The best farms for XP in Minecraft 1.21 Java and Bedrock help you level up to apply enchantments to your gear as you take on more significant challenges in your world. Any contraption that builds experience will also drop valuable resources that could be used in other projects. Multiple places that generate XP will help reduce time spent hunting for experience and automate the process, making leveling up less tedious.

XP is spent at Enchanting Tables and Anvils that you build. These enchantments allow you to give items special properties or repair various objects you've extensively used. The enchantments in Minecraft's previous update introduced traits to upgrade your strongest weapons, armor, and other tools. Both crafting stations mentioned require a lot of XP but are highly convenient places to make some of your best gear.

16 Basic Mob Spawner Farm

Early-game XP Farm

A simple kill room for hostile mobs is one of the easiest XP farms to make in Minecraft after you harvest a spawner from structures deep within cave biomes. Creating a room filled with water around the mob spawner will drag enemies into a pool of lava, eliminating them instantly. Even if this can be tricky to set up, the large amount of experience gained from the numerous mobs killed cannot be underestimated.

If you combine all mobs found in the cave biomes in the mob farm, you will yield many items besides XP, which are useful, especially early on in the game. These items can be found in the table below:

15 Double Furnace Cooking Farm

Smelt Blocks Or Food For XP

Setting up a Double Furnace auto smelting farm is another easy way to quickly get a bunch of XP by constantly cooking food harvested from animals. You only need a good amount of coal or another fuel source to keep your Minecraft active. As long as you have a steady supply of raw ingredients from Cows, Chickens, or other livestock, you will have no problem maintaining this Minecraft XP farm.

Many XP farms rely on Hoppers to harvest the materials from whatever process is done to generate XP. Hoppers can be placed on a crafting bench by placing five iron ingots in a 'V' pattern.

14 Zombie Reinforcement Farm

Gain Unlimited Copper Ingots

This farm works with a zombie spawner, and the zombies perpetually call in reinforcements in a loop. To create the farm, players need to form an area of containment full of water so that any time a new zombie spawns, it's converted into a drowned zombie, which has a chance of dropping iron ingots. The trick is that new reinforcements are called in before the zombie is converted, leading to more and more zombies spawning in, drowning, and providing the player with a slow but steady supply of copper.

In earlier versions of Minecraft, the farm was able to function with minimal setup. In Minecraft 1.21, a few extra steps are required to set up the farm correctly. Mobs in the game can now breathe when they reach the top of the water, which can lead to the zombies never drowning. To remedy this, players will need to top off their containment chamber with a mangrove tree, some leaves, or anything else that removes the airspace between the top of the water and the block above it, not allowing the trapped zombies to breathe.

13 Enderman Farm

Gain Infinite Ender Pearls & XP

A far more difficult a Basic Mob Farm in Minecraft focuses on Endermen alone. You have to reach The End through a Stronghold's portal before you can even begin building this kind of farm.

The trick with this type of farm comes from building a gateway made from Leaf Blocks that lures Endermen in when you look at them for an easy kill as they become aggressive. A safer version of this farm that doesn't endanger the player is to spawn an Endermite using an Ender pearl. Since Enderman is hostile towards Endermites, the small mob can act as bait.

12 Raid Farm

Earn Over 6k Emeralds And 5k Redstone Per Hour

This farm is an incredibly efficient way to gather redstone and emeralds quickly. Better yet, the farm requires no input from players, so they can sit back and watch or go do something else while the farm does its thing and collects resources. The only caveat is that the farm does need an autoclicker (though Nash says players can also just tape their right-click button down to provide continuous input).

The farm works by leveraging platforms and pillars suspended above water (ed by nothing but a floating lilypad). A system of scaffolding maintains the structure and holds the necessary furniture items needed to trigger raids: beds and workstations. Players must acquire a Bad Omen and enter the farm, triggering a raid. Once a raid has started, the farm uses the platforms and water to funnel pillagers into a trap, which can be made of a trident killer or lava trap, and loot is collected using the hopper system.

11 Guardian Farm

Get 100 XP In 15 Minutes

Ocean biomes can sometimes host Minecraft patrolled by Guardians, rare mobs that yield some of the highest quantities of XP when killed. A series of waterways built above the Guardian's Temple will help funnel them into a trap made of Redstone. Pistons made along these watery paths lead these mobs to their eventual doom.

You must gather Prismarine Blocks and construct Sea Lantern pillars to regulate how Guardians will spawn. These creatures have stricter regulations behind their appearance, a trait not shared by other hostile mobs in Minecraft.

The unique aspect of water in the contraption you create means that the glowing orbs of XP produced from dead Guardians can be directed to flow to a single spot for you to collect.

The YouTuber claims that players can get close to Level 100 in XP in as little as fifteen minutes. Below, the table breaks down how many levels of XP players can acquire with the Guardian farm, along with how long it takes for the farm to yield these levels. Per hour, you can obtain up to 13,936 items, or 10,480 items without Fish in Minecraft:

10 Creeper Farm

Get XP & Stacks Of Gunpowder

Ironically, the least dangerous mobs from which to harvest XP are creepers since predicting how they will react in different situations is far easier. Building glass to encapsulate a group of Creepers in a Minecraft Creeper farm lets you see these creatures and control their movements without worrying about an unexpected explosion.

It's also possible to control the movement of creepers by strategically placing cats within the trap. Creepers are afraid of cats and will actively move away from them to avoid them, acting almost like a herding dog and corralling the mob wherever players want them to go.

9 Automatic Dried Kelp Farm

A Quick & Easy Farm

Some of the best farms to make in Minecraft come from the most unlikely sources, with Kelp being a common material you may not expect to be important. Like the Double Furnace XP farm, this gadget uses Hoppers to funnel destroyed Kelp into Chests as experience is generated.

According to Rediscover Redstone once more, you can place Kelp on Sand Blocks and build a machine that can destroy it as it grows over and over. You will need to make a small stone building, preferably with Glass Blocks that allow you to see inside the device necessary for the farm.

Using Pistons, you can set up a timer that destroys the Kelp right as it grows to the right length, causing it to drop XP orbs. You only need two block spaces to grow this plant, making this a quick place to grab a decent amount of experience without as much effort as other farms in Minecraft.

8 Pillager Farm

910,000 XP Per Hour

Raiding a Pillager Outpost in your Minecraft world is a surefire way to gain XP, but these humanoid enemies are formidable opponents to take on. YouTube creator Nico is LOST has discovered a way to make a kill zone near a Pillager base to sur enemy mob limits and produce mountains of XP.

A complex series of wide platforms and elevators comprise a structure you can build using instructions from the video below.

The trick is to build directly on top of a Pillager Outpost and position the kill zone in such a way that the farm can exceed the maximum number of pillagers that can be spawned at once. When done right, this farm produces insane amounts of XP very quickly, allowing players to shoot up to level 30 in roughly 30 seconds without having to actually fight a single pillager.

7 Automatic Cactus Farm

A Simple But Effective XP Farm

The Kelp Farm can inspire other XP farms fueled by vegetation, including a slightly more ambitious automatic cactus farm. A common plant found in Desert biomes in Minecraft, Cacti are typically used to create green dye or provide a prickly aesthetic to your base. However, elevated sand and Iron Blocks can be combined to shear growing Cactus plants and cultivate XP orbs on a much larger scale than Kelp.

What makes this farm so useful is that the abundance of Cactus plants is apparent even in Survival Mode. Even with the 1.20 update to Minecraft, which added several biomes, like Cherry Blossom Forests in Minecraft, deserts are still extremely common places to find and allow you to collect this resource easily.