Farming Squid with Axolotls! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide (1.18 Tutorial Lets Play) [S2E93]

Hello everyone my name is pixel riffs and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide i hope you’re all having a good day we’re back over here at the guardian farm just temporarily i do want to do a little bit more work around here but i’ll probably do that on a live

Stream between clips so that we can get a few more things tidied up here get the stuff decorated and get all of the supplies out of here but we’re not done with the products of the farm itself because today we’re going to set up an

Ink farm so that we can make more of one of my favorite blocks in the game we’ve got a little bit of it up there dark prismarine dark prismarine is one of the difficult blocks to get out of this block palette because since there is a limited amount of it in

Ocean monuments and since the majority of the monuments is made out of prismarine brick and prismarine you soon find yourself running low on it and unlike prismarine and prismarine bricks dark prismarine can only be made out of prismarine shards and ink sacs or black dye technically speaking because it used

To be ink sacs but then more ways of obtaining black dye became available in minecraft and they switch the recipe so you only need black dye now as far as a single player world goes the best way of acquiring black dye is usually via some sort of squid farm but that’s not always

The case on servers because on minecraft servers a lot of the mob cap a lot of the you know spawning of mobs around players is split between different players and so if one player builds a squid farm but another player is near water if they’re near a large body of

Water like an ocean or a river or something like that squid farms become less effective because the game tries to split the spawning of squid between those two players so that’s why on servers when people need a larger amount of black dye you typically find them

Making a farm for wither roses as we mentioned in the wither episode where the roses can be obtained by the wither killing another mob and those are actually a source of black dye like the other flowers in the game you can craft them down into black dye in a single

Player world however i think a squid farm is probably the easier of the two to set up compared to a with a rose farm it’s a relatively straightforward process and it may work on certain servers depending on your configuration but today we’re going to find a place

That we can go and set up a squid farm so that we can get hold of regular supplies of ink sacks and so that we can craft as much dark prismarine as we want to with some ink sacs and prismarine shards here in my inventory you’ll notice that the dark prismarine recipe

Doesn’t come up at all in the crafting interface and that’s because if we turn all of this into black dye that’s when it becomes available and you need eight prismarine shards and a black dye to make one block of this stuff so needing a large amount of black dye is pretty

Much a necessity if you want to build with larger amounts of dark prismarine in the meantime though you’ll find that regular prismarine and prismarine bricks are both craftable just with prismarine shards and a 2×2 will get you a block of regular prismarine while a 3×3 will get you prismarine bricks so prismarine is

The much cheaper of the two you can make two of these blocks for less than it costs to make one block of prismarine bricks but prismarine has some interesting properties as people noted in the previous episode it actually slowly changes color over time like right now it’s probably roughly the hue

Of the prismarine brick blocks that we have around here but now it’s a huge contrast compared to the prismarine brick and that’ll subtly fade over time until it becomes more of a sea green kind of colour and it’s really quite fascinating to watch all of this

Happening in real time but that makes it quite difficult to build with depending on what you’re using it for so i’m kind of interested to see if we can work this into a build palette somewhere in the future or even make some kind of rock formations out of this because

Prismarine and prismarine bricks can both be made into slabs and stairs as can dark prismarine actually we’ve already used a few slabs of that in the construction of the farm here it’s just a little bit difficult to get hold of enough of this stuff and especially if you want stairs you’re probably better

Off using a stone cutter to make them so fun though it is to study these prismarine blocks we’re going to want to get a whole lot more of the dark prismarine and so today’s episode is going to be dedicated to setting up a squid farm and some of the places we are

Most used to seeing squid in this world are over here at the riverlands the spawn area that i have come to know and love we’ve got a ton of squids spawning around here although we don’t actually see a great deal of them right now there’s mostly salmon and stuff around

Here but if we fly around a little bit we are sure to spot a couple of squid and yeah there’s one in there they usually pack spawn in areas like this we’ve even got the drowned rising up from the depths but we should hopefully able to deal with those and yeah here we

Go we’ve got a pack of squids spawning over here usually spawning in the same areas that you find salmon you find squid most of the time in rivers and oceans and swimming around manually killing them can be a pretty effective way of gathering ink considering that

You’re going to get a little bit of extra ink from looting if you’ve got looting on a sword another right sword with sharpness can easily dispatch a squid in one hit so there is plenty of opportunity to grab ink this way squid will spawn anywhere from sea level at

Y64 or so down to y50 so about here is probably the lowest we need to go and that’s kind of the bottom of the riverbed in this area anyway so lower down where these drowned are coming from it’s really unnecessary to go looking for squid you won’t find a great deal of

Them down there you might occasionally find glow squid further down but the spawning conditions for glow squid are a little bit different so today we’re just going to focus on the non-glowy squid and this is really because we want to get black dye and glow squid don’t tend

To provide that they provide glow ink which is used for a completely different set of stuff however this area is not really the best place for us to set up a squid farm at least not an organized one where we can rely on the drops all arriving in some kind of collection

System because if we fly up into the air right here you can see that for a start there is a lot of river biome around here the rivers are quite wide they extend in lots of different directions there is also an ocean biome close by which is the other place you can find

Squid spawning at roughly the same coordinates from sea level down to about y50 and so while we could set up an area for squid to spawn in somewhere around here we would have to drain all of the water from the surrounding rivers and oceans in order to make sure this farm

Was effective or at least afk maybe 128 blocks up in the sky in the same way that we do in the mob farm to ensure that the squid only spawned in one area which would still ideally require us to dry out an area around that just to make

Sure we didn’t get any spawns outside the walls of our squid farm despite the fact that squid are passive mobs and not hostile mobs they will still despawn once you’re 128 blocks away and they will only spawn outside of the range of 23 blocks from the players so ideally we

Want to have a decent sized river area but somewhere that we can easily dry out the remaining river and there’s no ocean nearby that we need to dry out so that we can optimize the spawning area for squid so we’re going to spend a bit of time looking around the world today to

Try and find an area that we can set up a squid farm without having to do too much extra work we’re gonna aim for that to be near one of the bases i’ve already set up so ideally next to the drip stone cave would be kind of good there’s

Probably a couple of rivers around there in that savannah here at spawn seems like a no-go and there are a couple of other locations around the world we could try if we can’t find a decent spot elsewhere so i’m going to do a bit of looking around and we’ll come back when

We’re ready to set up a squid farm having looked around for likely candidates weirdly it seems like the best place for our squid farm that’s going to be relatively close to a place i have an established base relatively close to spawn so that i can come out

Here quite regularly is over here in the jungle adjacent to the drip stone cave base where we have a stretch of river here as you can see plenty of squid spawning around this place and it’s not really too much river that we can’t dry out some of this area much as it seems

Like a shame to dry out an area of a jungle river especially since the jungle is such lush and overgrown terrain it seems like there should be a river here for the functionality of a squid farm we really need to eliminate a lot of the water from around here but this is just

A section of river it should be fairly simple to dry out and some of this doesn’t even technically count as a river biome and this is where having the f3 debug information to show us what’s a river and what isn’t is really going to come in handy because right now as you

Can see from the left hand side of the screen i am standing in a river if i get a little bit over this way though this whole area this kind of watery basin here is technically part of the jungle biome and that’s because the river here

Has merged with an aquifer one of the localized water levels that generates as part of minecraft terrain and of course this area down here is all part of the jungle biome as well it just happens to be underneath an area of jungle so it’s not technically speaking part of a river

And we shouldn’t see any squid spawning in here glow squid maybe but regular squid no and by keeping track of that biome data we can really see what the borders of these sections of river are going to be as i’m standing right here i’m in a jungle but if i step a little

Bit closer to the river here you’ll notice as the grass color starts to change that’s the border of the river biomes so if we wanted to we can actually expand a little way into the land here to take some of this terrain here into account for our squid farm

You’ve got to know that the borders of these biomes are a little bit tricky to navigate and this is where you might want to go into your video settings and turn down the biome blend setting here at the top if we turn that down all the

Way to off that’s going to show us a pretty hard border between the jungle and the river as you can see here if i step back onto this block here that is jungle if i step onto this lighter grass color that is the river and that will help us determine where exactly the

Boundaries of the chunks of the river are and where we can expect to find squid spawning if we dig it out and fill it with water for example there’s a patch right here that is technically river several blocks in land it gets a river all the way up to here so this is

All a section that we could reclaim if we wanted to turn it into a squid farm but we got to remember that the same will also count in reverse and some areas of this which are filled with water may not be part of the river biome

At all like right here for example there is clearly a border between the river and the bamboo jungle right there and so if we place a little bit of grass around here you can quite clearly see the difference between bamboo jungle right there and river right here and that’s

Why initially i think it’s going to be a good idea to use grass blocks to outline the area of the farm because we all know that any blocks that appear in this grassy color are going to be part of the river biome and they will be perfect for

Setting up our squid farm and then we can figure out exactly which areas of the river we need to drain and which areas we need to keep flooded with water in order to spawn the most squid so let’s go and get some more grass blocks and let’s try and outline a decent sized

Area for a squid farm okay after a little bit of trial and error i’ve managed to mark out a pretty decent area we want each of these tanks to be eight blocks wide so that once again we can use water streams to direct the drops into a line of hoppers that’s going to

Run along the center here so the water is going to be flowing in from both sides directing all of the ink sacs that end up coming through here into the hoppers and the hoppers will carry it off to a storage area that’s going to be nice and easily accessible to us i tried

Reconfiguring this a couple of times and while it might make sense to have this tank lengthways along the river instead of horizontally across it like this the river actually narrows in certain points especially over here that make it kind of difficult to find a place where it

Can be eight blocks wide on both sides without losing some area to the jungle around the outside so while we could potentially do a lot more trial and error to figure out exactly where the optimal area in this jungle is i just think losing what is this like

Ten blocks worth like nine blocks worth of the tank here it’s not going to be too much for a problem we’re not gonna get anything weird spawning in here we’re just gonna lose out on a couple of squid spawning spaces but there’s plenty here for our tank to use and as far as

All the blocks go in the middle of this there aren’t any weird overlaps with the jungle in the areas where you see one or two blocks that’s basically the edge of the jungle biomes so i think this is going to work out just fine we need to

Make these tanks out of a slightly more permanent block than this i think the grass is nice as an example but i would really prefer it to look a little bit better and i think what we’re going to do is spend a little bit of time

Sectioning off the river in the same way that we did the ocean monument just so we can make sure we can dry the majority of it out with sponges if the river is clear for let’s say 20 or 30 blocks in each direction then it should be simple

Enough for us to make an afk spot up in the sky and the bottom of the river here is still going to be within the spawning sphere that it generates around a player meaning that squid will be able to spawn in here and hopefully won’t end up

Spawning further down the river we can always widen the dry perimeter of this farm if we need to it’s just going to be easy enough to set things up and do a quick bit of trial and error to make sure that we’re getting some squid spawning here since we’re close to the

Drip stone cave i do have quite a lot of materials down here and i’m thinking maybe we’ll do something with granite and polished granite i think that could be a neat material to use to outline the tanks something that makes it nice and easily visible we can always come back

And swap the materials out later if we want to we’re going to outline the tanks in granite and polish granite and then we’re going to dig all the way down to y50 which is the lowest coordinate at which squid will spawn the only thing we

Will need to be aware of is how dark it gets down here because squid will spawn in any light level below the surface but potentially we have the risk of the drowned spawning down here and since the primary killing method of the squid in this farm is going to be axolotls we

Want to make sure that they won’t end up initiating fights with the drowned and getting killed because of it it might also help to make a perimeter wall around the outside of this if you plan to afk close enough to the farm that zombies might wander in and become

Drowned because that kind of causes the same problem really but on the other hand if you’re afking far enough away from the farm zombies ai shouldn’t even have them tracking in towards the center of the farm because they’ll be far enough away from the player that the

Game doesn’t even bother giving them any movement alternatively we could just put some easy light sources down here sea lanterns or shroom lights or anything you’ve got handy even jack-o’-lanterns something like that if they’re nice and cheap those will do and that will make sure that the light level down here is

High enough that the drowned shouldn’t spawn at all well so far our squid hasn’t caught much except for the wandering trader who is incidentally selling a black dye it’s like he knows i’m pretty sure he watches the series anyway we do have a couple of squid sporting down

There at the bottom of the river along with a couple of fish and this is the point at which we’re going to start putting in the collection mechanism for the farm which is simply going to be a row of hoppers terminating around here in a chest which for now i’m just going

To put a shulker box down and those are pretty full so it’s not going to stay there for very long but if the watering trader gets out of the way all we’ll need to do is replace this line of grass blocks along the center of the farm with

Hoppers then for the moment we’ll put a double chest at the end here for collection although we’re probably going to need to expand the storage of this because these farms promise to be fairly productive if we afk at them for a long enough time and the next section of the

Farm is going to be very straightforward we’re simply going to place a one block high perimeter wall around the entire outside of the farm then much the same as we did with the amethyst geode farm a while ago we’re going to fill in the top blocks around here with a bunch of solid

Blocks that we can run water streams along the top of then with two water buckets we’re going to place some water sources along the outside edge of the farm like so so that they all flow in towards the center then we’ll go through and remove all of the grass blocks in

Here and we should find that eventually they float to the surface this is also a really great way of testing whether or not there is still flowing water down at the bottom of the farm you can see that there are a bunch of grass blocks getting caught right at the bottom edge

Here which means that the water at this level is still falling you can also test that with whether or not it’s possible to fill a bucket of water from down here and if it’s not that is falling water still and while it’s possible for squid to spawn in falling water they don’t

Have to spawn in a water source block it is going to be necessary for item transport that all of the blocks in here are water sources because that’s what’s going to allow items to rise to the top here and make their way into the hoppers so at this point i will recommend going

In to get a bunch of kelp and growing it up a few blocks at least so that you can make sure that all of the water at the bottom of the farm is a full water source and is no longer falling and since we are worried about creating

Bubble columns this time we can effectively alternate the kelp like this because of course once it creates water sources it’s going to fill in the gaps in between it so you don’t need to place nearly as much kelp as you did previously the other thing you’ll need

To do is make sure there’s a row of water sources in this second row from the top basically the row that we replaced with grass blocks earlier we’re going to need to make sure that that’s all water sources otherwise it’s not going to allow items to float up into

The water streams that are going to carry them into the hoppers but from this point it should be pretty simple to test whether or not the farm works we just need to throw a few items into the water and wait for them to float up to the surface at which point the water

Stream should catch them and pull them into the hoppers and looks like our grass blocks are doing just that floating to the surface and popping over into the hoppers as soon as they rise up in some very rare cases the items might have the kind of momentum that gets them

Stuck underneath the hoppers in between the hopper hitboxes here but honestly this farm is going to be productive enough that we don’t need to worry too much about losing one or two ink that way now all we need to do is repeat the same process for this pool on the

Opposite side making sure all of the water streams running towards the hoppers and then we can start drying out the river around this and we can see how productive this farm is really going to be to get this farm really producing though we’re going to need a few extra

Things we’re going to need a bunch more buckets and we’re going to need some axolotls so let’s head over to a lush cave and see if we can track some of the critters down luckily the lush cave over here by the spider farm pretty much

Always delivers and now we can pick up a couple of axolotls preferably a couple of each color and we can try breeding them a little bit to see if we end up getting a blue axolotl pretty rare so i doubt we will but in the meantime we can

At least collect a lot of squid hunters that are going to be perfect for our farm hey folks welcome back so we have a couple of axolotls starting to work here in the farm and right now things are as they should be it all seems to be working pretty well i have

Put a couple of glowstone blocks in the floor on each side because we did get a couple of drowned spawns which was a surprise to me because i thought the light level down there was still light enough from skylights that we wouldn’t see any drowned spawning but

Unfortunately it looks like we got a couple easy fix just a couple of glowstone blocks in the floor reasonably spaced apart we could add more in if we still see some issues with the drowned but i mostly just don’t want our axolotls getting in trouble and taking

Damage we already lost one of them since the drowned happened to spawn but in the meantime i have cleared out an area of the river on either side of the farm about 30 blocks distance and the reason for that is because all the way up there

Is where our afk point is going to be since the lowest point in the farm is at y50 it stands to reason that the highest point we can stand afk and make sure that the bottom of the farm is loaded is around y 178. this scaffolding stops

Just a little bit lower than that at y 172 and that means that the sphere in which stuff can spawn has a slightly larger radius around the farm just to make sure that nothing is going to be prevented from spawning on the far edges of the farm basically and what that

Meant is we had to clear out a reasonable amount of the river on either side but 30 blocks distance seemed to do the trick it does take a little bit of time to clone the scaffolding so sometimes i rocket assist my way up here and we’d probably build some sort of

More permanent platform up here if we plan to use this farm for a little bit longer but as you can see from up here we are looking down at the squid in the farm and the squid actually won’t move a great deal once you’re outside of a 32

Block range because their ai kind of freezes and they don’t spend any time pathfinding an exception is made for the axolotls though because you’ll see they are constantly moving and this is a feature of axolotl ai it’s kind of similar to slimes in a way where basically their movement is defined by

Them constantly moving around and searching for something to attack and in this case that’s going to be the squid if we take a look to either side we might occasionally see another squid spawning here or there but i’m pretty certain that we’ve eliminated most of the spawning spaces around the outside

There might be a couple of higher up spawning spaces here or there that might spawn a squid occasionally but for the most part all of the spawns are going to be concentrated in this farm once they’ve attacked a squid though axolotls do have an attack cooldown basically

When it comes to passive mobs they attack them a lot less frequently and so we’re going to have to load this tank up with a bunch more axolotls in order to make sure that they kill a squid every time a squid spawns we may also end up

Putting some sort of barrier down the center of the farm there something like walls or some sort of block that’s going to prevent the axolotls from hopping over the top because occasionally they will swim up into the water streams that carry them over the top or they decide

To breach the surface they end up hopping up onto the hoppers and then they try and pathfind towards some water again before they start to take any kind of drying out damage and therefore they end up swapping sides of the farm but at this point all we really need to do is

Load up the farm with the remainder of the axolotls that we’ve brought over here and set them to work so we’re going to release four of them on this side and three of them here on the other side and i think one of them has already migrated

Over to the opposite side but i think we’re going to spend a bit of time breeding up these axolotls so that there is more than enough population to keep them going from one side to the other that is of course going to require feeding them tropical fish in buckets

And waiting for them to produce babies and then we’ll probably head back over to the lush cave and we’ll bring either a bunch more tropical fish back or most likely we’ll try and find as many axolotls as we can because honestly breeding them this way is a little bit

Tedious but a few extra axolotls are brought back from the lush cave but right now we can already see the farm in action having headed away and then come back we can see a couple of spawn cycles happening right in front of our eyes and the squids seem to be getting attacked

Pretty consistently we just want to make sure this farm reaches equilibrium so that if any squid spawn an axolotl is ready to take them out pretty much right away so i brought five or six more back with me i think i have about five on me

And yeah we can bring a few more tropical fish into the equation as well to breed a couple more up but honestly i think bringing individual axolotls back in buckets is usually a good idea if you can swing it because breeding them takes two buckets and only gets you one

Axolotl obviously if you want to try going for the blue axolotl then go for it but i think it’s a one in 1200 chance that it breeds so it’s really not that likely in the grand scheme of things in the meantime though i think we’ve got

Enough axolotls in the farm to at least get ourselves started so i’m gonna head all the way up to the top of our scaffolding tower make myself a little afk box so i can be safe from phantoms and we’re gonna spend maybe an hour afk at this farm and we’ll see what results

We get after that okay the timer is up and i did have to fly down a couple of times and make some adjustments i did grab the bed at one point because it was thundering and i haven’t set up any thunder protection for this i don’t think anything should

Happen to axolotls considering they’re underwater but i wasn’t gonna count on that and there’s a chance that one of them might have been at the edge of the farm and got struck by lightning and taken damage or something like that didn’t really want that to happen but it

Looks like the majority of them are doing just swimmingly no pun intended and there are a whole bunch oh was that an ocelot hello there’s a couple of squid still here in the farm but it seems like the axolotls are taking care of them every so often it does seem like

We do need a few more axolotls in here though for it to be a constant churn so i’m not expecting the farm to have a massive output quite yet but after an hour yeah there’s a decent amount of stuff in there there is at least nine stacks of ink that’s actually 11

Stacks yeah that’s pretty good there was also a nautilus shell in here and some salmon so they have killed several fish and a drowned i think the salmon to be honest don’t spawn once you’re that high up in the world but the drowned seem to and that’s a concern there is also a

Little bit of ink as i said getting stuck underneath the hoppers there that’s just seven ink okay so that’s like yeah it’s not an unforgivable amount i think we could maybe try and do something about that in a redesign of the farm at some stage but in the

Meantime we are getting the majority of the ink in here and that’s doing pretty well the drowned is a concern though and i’m thinking we’ll probably end up putting some more glowstone or some more light sources of some kind that aren’t affected by water around the outsides of

The walls about halfway up just to make sure that the drowned don’t end up spawning mid water here because i do think i need to revise what i thought about drowned spawning i kind of assumed that now that all mobs needed zero light it was like the surface mob spawns but

It seems like because they spawn in water there’s something of a special case so i’ll probably end up looking at those fairly soon we might end up doing a drowned farm for tridents at some stage so that’s kind of a uh concern for the future but in the meantime i’m

Pretty happy with how our ink farm has gone a few extra axolotls and an overnight stay at this farm would probably fill up at least a double chest of this if not more and that would be a double chest of dark prismarine ready for us so let’s head back over briefly

To the guardian farm so i can walk you through a couple of changes i’ve made over there so most of what i’ve done here is a little bit of cleanup i’ve gotten rid of some of the materials and the smokers and everything that were up there at the platform we might end up

Moving the portal around to up here just so it faces the front of the farm and the main entrance still got a couple of chests of prismarine here that will probably move but i was thinking about doing a little more decoration while we are here the main changes have been

Functional and they’re taking place down here so as we come down i’m considering changing some of this stuff up in terms of build palette and as we turn to the right here you’ll see that there is an item sorting setup already here and we’ve got a bunch of stuff that has just

Been spat out onto the side there that i’ll probably end up getting rid of but there is a dropper clock here that is throwing out anything that isn’t one of the three main drops from this farm being prismarine shards prismarine crystals and raw cot if it gets any

Cooked cod because of course they’re coming down here on fire and then dying on top of the enchanting tables that’s all going into the overflow here and the dropper is actually spitting this out onto a cactus that’s buried down there in the ground but all that happens is

The cooked fish end up coming through here they get spat onto the cactus and the cactus immediately destroys them now i do need to stick something temporary behind here i just wanted to make it a non-solid block so that we didn’t end up with any of the cod on top of here but

We didn’t end up with the redstone torch there powering this hopper and potentially preventing items from getting into this chest but aside from that this whole thing is running as intended maybe we’ll put like a stair block there or something like that so

Now all i need to do is grab a bunch of the prismarine shards that are in here and there’s a bunch in the chest above that are still slowly filtering down into here we’ll grab some of the ink sacks that we brought over from the ink farm convert those into black dye and

Just like that we have a stack of dark prismarine blocks perfect and there’s plenty more where that came from both in terms of the shards and in terms of the ink well folks that is where we’re going to wrap things up for this episode of the minecraft survival guide i do hope

You’ve enjoyed taking a look at an ink farm with me and we’ll do it with a rose farm at some point in future which we can also use for black dye but has a lot of other functionality as far as where the roses go as well so that’s gonna be

It from me thank you so much for watching the minecraft survival guide my name has been pixel riffs don’t forget to leave a like on this video if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and i’ll see you folks soon take care bye for now you