Iron farm that actually works on Bedrock
The short answer
- Java: 3 villagers, 3 beds, a zombie to scare them. That is the whole requirement.
- Bedrock: 10 villagers, 20 beds, and 75% of them must have worked recently. It is a different machine.
- If your farm produces nothing, check for a second village within about 100 blocks before you touch anything else.
Iron farms are the most copied and least understood build in the game. People follow a tutorial block for block, get no golems, and conclude the tutorial was wrong. Almost always the farm is fine — the biome, the village count, or the villagers' work schedule is not.
Why your farm spawns nothing
Check these in order. The first two account for most failures.
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| No golems at all | Another village overlapping | Move the farm ~100 blocks from any bed or workstation cluster |
| Golems spawn but die instantly | Kill chamber too close to the spawn platform | Drop height of at least 3 blocks before the lava or cactus |
| Worked for a day, then stopped | Villagers stopped sleeping (zombie permanently visible) | Pulse the zombie, or hide it behind a piston on a timer |
| Bedrock farm gives nothing | Villagers never worked | Give them workstations and let them work one full day |
| Very slow on Bedrock | Expected — Bedrock rates are lower | Build a second module rather than trying to fix this one |
The 100-block rule is the one people miss. If there is a village, a villager breeder, or a trading hall within roughly 100 blocks, your farm is not creating its own village — it is competing with an existing one, and the golem cap is already used up.
Java build, step by step
This is the compact version: one platform, three villagers, one collection point.
- Pick a flat spot away from everything. No other beds, bells, or workstations within 100 blocks in any direction.
- Build the villager chamber. A 5×5 interior with a roof, three beds along one wall, and a glass or slab floor so you can see in.
- Trap the zombie. A single zombie in a 1×1 cell at eye level with the villagers. It must be able to see them, or the scare mechanic does nothing.
- Build the spawn platform. A flat 9×9 area roughly 3–5 blocks above the villagers' heads, with water channels pushing toward the centre.
- Add the kill chamber. Lava blade or a drop into a hopper collection area. Keep it below the platform, not beside it.
- Sleep one night nearby. Golems will not spawn until every villager has slept at least once. This single step fixes about a third of "broken" farms.
Bedrock is a different farm
Do not apply Java numbers to Bedrock. The spawning conditions are stricter and the throughput is genuinely lower.
- 10 villagers minimum, not three. Some designs use 20 for stability.
- 20 beds for those 10 villagers — the bed-to-villager ratio matters.
- 75% must have worked in the last in-game day. This is why a freshly built farm does nothing: your villagers have never touched a workstation. Give them jobs, wait a full day, then expect golems.
- Expect roughly 30–80 ingots per hour. A Java farm will do several times that. If you need a lot of iron on Bedrock, build two or three modules in a row rather than optimising one.
Do not mix designs. A tutorial labelled "Java/Bedrock" is usually a Java farm with a note attached. If the video does not state the edition in the first 30 seconds, find another one.
What you should expect
Realistic numbers, assuming a working farm and a player nearby (farms do not run when you are far away):
| Edition | Ingots per hour | Enough for |
|---|---|---|
| Java, single module | 300–400 | Hoppers, rails, anvil repairs |
| Java, four modules | 1,200+ | Full rail network, beacon pyramids |
| Bedrock, single module | 30–80 | Basic tool repair |
| Bedrock, stacked modules | 150–250 | Comfortable mid-game supply |
Keeping it running
Three things break iron farms over time: a wandering villager linking to a bed outside the chamber, a zombie burning in daylight because the roof has a hole, and a chunk boundary cutting through the kill chamber so items despawn before you collect them. Fix the chunk boundary issue by pressing F3+G on Java and checking that the whole farm sits inside one or two chunks.