Easy Infinite Lava Farm! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide (1.18 Tutorial Let’s Play) [S2 E56]

Hello everyone my name is pixariffs and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide do i have a co-host now i feel like i have a co-host this big man just wandered up while i was doing my intro i’m like no go back get away i’m the only host of this show anyway sorry

About that bit of a weird spontaneous intro thing there uh today we’re going to be looking at the stuff that i was hinting at at the end of the last episode about pointed drip stone because we can use this stuff to farm lava as well as water as you can see these two

Cauldrons have started filling up just gonna break those with particles everywhere for some reason when you break cauldrons i think because they can contain liquids anyway we’re gonna grab a bunch more of these and yes i’ve still been working on a little bit of base decoration around here and we’re

Probably going to turn one of the biggest drip stone features in this entire cave into our lava farm because we have a massive pillar of drip stone over here and i thought it could look super cool if we end up turning the base of this like all around here and maybe

Even have one over on that side as well since that pillar is of pretty equivalent diameter we could have a bunch of cauldrons collecting lava from around the base of these things as though there’s lava just kind of stored up in there and it’s dripping down into the cauldrons i think that’ll look

Amazing so i think that’s what we’re going to do today this is going to require a lot of iron so once again we’re going to have to return to my base grab a bunch of iron from the iron farm or my stockpile and my storage system

And let’s get crafting i think one of the other episodes we’re going to do this week will be about nether transport because i’m honestly getting a little tired of running the long way or what feels like the long way to our base all the way back at spawn i feel like that

Can be done a little bit faster and with a little bit less interference from hoglands so maybe this week we’ll work on the nether hub some but in the meantime let’s see what we’ve got going on over at the iron farm and yep this thing is entirely full again i

Think i’m probably gonna have to divert some of the poppies into a composter for bone meal or something at this rate because it’s getting a little bit hard to handle here at the very least we need to expand the storage system to at least double the amount of chests that are in

Here and i think all of the hoppers back there are going to be filled up as well so yeah we’re going to have to figure that out sooner or later anyway at least we get to come away from that with an absurd amount of iron which we can turn

Back into iron ingots to make ourselves i think 64 cauldrons seems a little excessive but we might as well have that many we can use them for decoration and various other bits and pieces around here too either way that means we’re going to need a bunch of pointed drip

Stone and let’s see what we can do about slicing out some of the bottom half of these giant pillars these things are even bigger when you get up close to them and they’re also absolutely covered with mobs especially now we’ve started to light up more of the caves so this

Could be a harder task than i expected but we’ll scaffold up here and there we’ll throw a couple of torches up in these places and hopefully we’ll be able to eliminate a lot of those dark spots before the mobs get too hard to handle well a creeper ended up chewing a chunk

Out of the side of that and there’s a few places up there that are still pretty dark but at least we have made a start and i think at the base of the pillar here around the outside the circumference of this we’re going to need to make sure that we can at least

Dig in a block or two because not only are we going to need some pointed drip stone facing down we’re also going to need a lava source above the drip stone block which means we’re going to have to make sure that lava isn’t flowing down over the outside so we’ll need to block

It off somehow probably like this to preserve the shape of this pillar at least at the bottom of it that means we’re going to be digging in a couple of blocks inside so that we can have our lava sources up there and the drip stone is just going to be dripping down into

Cauldrons below so pointed drip stone there lava source above that behind these two blocks surrounded in there by the rest of the pillar lava dripping down into the cauldron drip stone block there that’s more or less the setup we need to have and we’re probably going to

Have that around the outside in a kind of circle i might add a couple of other bits and pieces maybe some like wooden support pillars or something like that to the outside just to make this thing look like it’s a bit better supported because while we’re not reducing it to

An apple core we are at least taking out some of the outside structure of this thing and normally if you wanted to make something circular like this you’d probably have to go to a website to kind of plot out the dimensions of the circle but in this case we can just use the

Circumference of the drip stone pillar itself and it’ll still end up looking pretty good now we’ve got a few cauldrons set up and ready for the lava to start dripping down where are we gonna get all of these lava sources from in the first place well i think the pretty obvious answer

To that lies back through our geode portal so we’re gonna craft a handful of buckets we’re gonna empty our inventory of everything else we’re currently carrying and we’re gonna head back through to the nether the nether has a huge amount of lava most of it in a

Fairly accessible place down here at y level 32 where the quote-unquote sea level of the nether is and it’s here that we can gather a bunch of lava sources in buckets and this will basically be the catalyst to start our own overworld lava farm with of course

The caveat that you can only carry so much with you you can fill shulker boxes of lava if you want to but each one of those is only going to carry 27 buckets so you really don’t need to bring that many with you unless you’re loading up shellca after shelker and with this

Amount of lava available to us in the nether it kind of begs the question why farm lava in the overworld at all well there are a couple of reasons actually and they’re all pretty good reasons number one then probably the simplest out of all of them the nether is

Dangerous the overworld is safe and that’s forgiven values of dangerous and given values of safe you might feel quite comfortable in the nether right now but if you don’t there is every chance that setting up a lava farm in the overworld will be slightly kinder to you by the

Way now we’ve put those two lava sources in place you will see that the drip stone is now dripping lava into these cauldrons and eventually randomly it will fill up the entire cauldron with lava which usually takes about 20 minutes or roughly one minecraft day on

Average but it kind of varies it’s a little bit random so yes the relative danger and relative safety of the nether in the overworld are really one of the main factors here if you don’t like it in the nether it’s possible to get a renewable source of lava elsewhere i

Think i’m also gonna grab some iron trap doors to go over the tops of those lava sources so we don’t have to worry about falling into them but we do end up with a decent amount of lighting around here since iron trap doors will not burn and

They also won’t block the light from getting through and because each iron trap door takes up four iron ingots in a two by two in a crafting interface and that means that we can use up a bunch more of the ludicrous amount of iron we ended up bringing with us with iron trap

Doors on top of this thing we can step on top of the lava sources quite comfortably although it does seem like a little bit more dangerous looking than it actually is oh and if you dig into the interior of these massive pillars of drip stone there’s actually a bunch of pointed

Drape stone inside of here which i might gather because once again it’s kind of nice to be able to farm some of this stuff i assume that’s just the game generating these pillars from the floor upwards in the same way that it does elsewhere in the cave but that’s kind of

Fascinating i never knew that anyway the next argument to be made in favor of the cauldron lava farm is one of renewability as you can see from over here we have a bucket of lava fresh from that cauldron ready to be collected and while it removes a bit of light from the

Area it does mean we get a full bucket of lava that we can use to propagate more of the farm making this whole thing kind of self-sustaining from this point onwards and while the lava lakes in the nether seem to stretch on forever and seem pretty abundant i think

Renewability is better than abundance in this case in fact in pretty much all cases i would argue that renewability is probably more valuable to the player than an abundance of something because with a huge amount of stuff available to us in the nether we still have to go

Further and further out to retrieve it each time not only that but retrieving lava from lava lakes gets progressively more unsafe because you’re having to wade out further and further in order to get hold of some or dive down into deeper sections of the lava lake you’ll

Need to use fire resistance potions for stuff like that and honestly it just gets a little bit tedious to do that every time mechanics like this also make it possible for us to farm lava in for example a skyblock world some place where you don’t have access to the

Renewable lava of the nether because the entire world is a void and at this point i think i’d say that the only thing the lava lakes of the nether have over this method in terms of like advantage is just the speed how quickly you can just

Pop through to the nether gather up a bunch of lava and then head off again if you find yourself desperately in need of lava then setting up a long-term lava farm like this is not necessarily going to be the fastest solution but there is a way that even a lava farm like this

Can end up outperforming the nether and it’s really a matter of just scaling up the output of a farm like this and giving yourself the opportunity to automate what you’re doing i’ve taken a quick trip down here to the lower levels of the drip stone caves which do

Continue it turns out there’s even an abandoned mine shaft down here which i would love to explore a little bit more of at some stage but what i’m really after is to grab a bit of redstone because i didn’t bring any of that over from the base either i still can’t help

Myself and i’m probably gonna touch a couple of diamond door on the way back there’s at least one more over here as well and it looks like it is just that one and the reason i’m getting redstone will become clear when i craft a couple of bows and make a dispenser or two

Because i want to prove to you definitively right here and right now that it is not possible to extract lava from a cauldron using a dispenser with a bucket in it in fact you’re going to destroy the bucket by doing that because what it does is dispense it into the

Block with the cauldron which brings it into contact with the lava and lava inside of cauldrons will still destroy items like that stick is gone for good despite the fact that a bucket of lava placed in a dispenser can be dispensed and retracted again into that bucket

That’s only the case if it is the full lava source block in front of you and unfortunately is not the case with cauldrons which means that a lava farm like this can never be fully automatic it can never be extracted from all of those cauldrons without a player being

Present but there are still ways players can automate this process and there are a couple of different approaches first of all cauldrons can be pushed by pistons and so for example if you were to set up a production line effectively of cauldrons filling up with lava being pushed towards the player the player

Simply standing still and holding a bucket in their hands an empty bucket and just holding down right click maybe without the shield but you could effectively go down the line harvesting a bunch of buckets and once your inventory was full up with lava buckets it would be thrown onto the floor if

You’re throwing them onto the floor in front of you then just make the floor in front of you a hopper and that would mean that all of the lava buckets could end up getting collected in some sort of chest another alternative would be to have the player moved around using water

Streams and this usually works better if you don’t have depth strider on your boots but water streams can push the player around at a pretty consistent rate and as long as you’re able to go around a water stream or even for example a minecart track could do something similar you could be pushed

Around once again holding buckets in your right hand and right clicking on the cauldrons as you went past to extract every bucket of lava around a circuit that circuit would probably not be a circular one like this i’m doing this much more for the aesthetics of the

Thing and going up and harvesting this manually than i am for the sake of you know automating this process but if you wanted to set up basically a track to push yourself around on it would be very simple to have row upon row of cauldrons collecting lava and any buckets that

Exceeded the capacity of your inventory could just get thrown into the water stream maybe the water stream goes over a hopper which collects them and once again you’re able to store all of these lava buckets in a storage chest that storage chest could even be the fuel

Input chest of an automatic furnace and now you can see the potential start to stack up because you could fuel an auto smelter perpetually using a farm that can continuously harvest lava at that point the only limiting factor might be the input mechanism and you can probably

See where this is going we could find ways of automating the input as well say you want a bunch of smooth stone hook it up to a cobblestone generator use tnt to blow up the stone automatically collected lava smelts the entire thing down into stone the stone gets stored in

A chest and suddenly you’ve got an entire castle’s worth of stone you can use this is of course an entirely optional process but automating stuff like this in minecraft is some people’s bread and butter and even if you’re not that into redstone it can certainly help you further down the line because what’s

A builder without convenient access to blocks and we can make exactly the same arguments about renewable stone as we have made here about renewable lava it’s all about convenience and even though the entire world is made out of stone once again the convenience of having something be renewable is often better

Than having an abundance of it and frankly i think the other arguments in favor of approaches like this are because we can and because it looks cool both of which are equally good excuses also one more quick thing to note before i grab another bucket of lava to close

Off this section of the farm you’ll notice that the lava spike on the right hand side is dripping a lot more frequently than the one on the left here and that’s because we don’t have a lava source above that second cauldron we just have flowing lava once again much

Like the drip stone farm that we made in the last episode it’s gonna have to be a lava source above this in order to make any more lava in the cauldron below but just like the drip stone that lava source above there is never going to deplete it’s not like we’re filtering

Down one lava source into the space of another we are producing more lava from just one lava source above this so once that lava source goes in we place the trap door over the top of it and now both of these are dripping lava and equivalent amount something that wasn’t

Immediately obvious to me which is now more obvious now i look at it from this side is that this isn’t one pillar it’s two pillars they’re actually side by side over here and i’m thinking i’ll probably just convert this pillar here into the lava farm and do maybe something different with these ones

Because it’s not quite as impressive having two pillars as it is having this one giant one i was trying to figure out how i want to distribute the rest of the cauldrons and i think i’ll just go all the way around this one and have this

Ring of cauldrons meet up on the other side and with these last few patches all connected up we are up and running this entire pillar is now a lava farm and it’s just the outside as well we could do something with the inside if we wanted to

Obviously we need a way in from this outer ring of lava cauldrons or we can even stack these on top of each other so that lava drip down into another row of cauldrons embedded in the next section as well and we just need to set up a

Walkway that we could come around and collect it all but i still have four buckets of lava left and this whole farm is now probably producing lava faster than i went and got it from the nether we only have six cauldrons left so i would estimate there’s about 60

Cauldrons total in a circle around the outside of this thing and we’re able to grab a bunch of lava from it as we travel around here by the time we’ve done one circuit chances are a couple of the other lava sources have filled back in at the very least we could wait for

About 20 minutes and we would have most of these able to pull some lava out we’ve already got another four buckets to put in our chest we could store these all up and throw them into a smelter if we wanted to now here are a couple of

Other facts about cauldrons with lava in first of all you can absolutely get into a cauldron and set yourself on fire so probably best to have a water source around you if you do that secondly pouring water over the top of a cauldron with lava in it does absolutely nothing

Doesn’t produce cobblestone doesn’t produce obsidian the lava source stays intact and the water does as well although if you right-click the cauldron with a bucket of water it’s just going to replace the lava inside with water and i believe the same is true the other way around as well if you right-click

The water cauldron with lava it’s just gonna replace the water with lava so lava can not only be created this way it can also be destroyed and remember to shift click around the outside if you want to do any weird shenanigans with a lava source and a cauldron of water

Underneath it although it should be pointed out that you will still take damage if you’re standing in a cauldron of lava even with water on top of it because lava damage isn’t necessarily just fire damage lava damage is its own separate thing as well it’s also absolutely useless to place a bucket of

Lava in a cauldron that’s already got lava in it you won’t get two lava sources back out of that or anything so keep that in mind if you’re automating a farm like this make sure that your inventory is filled up with empty buckets continuously otherwise you will

Just end up with a bucket of lava in your hand that’s going to be just placed and retrieved continuously from all of the cauldrons around your chain and now i have harnessed the power of lava it seems like the thunder gods are not too happy with me so i think we’d

Better wrap up this episode here thank you folks so much for watching this episode of the minecraft survival guide my name has been pixel riffs don’t forget to leave a like on this episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and i’ll see you folks soon

Take care bye for now you