Minecraft’s Maddest Snow Farm Technique!

Hello everyone my name is pixelriffs and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide i hope you’re all having a good day we are going to be working on setting up a frog light farm in the next few episodes but first of all we need to accumulate some resources i’ve been

Doing some testing for frog light farms in a creative test world and i’m delighted to say they are remarkably simple in fact i think the hardest part is going to be breeding up all of the different types of frogs so that we can get all of the different types of frog

Lights but we need to make a couple of preparations get some materials for the farm before we do that and the main thing we will need is powder snow and while we could grab a ton of buckets fly out to our nearest grove biome and just

Spam click the landscape to get a bunch of buckets of powdered snow i thought it was going to be a good idea to set up a renewable powder snow farm because after all we have a pretty convenient place to do that our brand new ancient city base sits right underneath a mountain biome

And the mountain biome not only has the elevation we need to farm powdered snow because it snows at higher altitudes it’s also a colder biome anyway and snow has even reached the floor of the cave in some areas if we take a look around here there’s a shelf of snow right there

Where it’s fallen straight down from the open sky above and there is even some snow reaching into the deep dark biome itself now the great thing about powder snow farming is that while it does rely on the player being in the area you couldn’t just leave the chunks and

Expect to find powder snow when you came back the powder snow can still be farmed in an area of 128 blocks horizontal distance from the player with according to my research no vertical limit whatsoever meaning we could be down there at the bottom of the world working on renovating that ancient city and

Transforming it into a new base location while all of the surrounding mountainside up here is covered in cauldrons which are going to collect powder snow for us so i brought a bunch of iron with me which we’re going to craft into a bunch of cauldrons we’ll start with this many just because i

Brought half a stack of iron blocks and we cut 41 cauldrons out of that but of course having an iron farm and plenty of iron in reserve we could basically set up as many cauldrons as we want to and i think just for ease of access because

It’s still relatively low down in the world and we just want to fly up here and check for powder snow every so often we’re going to be setting up our powder snow farm right here on the edge of this shelf of stone because that’s been collecting layers of snow every time

It’s been snowing around here so anywhere there’s a snow layer we’re just gonna pop a cauldron down and the next time the weather changes to be rainy or thundery it’s gonna snow in this biome and these cauldrons have a chance of filling up with powder snow so now we

Have this pad of cauldrons covering up the landscape here and we could probably extend it to the outer reaches of all of the snow here but effectively this is going to work exactly like our lava farm does over in the drip stone cave and any time the conditions are right for it any

Anytime it is snowing we should find that one or two of these cauldrons start to fill with layers of snow until we end up with a full cauldron of powder snow that we can collect using a bucket now you know what just to increase our output here i’m gonna grab a stack of

Blocks from my beacon supplies i should still have enough iron blocks in there for at least a tier 1 beacon and we’re going to fill up the remaining snowy spaces around here as well because this is going to be a waiting game we’re going to have to wait for it to snow and

Once it snows i want to acquire whoa hello that zombie scared me once it snows we want to be able to fill our inventory with powdered snow and i do mean fill our inventory because powder snow like water can only be stored one at a time in unstackable spaces in

Buckets like this so we’re gonna have to bring over a couple of shelter boxes if we want to move a large amount of this stuff however fortunately the frog light farm design i’ve been looking at does not require a great deal of it the one

Thing we do need to be aware of around here is how frequently we sleep because of course sleeping is going to reset the weather if it is currently raining or thundering so we need to make sure that we check the weather each time we want

To sleep or just leave the weather to do its thing in the background but honestly i’m not sleeping much down here in the ancient city project i’m not really worrying too much about phantoms because we’re below the height of which they would spawn anyway and usually we are

Under the cover of the cave and there’s no access to the open sky while we’re waiting for it to potentially snow i do want to look around a little bit more of this cave because there’s a massive abandoned mine shaft just exposed to the open here and there’s probably a couple

Of cave spider spawners in this yep thought so sadly they’re not within range of each other because i wanted to test out a couple of ideas involving farming skulk from cave spider spawners but if we wanted to do that we need to either find another abandoned mine shaft

That had cave spider spawners closer together or reuse the cave spider spawner setup we’ve already got and transform that into a skulk farm over there in the lush cave anyway while we’re waiting for it to snow i figured why not cover another type of farm that requires a cold biome in order to

Function and that is an ice farm and we’re going to be setting that up a little higher up in the cave i think we’re not going to need ice in huge quantities right now but i figure it might be worth doing seeing as we’re here for the sake of this demonstration we’re

Going to set up our ice farm over here on the mountain top and you’ll need a cold biome to do this whether it’s a mountain top like this or a an ice plains basically you want any biome in which a water source when left out in the open will eventually turn to ice

Which this one has done now i’ve started to mark out a 15 by 15 area we’re basically just going to build out a giant square and that’s where we’re going to be farming all of this ice from let’s briefly look at the conditions in which ice freezes because water will not

Freeze into ice if there is a an adequate light source nearby i believe it has to be a light level of below 11 for ice to stay formed otherwise it will turn back into water yeah having taken a look at it 11 is a good threshold

Because at light level 12 if there’s a light level 12 adjacent to a water block here it will re-freeze and melt again so basically you want to make sure that there is light level 11 or lower throughout the entirety of the farm which is fine you can still mob

Spawn proof this area with that the other way to prevent ice from forming from water in case you want to is to place a block directly above it because water basically needs full sky access it needs to be fully exposed to the sky in order to freeze over so if we place a

Block above here i think it can even be a glass block like transparent blocks count as well that will prevent your water sources from freezing over which can be useful if you’re in a snowy biome and you want to build things like crop farms the last mechanic we need to know

Is that a water source will not freeze over unless there is a non-water block horizontally adjacent to it so this water source here would not freeze and turn into ice but if we place a block next to it here then eventually this water source block would turn into an

Ice block and then all of the flowing water around the outside would eventually dry up there we go it happened eventually and all of the water drifts away now the reason behind this is really so it can act a little bit more naturally and you’ll notice this in

Frozen rivers if you break out the center of a frozen river so it turns into water the ice forms around the edges and sort of drifts in towards the center as it reforms so the non-water block that’s horizontally adjacent to the water we want to freeze can just be

Another ice block if it wants to and ice will sort of slowly start to take over a large area of water if we fill up a square like this but it’s worth noting that things might happen a little quicker if we divide up the square that we’ve built into smaller squares so that

Effectively what we’re making is more like an ice cube tray i guess but let’s uh break this so that it turns back into water let’s get rid of that block and i’ve got a couple more buckets of water from the ocean down there which we can

Fill up this tray with and the entire thing will turn into water sources and brilliant it started snowing during the video that’s what i was hoping for because this will allow our powder snow farm to start accumulating snow down below us inside the mountain and as you

Can see we’re already starting to see ice forming around the edges of our tray of water here and the entire thing is going to turn into ice soon enough but when you’re farming ice like this if you’re actually looking to get hold of the ice blocks themselves you’ll want to

Go around with silk touch collecting these and allowing the water sources to reform and if you allow the entire tray to become ice and you harvest it all with silk touch you’re not gonna be left with any water sources remaining in here and so that is why we’re going to

Implement another change to this farm first of all i realize that these aren’t perfectly square because i’m bad at eyeballing stuff and that’s actually going to be important because we’re placing a diagonal line of slabs across the center of these and the function of these slabs is two water logs so we’re

Going to water log each of those in turn obviously creating an infinite water source up here so that we can just grab a bunch more of those and once that diagonal line of slabs is all filled up they connect to make adjacent water sources and that will actually refill

This entire thing and since it’s not possible for waterlogged blocks to freeze for example right here these slabs are never going to be covered over with ice because an ice block and a slab can’t occupy the same space all we’ll need to do is remove all of the ice

Blocks inside of here and thanks to the slabs being at a diagonal all of the water sources in here will reform so we’re never going to end up with a situation like this where if i mine out these ice blocks the water is either going to flow in or if the whole thing

Is frozen over we’re not going to be left with any water sources in the tray now the reason i chose wood slabs for this instead of any other kind of material is that the pickaxe isn’t the preferred tool for breaking wood so anytime we’re running around here just

Idly spam clicking with our pickaxe or just holding down the left mouse button we’re not going to be breaking these slabs in the process and have to start rebuilding the farm every time if you see yourself using this farm quite often you’re probably going to want to build

The outside of this out of wood as well so you don’t end up breaking any of the stone bricks that i’ve placed around here they don’t need to be stone bricks at all they just need to be a solid block and having just spent a couple of

Minutes around here i now have over two stacks of ice which of course if we want to can be crafted down into packed ice in a 9×9 and from there another 9×9 to get us a block of blue ice but that’s pretty expensive that’s 81 blocks of ice

Per block of blue ice so normally whenever i’m collecting blue ice i just go out to icebergs and get it in larger quantities so that is our ice farm all set up and i’m going to resist lighting this up while it gets dark i’m also going to resist sleeping because if we

Head back down inside the mountain hopefully we should have accumulated some powder snow and it looks like we have now powder snow works a bit differently to the other contents of cauldrons in fact it works a little more similarly to water in that it’s going to

Fill up in layers inside of a cauldron and you’re not going to be able to collect it until it is completely full lava will obviously fill up a cauldron instantly whenever it generates a new lava source you don’t get multiple levels of lava inside a cauldron but

With powder snow as with water you’ll find that it takes a little while to fill up you’ll find that there are multiple layers and since there is only one way of accumulating powder snow by letting the snow fall on top of the cauldron it’s going to take a little

While to fill all of these up right now i can’t collect any powder snow out of any of these cauldrons unfortunately there are a couple that are nearly full but are still not quite there so i think i’m going to spend a bit more time around the deep dark city and we’re

Going to return to this when we hopefully have a decent yield of powder snow okay took a quick look around and the snow seems to have worn off it’s looking like we do have a couple of full cauldrons though which is fantastic we’ve got one right here let’s grab a

Bucket of powder snow from that perfect obviously that resets the cauldron to empty so that we can grab some more this one looks full as well that’s two so far let’s see if there’s any more nope looks like that’s it we only got two buckets from that one snowfall so we are gonna

Have to wait a little while longer to get hold of enough powder snow to make our frog light farm since i think we’ll probably need at least a dozen blocks maybe more we’re gonna be spending a fair amount of time around here anyway we can sleep as long as it’s

Not raining or snowing because that way we won’t worry about resetting the weather and in the meantime we can keep working on the details of the deep dark how about up here there we go look at that our ice cube trays have almost completely frozen over we’re just

Missing a couple of spots one there and one there but i think we’ll throw the powder snow in there and we’ll do a complete harvest of the ice farm and by the time i finish harvesting the ice farm one of these trays has already started to refreeze in a big way but we

Got ourselves just over two stacks two stacks and change we got two and a half really and that’s refreezing nice and quickly so as a basic ice farm goes it’s not too bad and there are of course plenty of cool ways we can automate this either by having a player directed

Around on water streams harvesting from ice trays just holding down left click or we can establish a redstone flying machine that’s going to push or pull some of the ice blocks around we can do this any number of ways really but i think unless you’ve got major ambitions

For what you want to do with ice or you want a whole lot of packed or blue ice and you want to be able to farm it instead of breaking down some icebergs in frozen oceans then honestly this type of ice farm is probably going to suffice

Until your needs grow larger so that’s really all i wanted to cover with this episode it’s kind of a short and sweet one i suppose i could briefly show you what i’ve been doing on the city in the meantime which isn’t a whole lot but i decided we should probably have some

Exterior details as well and since those flat panels there were so good looking on the inside i thought why not show them off from the outside as well so i’ve just started to put in some buttresses basically some things that make it look like this wall is supported

Like so you find these in castle designs quite a lot and i think it fits the deep slate brick vibe and then each of these is framed out using dark oak stairs since we have dark oak in the rest of the structure as well i like these they

Kind of feel like stained glass windows in a way you can almost imagine that being a window design that you could look in through although the blocks themselves aren’t exactly transparent and then i’m gonna start working on filling out some of these walkways a little bit more and hopefully whilst we

Work those powdered snow cauldrons are gonna fill up and provide us what we need to do a frog light farm next week but that’s where we’re gonna leave it for this episode of the minecraft survival guide thank you folks so much for watching my name has been pixel

Riffs don’t forget to leave a like on this video if you enjoyed it subscribe if you’d like to see more and i’ll see you folks soon take care bye for now you