Guardian Farm, Part 1: Preparation! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide S3 ▫ Tutorial Let's Play Ep.71

[@NestintheNW]

The best thing about the survival series is covering the things about building farms that other farm tutorials don’t give. Like how to deal with the mobs that will get in your way! Not only are we able to start building useful things in our worlds, but developing skills and the ‘why’ is super useful!! Thanks Pixel!!

[@AtticHaunt321]

Watching people drain ocean monuments always inspires me to do so as well. I’m not a farm builder, but an ocean monument base is very appealing.

[@TheRealWormbo]

The act of draining an ocean monument is the only time you have to deal with them. But as long as you are invisible and keep all your armor slots empty (except for at most one piece), the monument bounding box is essentially safer than any other place in the ocean. And once you cleared that area of water, no hostile mobs can spawn there any more. (The only exception is pillager patrols, but they spawn a certain distance away from you, so it's unlikely they become an issue.) The monument is a great place for setting up a base, or at least a storage area. My most recently cleared ocean monument ended up becoming the "bartering monument", a sorting system for a piglin bartering setup in a blackstone version of the monument structure with crimson nylium and gold blocks as highlight colors.

[@AtticHaunt321]

@@TheRealWormbo that sounds like a lovely color combo for a build!

[@SmeagolTheGreat]

It inspires me too, but I know it'll be way too much work for me to actually start it

[@Abzanafenza]

Guardian farm building has got to be one of my favourite genres of minecraft content to consume. It's so pleasing to watch, knowing I'm never going to do that myself

[@RedWinterRoses]

Today I learned that sponges aren't always exact in how they absorb water -- always something to learn from the Survival Guide!

[@Pixlriffs]

I think of them like TNT. A lot of TNT explosions are dependent on the small amount of random motion it gets once primed, but the explosion radius is also calculated a little bit randomly, so you rarely get two identical explosions.

[@TheRealWormbo]

Sponge absorption is deterministic, but the algorithm for selecting blocks to remove water from is not very intuitive. It's a breadth-first search with maximum depth 6 and a maximum of 65 blocks total. Effectively that's roughly a Manhattan (taxicab) distance of 4 blocks, but it also counts flowing non-source water blocks and even some removed water sources may reform right away according to the usual rules. According to Gnembon, one of the most efficient ways to use sponges is sectioning off 5-wide lanes of water and placing sponges one or two blocks below the water surface in the center of those lanes using helper blocks between the sponges. But sectioning off 4x4 or 5x5 square areas allows less precise sponge spamming without too much loss.

[@CaptainBo25]

This is giving me survival guide season 1 vibes. I love it!

[@sharkdentures3247]

Anyone else hear Pixlriffs doing a Darth Vader impression in their heads? "The circle is now complete." LOL

[@indus3270]

The "truckload of sand" stream was fun to join! Very chill, yet informative!

[@franziska9260]

Time yet again to marvel at a project I'll never be dedicated enough to do !!

[@simplyn4732]

Real

[@Yue_mariin00]

I love your videos so much!! It's hard for me to find context to watch because I'm autistic but your videos are so relaxing, calming and extremely informative always, so they're truly a joy to watch! Thank you so much for all your work! It really means a lot to a lot of people!

[@alexander.the.gr8888]

Interestingly, with guardians, you can wear one piece of armor (doesnt matter which piece, just has to be only one) while invisible and they'll still ignore you

[@professormarill3251]

I find scaffolding extremely useful when draining ocean monuments.

[@thejitendrashahofficial]

This is what made me start watching you regularly (from S2)!

[@D_4_N_]

YES! The part of the series I've *really* been looking forward to, the big farms! Can't wait.

[@oratios21]

So the big projects starts!!! Although i was expecting to introduce flying machines first so you can make a different format than the last season

[@Dinki-Di]

There’s something so satisfying about terraforming projects in Minecraft, and draining an ocean monument has to be among the best.

[@MisterUnconcerned]

This was my first big project a year into playing Minecraft. Sooooo much sand. Being new, I drained out a square area of course.... I've since built a good looking farm and tower to conceal the farm. On my project list for a couple years now is going back, draining a circle, and taking down the glass square. It's now an eyesore in my industrial district islands.

[@TheRealWormbo]

While the sand and sponge method is probably the most popular way people drain ocean monuments, there is a (much) faster (but more advanced) method if you want to drain a rectangular method and don't want to keep the monument structure's blocks in place: 1. Place a Haste 2 beacon and a conduit such that you have those two effects in the entire monument area. Use these to mine away the entire monument structure. Take off your armor except for an Aqua Affinity helmet and drink Invisibility potions for this, so you are properly invisible to the guardians, yet still mine the prismarine blocks instantly. Depending on whether you collect the mined blocks or let them despawn, this can be done as quickly as 2-3 hours. You will need about 3-4 Unbreaking 3 diamond pickaxes worth of durability for the entire monument. 2. Place a pillar of blocks in the corners of the area you want to clear, these will make sure the water sources will stay out of the area after you removed the water. 3. Build walls (you need them only on two opposite sides) such that they fit perfectly for the machines you are going to build in the next step. These walls need to be non-sticky and are temporary - my preferred material for these temporary walls is actually sugarcane, but it can't be planted on stone or gravel. (You can build permanent walls later, if you don't like the free-standing water walls that will form from this water removal approach.) 4. Build and run water sweeping flying machines with self-lowering return stations on either side. Ilmango showcased a (slightly outdated) design for this kind of contraption many years ago, but there are also newer ones with even simpler return stations. (I can recommend a design I found in the "liquid-sweepers" channel of the Slimestone Tech Archive discord server. It's currently the most recent post in that channel) In any case, build the return station on the side where you build the sweeper one block higher than on the opposite side, then launch the sweeper towards the closer return station. Frost Walker boots may help with building the sweepers on the water surface. Building them requires a bit of practice, but running them should take at most 15 minutes if your area to clear is only about 64 blocks long. 5. Remove the flying machines and the temporary walls. Walls made from sugarcane are even easier to break than walls made from gravity blocks as Pix showed in this video. 6. Either contain the flowing water (e.g. with inward facing water-logged stairs or just have it flow into a groove) or build your permanent walls. Note: I recommend draining at least a 60x60 block area centered on the monument this way, otherwise guardians might spawn in the flowing water walls. You may also want to remove the prismarine base plate of the monument, as it would likely stop the sweepers early otherwise. (The other option is to build the sweepers half as wide and have full blocks below the slime or honey bars, so they can "scrape" across the base plate. But you will need twice as many return stations for this.) A video called "Removing lots of water using the simplest flying machine in the game" by Volbla shows a variant of the return station design I mentioned above. Don't build the sweepers in this staggered way, though. Just use a simple flying machine as Pix showed it before, with outward-looking observers on top of the slim the pistons are attached to. Cap off the ends of the slime bars with a full block on either side. I used this approach twice in the last few years and the net activity time at the monument site was less than 5 hours, not counting material gathering and potion brewing. A shulker box of Invisibility potions should last over 3.5 hours, taking you most of the way there. (If you don't collect the monument blocks and have some practice with building the walls and sweepers, a box might even be enough to do the entire thing.)

[@Pigborg]

Small correction: you don’t need an aqua affinity helmet. Conduit gives you aqua affinity naturally.

[@TheRealWormbo]

@@Pigborg Are you sure you're not confusing it with Water Breathing or Respiration? Aqua Affinity is the enchantment that waives the mining speed penalty for your head being in water. As far as I can tell there is no other source for this effect than wearing an item with the enchantment.

[@Pigborg]

@@TheRealWormbo seems it was my mistake. Conduit gives you haste, not aqua affinity.

[@Questerer]

I really hope this farm design goes more into detail on how to get great spawns in the guardian farm. I still don’t know how to improve my single player farm even when I did watch the farm you made last season.

[@johanputter5061]

Hey Pixl, Sorry to hear about your armor but a fresh start is just as good... thanks for the eps and can't wait to see what you do for the build inside the tank!?. Cheers till next eps

[@Cxrm3n]

i've been looking forward to this video for so long!. draining an ocean monument is such a daunting task but i've always wanted to do it in a survival world and now i know how!

[@BaddHabytzz]

I've drained two of these now, and will likely never do so again. I thought I was smart using zero tick feed tapes to do the second one, but I made it nearly twice as big so it was no less mind numbing in the end. Empty monuments can be quite impressive, though, when all is said and done.

[@TheRealWormbo]

If you don't mind taking down the monument itself, using flying machines instead of many sand walls and sponges can be way less work.

[@another_jt]

While extremely unlikely, it's possible that a dolphin started playing with your missing shulker box, and since each dolphin touch resets the 5 minute despawn timer, it could still be out there somewhere. But don't count on that.

[@WildWestDan]

Great work! Thanks for the episode!

[@frostbaka]

Yeah, dark prismarine is that nice of a block to build with. A farm is needed!

[@Xacris]

I just did one of these full-drain guardian farms on a modded server, and I have a method for finding out what the minimum radius for a circle to envelop a square, a little trick stolen from TTRPGs with those grid maps. Start at the center and count the blocks diagonally to one of the corners, but every other block you travel is +2 (or count each block as 1.5, or count them up normally and multiply by x1.5 at the end). I got the same result you did, and punched it into plotz (cause big circles are hard)

[@BelleVanSchijndel]

I'm a bedrock player, and a lot of farms are either more efficiently or easier to build on Java. But I'm not jealous of people who build guardian farms on Java, I'm so happy I don't have to drain an entire ocean on Bedrock!

[@M0U53B41T]

Oh ouch! I hate losing armour and stuff sooo much! maybe mojang will make a portable redstone alarm sometime that you can attach to an item - or even make it so it won't ever despawn

[@andrecruz04]

Losing shulker boxes is tough. Lost an entire Redstone one when I didn't realize I had full inventory.

[@ryanmoyo5854]

This is just my opinion but I like to keep a trident with riptide 3 to save time when it’s raining as it isolates much faster than fireworks

[@thomasharper9087]

i personally do 3x5 rectangles then place sponges every 3rd block

[@TugiFox]

Pro tip to anyone wanting to build a guardian farm: If you're using a tutorial, make the farm to the tutorial. Pixlriff's design works so much better if you dont build the chambers 1 block further apart than they're supposed to be...

[@WhiteDoom]

How did you know i needed all these ocean monument info for my own project right now?! Anyways good work!

[@BendMax]

Yeah, I started doing this a while ago. I gave up when I finished draining it.

[@spectralc4tlass]

It was a nightmare draining the ocean monument (took me and my friend two weeks with irl obligations to drain the entire thing) Now our storage is overflowing with prismarines

[@glauco_rocha]

Put a sign saying "Moses was here \o/"

[@THE_bchat]

Sounds like the missing shulker box, instead of popping up into your inventory when you broke it, sank & drifted away in the water, which you probably didn't notice as it happened.

[@kestrelgaming554]

Sea grass doesn't break gravity blocks, adding that to the things I didn't know about minecraft 😊.

[@althaf4540]

Wake up babe!!!

[@thattrekyoverthere121]

Gotta love this trend. It's wonderful.

[@inc2000glw]

The new FIRST

[@wilbibe]

Love this trend!

[@tobiassalisbury245]

New survival guide episode just dropped

[@nguamolyt327]

I am not far from saying the N word

[@lifelessorcTwitch]

Love your vids man

[@briannawendell7543]

RIP the armour! Great episode, though

[@dmcreations7492]

2:32:00 in the live stream yesterday is where you lost your armor. Did not hear the pop from it going into your inventory.

[@rainey82]

Thank you for what you do!

[@TheWestcoastnz]

Yes!

[@gerardosoto7067]

I think that break dancing cod had to do something with your shulker disappearing

[@TheMinecraftBlockHD]

Nice video!

[@lckittyqueen]

whenever I see a guardian farm I think of the insane one from the deep end smp. it literally funded the whole server’s xp😂

[@AmanChooses]

There are ways to make a guardian farm in Java edition that do not require draining the water out of the monument. Is draining the monument worth the effort?

[@Pixlriffs]

I don’t know how the rates compare, but my philosophy is that draining an ocean monument gives you more opportunities to do something creative with it. It’s worth the effort to create something that looks impressive, and clearing the ocean like this is always cool looking

[@TheRealWormbo]

The rates will depend on a lot of things. A guardian farm typically has enough spawning spaces that it's limited by the hostile mob cap. If any guardians spawn outside the farm and don't despawn quickly enough, your output rate will be lower. But other factors for guardian farms apply as well, such as how long guardians stick around inside the farm. That said, using the entire monument bounding box, you can make a farm without having to drain anything that spawns guardians faster than you can remove them from the farm. The most efficient guardian farms drain the monument (and even an area around it) to ensure there are no stray guardians or drowned anywhere it would matter.

[@DoomWalker42]

"Stack of sand in your hand" Say that ten times fast lol

[@VulpisFoxfire]

Ouch on the shulker snafu. What method are you using for your sponge drying...setting up a furnace as needed, or ducking through the nether portal? (Just learned something interesting from the wiki, BTW...if you have an empty bucket in the fuel slot when a sponge finishes drying, you end up with a bucket of water)

[@MrFox23]

I just posted my version on reddit and it makes me so sad that I didnt know about that machine 😢

[@leetuah]

Pix, you should really invest on a sand / concrete powder duper

[@Pixlriffs]

This is a tutorial world where I've only just started making stuff like hostile mob farms. I'm not going to leap straight to destroying an end portal and modifying the end entry platform just to avoid grinding sand for a couple of hours

[@AshleyIsArtsy]

RIP netherite armor, that's so unfortunate 😭

[@WilliamDohnany]

the thumbnail is so close to being great

[@elliotgandersen]

R.I.P. to the armor lost at sea.

Instead of the clunky image editor not just calculate the value? 58*sqrt(2) is 82.02. then you can round down to 82 if you dont mind clipping a bit or round up to 83 or 84(if you don't want an odd value because the center is 2by2)

[@Pixlriffs]

I'm better with visual examples than I am with maths, the image editor example works better on camera, and it's a useful reminder that image editors can be used to plot out more complex footprints for builds which don't have convenient formulae.

[@seanrath6043]

How many ocean monuments have you drained? I've drained only 2 in survival of course! Cheers pixs

[@Pixlriffs]

This is my third, I think.

[@seanrath6043]

Nice!!

[@TenkoBerry]

This is Great 👍

[@Jbot123]

I recently built one of these in a giant bowl instead of a cylinder like you're doing. HUGE mistake. Completely not worth it. For the invis potions, don't bring the potions, bring the brewing stand, 3 or 6 bottles, and a bunch of golden carrots, fermented spider eyes, and redstone dust. It really beats trying to bring in enough non-stacking potions to do the job.

[@SalamiDog]

Hello!

[@OrigamiMarie]

I once broke a shulker box underwater and it just . . . vanished? I always pay attention to my pickup sounds, so I knew in the moment that I hadn't picked it up. I swam around and around, and couldn't find it. No idea where that box went.

[@Pixlriffs]

On stream we speculated that the dolphins might’ve got it, but there was no sign of them playing with it anywhere.

[@The_Celestial_Bros]

Hello Pix

[@kirito4579]

Why his glass doesn't have lines?

[@Pixlriffs]

It does have lines, it's just harder to see them because it's blue glass against a blue background.

[@kirito4579]

@@Pixlriffs OKK Thank u

[@AnyKeyLady]

I play MC with my kid on easy mode and noticed an elder guardian didn't spawn. If i switch it to normal mode and go back to the monument, will it spawn them again or do i need to remove that chunk and reload it in normal mode? I see these big ocean monument farms and for us that would produce far too much for the work that goes into clearing that all out. Is there a smaller farm i can build so we can get some stuff but not overflow all of the time or is this the only way it will work? Could i just drain 1/4 of it, knowing that it will produce 1/4 drops?

[@Pixlriffs]

Elder Guardians never respawn, you'd probably need to delete the chunk and return to it in normal difficulty. They should only despawn if you're on Peaceful mode. There are farm designs out there which don't drain the monument at all - or just drain the interior and rely on guardian spawning on the outside. I'm just going to this extra effort because I think it looks cool, and makes the farm a landmark of your world.

[@AnyKeyLady]

Thanks for the reply @@Pixlriffs! That it useful to know. Yes, i think it looks really cool too but i also am aware of how long it takes to gather the resources, let alone build and will probably just end up being me who works on it! lol Maybe i can switch modes, delete the chunk, drain the centre first and see how i go. This used to be a single player world that they started i think in peaceful or easy, so might explain that and it is near where they decided to make a base. I turned it into a multi player world to help them out - built a wall defence and make the area safe and then started getting into building farms underground as i also got in to playing the game. It turned out to be a handy location with a spider spawner under the area as i was digging out space for an iron farm. I like building the scalable farms so i get more of an idea of how they work, refer back to and also to teach them how they work so they can use them in their own single player worlds. I might tempt them with an adventure to find a camel, trims, etc and then get sand at the same time. I trimmed the world before i upgraded both games to 1.20, so a great opportunity to go for a new adventure! That said, i would rather the villager trades sand rather than glass imo. The irl garden is settling down for winter too now, so will have more time for this as it gets darker earlier too. Appreciate the advice as i do often refer back to these videos for builds. So gutted you lost your shulker box too. You should have played the Titanic song. Maybe you should name one of your armer pieces or shulkers to "Never let go Jack" or something to remind you to double check you got it back in your inventory. lol We just upgraded to netherite before the upgrade and that felt like a task for two sets!

[@joeyadams8116]

For all to know this farm will not work on bedrock guardians spawn way differently.

[@jonadabtheunsightly]

There's really no excuse why the vanilla game still doesn't have any kind of renewable sand mechanic (discounting the wandering trader, who supplies such limited quantities as to be effectively irrelevant).

[@Pixlriffs]

Yeah, renewable sand is still high on my wishlist of features.

[@jonadabtheunsightly]

@@Pixlriffs At least there's renewable clay now.

[@cporly3051]

0:05 I haven't up until now

[@nichole_bmx8313]

So early it’s not even showing up! 😅

[@Agent4077]

are you using a furnace or the nether to dry out your sponges?

[@Pixlriffs]

The Nether. The portal's right there, it's much faster

[@ghostbride8718]

Still think we need more building around '-'

[@Sak23017]

NEW FEAR UNLOCKED!!

[@dojelnotmyrealname4018]

Y'know I never realised that the conduit will attack mobs.

[@TheRealWormbo]

Only a complete conduit structure will damage mobs. The amount of damage is not very impressive because it only hits one (wet) hostile mob at a time.

[@SlimPizzaBoy]

I just lost my armor too, by not picking up my shulker box😢😢

[@TName30]

babe, i am very late but, last night's work has been very rough, but i still have my duties to say, wake up babe, new survival guide just dropped.

[@CatinSpanish]

F's in the chat for the shulker box 🫡

[@jujoya]

That's a miserable fate for all that gear, sad

[@inc2000glw]

WAKE UP BABE !!!

[@bluejaythe1]

Early gang

[@tydesilompe2908]

blooper 20:57

[@calebkemere7899]

What happened to new life?

[@sherifsaad745]

Firsttttt

[@Thomas_Wagner1786]

I like to use pure water walls, for an gigantic hole in the ocean like that. But i haven't considered an circular one yet. I don't know if that's even possible. The only thing one must have, to make this pure water wall possible, are 4 specific corner blocks at ground level. That's all it needs. I make this corner blocks out of obsidian, because they are very crucial. If even one of these corner blocks breaks, the entire water hole will fill with water. But it is ultra cool. *◝⬬‿⬬◜* _(It's also unintentionally a squid farm.)_

[@TheRealWormbo]

Free-standing water walls can technically take on any shape, as long as you make sure that shape does not allow the formation of water source blocks by ensuring there is no solid block or water source at the very bottom of the area where water sources would reform. If you're feeling up to the challenge, you could even attempt to make a shape for flowing non-source water within the area that is free of water sources. (At some point I will make the "Hubris Bowl" reality, where it looks like the lower part of a sphere of air is pressing into the water in the middle of an ocean, preferably around an ocean monument structure.)

[@Thomas_Wagner1786]

@TheRealWormbo Interesting. But it sounds very complicated and complex. So flowing water goes in to shape the hole?