How to Make a Sculk Farm (XP Farm) in Minecraft

Most XP farms make you stand in one spot swinging a sword. A sculk farm takes a completely different route: it banks the experience from mob deaths into blocks, then lets you cash those blocks in whenever you like. Once it is running, a few minutes of hoe work can pay for a full set of enchantments, which is why this design became the go-to XP machine for survival players who have reached the deep dark.

The mechanic that makes it work

The heart of the farm is the sculk catalyst. When a mob that drops experience dies within eight blocks of a catalyst, the catalyst absorbs that experience and spreads sculk features over nearby surfaces: plain sculk, sculk veins, and occasionally sensors and shriekers. Here is the important part. Every sculk-family block drops experience when you mine it without Silk Touch. So the farm is really a converter: mob deaths go in one end, mineable experience comes out of the other, and the sculk itself is just the storage medium.

Getting a sculk catalyst

Catalysts generate naturally throughout the deep dark biome and are especially common in ancient cities. To collect one intact you must mine it with a Silk Touch tool; without the enchantment it drops nothing but a little experience. The Warden also drops exactly one catalyst when killed, but fighting a mob with more health than most bosses for a block you can pick up off the ground nearby is a trade almost nobody should make. While you are down there, work quietly and watch for shriekers.

What you need

• 1 sculk catalyst, collected with Silk Touch
• An open area of at least 9 by 9 blocks, plus roughly 25 stacks of building blocks for the tower
• 2 water buckets and about a stack of trapdoors
• A plain hoe for harvesting, without Silk Touch
• Optional hoppers and chests if you also want the mobs' item drops

Building the farm

1. Place a marker block at the centre of your area; the catalyst goes here at the end. Mark a point eight blocks away in each direction, since that ring is the limit of where sculk can spread.
2. Build a pillar at least 25 blocks tall at each of the four marked corners, then join the tops with walls to form a hollow chamber. Twenty-five blocks of falling is enough to kill the mobs that will drop through it.
3. Line the chamber floor with raised platforms in the corners and two-block-wide bridges between them, leaving a 2 by 2 hole in the middle. Fit trapdoors along the bridges; mobs read trapdoors as solid ground and happily walk over the drop.
4. Place water at the wall edge of each bridge so the flow pushes wandering mobs toward the central hole.
5. Roof the chamber completely. Darkness inside means hostile mobs spawn in it all day, wander into the streams, and fall.
6. Remove the marker block at the base and set the sculk catalyst in its place, at the centre of the landing area.

Harvesting and upkeep

Give the farm time to work. Each falling mob dies within range of the catalyst, and the floor gradually skins over with sculk. When a good area is covered, go in with your plain hoe, which tears through sculk faster than any other tool, and mine it all: no Silk Touch, or the blocks drop themselves instead of experience. Because the catalyst replaces existing blocks rather than creating new ones, the floor slowly hollows out over repeated harvests. Refill the gaps with cheap blocks like cobblestone so the next spread has something to convert. Players who want maximum output build two or three farms side by side and rotate between them, harvesting one while the others recharge.