How to Make a Gold Farm in Minecraft

Gold is essential for powered rails, golden apples, bartering with piglins, netherite ingots and beacon pyramids. A gold farm exploits zombified piglin spawning mechanics to produce thousands of gold ingots per hour with minimal player effort. The two main designs are Nether-based portal farms and Overworld Nether portal farms. This guide focuses on the Overworld portal design, which achieves the highest rates on Java Edition.

How zombified piglin spawning works

Zombified piglins spawn naturally in the Nether in nether wastes biomes. However, they also spawn on Nether portal blocks in the Overworld. Any obsidian-framed portal that is lit has a small chance each game tick to spawn a zombified piglin on one of its portal blocks. This Overworld spawning ignores the hostile mob cap, meaning you can stack hundreds of portals and get spawn rates far beyond what any Nether-based farm achieves.

Design overview

The Overworld portal gold farm consists of:

• A large array of Nether portals built in a grid pattern.
• Turtle egg aggro to lure zombified piglins off the portals.
• Water streams or entity cramming to funnel piglins to a kill zone.
• A player AFK spot within range of the portals.

Step 1, Build the portal array

Each Nether portal must be at least 4 blocks wide and 5 blocks tall (the minimum frame size). Build portals in rows, sharing obsidian walls between adjacent portals to save material. A standard farm uses 24 to 32 portals arranged in two rows of 12 to 16, back to back. Each portal is separated by one block of air so piglins can walk out.

Light every portal with flint and steel. You need to light each one individually since adjacent portals do not auto-ignite each other. Building at y = 200+ in the Overworld reduces interference from natural cave spawns below.

Step 2, Zombie piglin aggro with turtle eggs

Zombified piglins pathfind toward turtle eggs and attempt to stomp them. Place turtle eggs on a block in the center of the portal array, surrounded by trapdoors so the piglins walk off an edge toward the egg but fall into a collection system below.

Getting turtle eggs requires finding a beach biome with turtles. Breed two turtles with seagrass and wait for the pregnant turtle to lay eggs on its home beach. Mine the eggs with a Silk Touch pickaxe, without Silk Touch they break and drop nothing.

Step 3, Collection and kill system

Below the portal array, build a funnel of water streams that push piglins toward a central kill chamber. Two designs work well:

Fall damage plus sweeping edge

Drop piglins 22 blocks so they land with low health. Stand at the bottom with a Looting III sword and kill them with sweeping attacks. This gives maximum gold nugget and ingot drops because Looting affects drop rates. Each piglin drops 0 to 1 gold ingots and 0 to 1 gold nuggets, boosted by Looting.

Entity cramming (fully AFK)

Funnel piglins into a 1x1 space. When more than 24 entities occupy the same block, they begin taking suffocation damage. Drops fall into hoppers below. This method runs while you AFK but produces fewer drops per piglin since there is no Looting bonus.

Step 4, AFK platform

The player must stay within 128 blocks of the portal array for spawning to occur. Build an AFK platform above or beside the farm at the correct distance. On Java Edition, ensure you are not standing too close (within the portal frame), or the game may try to teleport you to the Nether.

Expected rates

A 24-portal farm produces roughly 300 to 400 gold ingots per hour with entity cramming. With Looting III manual kills, rates climb to 600+ ingots per hour. Larger farms with 48+ portals can exceed 1,000 ingots per hour on Java Edition. Bedrock Edition rates are lower because portal spawning mechanics differ slightly.

XP output

Gold farms are also among the best XP farms in the game when using manual kills. Zombified piglins drop 5 XP each, and with hundreds dying per hour, you can go from level 0 to level 30 in a few minutes. This makes the farm ideal for enchanting sessions.

Important notes

• Aggro chain, when you hit one zombified piglin, all nearby piglins aggro onto you. In a gold farm, this is fine because they all funnel to the kill chamber. But if you accidentally hit one outside the farm, every piglin in a 40-block radius attacks.
• Sound, large portal arrays produce constant portal ambient sound. Build the AFK spot at least 15 blocks away or the noise becomes overwhelming.
• Lag, hundreds of entities can cause TPS drops on weaker hardware. Use entity cramming or fall damage to keep alive mob counts low.
• Overworld portal linking, if your gold farm portals link to existing Nether portals, piglins may wander through. Block the Nether side of each portal with obsidian or build the farm far from any Nether-side base.

Using the gold

Gold from the farm feeds several systems:

• Bartering, trade gold ingots with piglins for ender pearls, fire resistance potions, string, gravel, obsidian and more.
• Powered rails, six gold ingots per 16 rails. Large rail networks eat thousands of ingots.
• Golden apples, eight gold ingots each. Essential for curing zombie villagers for discounted trades.
• Beacon pyramids, a full four-tier pyramid needs 164 blocks. At nine ingots per block, that is 1,476 gold ingots.

Looking for a server that nails this setup end-to-end? Try Astroworld MC, economy survival, custom bosses, full crossplay.