword, often one with Sweeping Edge. Keep the drops away from lava too: only netherite items survive it.

In Java a raid farm gives only the raiders' own drops. In Bedrock, pillagers and vindicators spawned by a raid also have a raid loot table with emeralds, enchanted books and iron tools and armor. Winning a raid earns Hero of the Village.

Map art at full size

A map at its closest zoom is 128×128 pixels, one per block, so a picture that fills it covers 8 chunks on each side and takes 16,384 blocks, 256 stacks, before any support blocks. Where that square sits on the map grid and how shading works are on the pixel art page.

Built flat, every block shows its color in one shade, which leaves 61 colors. Raising and lowering blocks against the block to their north adds a lighter and a darker shade, 183 colors in all, but every column of the picture then turns into a slope you have to plan. The color tables list a fourth shade as well, and only an external tool can put that one on a map. The map art landscape uses height for its shading, so build it the staircase way.

What a flying machine can carry

The auto bridge builder rides on a flying machine, where observers and sticky pistons keep pushing slime blocks along. A piston moves at most 12 blocks. Slime blocks and honey blocks drag along the blocks touching their sides, but they do not stick to each other, so a slime part and a honey part side by side can be moved by different pistons and the machine can grow past that limit. Obsidian and other immovable blocks stop it, and in Java so do block entities such as furnaces, so stopping a machine means putting one of those in its path. Get a plain flying machine running before you add anything to it.