Iron Farm VS Ore Vein: Which Is Better? ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide(1.18 Tutorial Let’s Play)[S2 E32]

Hello everyone my name is pixelriffs and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide i hope you’re all having a good day in today’s episode we are going to take another look at the iron farm through a spyglass actually and you’ll note that i have done a couple of things

Around here first of all if you missed it at the end of yesterday’s episode and i wouldn’t blame you because it was 40 minutes long and there was a lot of information in there so you might not have watched all the way to the end if

You didn’t watch to the very end though there is a pretty important change that i made to the overall design of this thing and yes we have a a wandering trader hanging out near our iron farm which is kind of hilarious at the end of that video i swapped the trapdoor up

There for a flower pot which is actually better in terms of limiting villagers line of sight to the zombie during the night but making sure they only do that one at a time because the hitbox of the flower pot is a lot less than the hitbox

Of the trapdoor and this thing has been working very very well since it’s making an iron golem with pretty much perfect efficiency every 30 seconds and around the outside i did decide to build something a little bit more fun and aesthetic obviously the inside has to remain pretty squared off because that

Will help the water streams run but around the outside i made this kind of crater out of deep slate and tough and i figured that would look kind of like either a meteor impact or some kind of volcanic thing it would explain why there are iron golems dropping out of

The sky and burning in there and it could also add a little bit to the geology of this area as we start to transform this area into something a little bit more decorated the whole idea of this area though is that it’s just a series of things that i want to build

Rather than having a coherent like story to it or anything so i’m not going to go with a specific build style and i kind of like the fact that this has something a bit more geological going on with it now either way the wandering trader appears to have disappeared so it’s

Probably time for us to start the episode and we’re going to start by racing the iron farm because this thing as far as iron farms go is a relatively small one it’s only one module of villages and one zombie it’s producing an iron golem every 30 seconds and since

Iron golems drop about four iron ingots on average it should produce about 480 iron per hour it’s pretty close to 500 iron per hour anyway and this thing is going to be running all the time in the background meaning that it will produce a steady flow of iron even when the

Player isn’t paying any attention to it and before minecraft 1.18 iron farms were pretty much the standard because going out and mining iron was not that much of a lucrative proposition and iron farm pretty quickly outpaced the player’s own efforts when it came to caving now that minecraft 1.18 is here

However there are a few changes to that we have the ability to fortune iron ore so that we can get multiple pieces of raw iron out of a single iron or block there are higher concentrations of iron at different levels of the world so we can go mining higher in mountains or

Lower in caves in order to find more iron and there are even huge veins of iron out there in the world that allow us to acquire a lot of iron in a shorter span because of the larger area that you find iron ore blocks over and i have

Located one of these in a cave relatively close to our starter house so what i was thinking we could do is we’ll take all of the iron out of the iron farm we’ll give ourselves one hour of real time and we’ll try our best to gather more iron by mining than we can

From the iron farm so we’re going to take this stack of iron out right now we’re going to leave the iron farm running i’m going to set an hour on a timer and we’re going to see if we can outpace the iron farm just by going and

Mining a huge iron vein and i’m being pretty generous to the iron farm here because i’m including the time it takes me to get down to find this huge iron vein which is actually down here wherever we ended up with the cave entrance yes there we go down here in

The caves basically below our first hole-in-the-wall starter house i was able to dig down in some of the caves here and we found a huge iron vein while i was on a stream and from there i didn’t touch it because i figured we would return to the huge iron vein in

Future if we wanted to mine it out for a challenge like this okay so the iron farm has the distinct advantage that it’s just taken me a while to find this again and i’ve actually encountered the vein in a different place to where i encountered it originally but as we can

See this is pretty clearly an iron ore vein because it’s got these streaky patches of iron in the same way that we find streaky patches of copper next to granite except instead of granite it’s mixed in with tough and you’ll find large blobs of tough throughout the

Underground here so these iron veins can sometimes be difficult to spot or you can sometimes find that there’s an iron vein irregular iron vein that’s just kind of buried in the tough and it looks for a second like there might be a huge iron vein and there isn’t one in this

Case though we’re digging away the iron we’re finding more tough as soon as we dig the top away we find more iron much the same way as we get in a huge vein of copper and as you can see we’ve already got a pretty decent amount of iron so

While the iron farm might have had a bit of an advantage in the beginning we are going to be creeping up on this very very fast now inventory management is always going to be a concern of course we’ve got an ender chest with us so we

Can stash the raw iron blocks away and we’ll need to compact those down using a crafting table we’re also going to get our inventory filled up with tough pretty quickly i think but we’re going to be saving all of that in a chest nearby that i can just stash down here

And save the coordinates so i can come back for it later i think that seems like the sensible thing to do anyway because otherwise this stuff is going to overwhelm my storage system with how much of it there is here there is also a likelihood that the iron vein just

Crosses over into a regular generated blob of tough and that way we lose a bit of time by searching through that when we could just be going for the visible iron ore around here so i’ll have to choose my strategy a little bit more carefully here if we’re going to get the

Most iron ore out of this but yeah we’re already looking like we’ve got over a stack and i expect the iron farm might have produced that much iron in the meantime the real question is do we get more than four iron every 30 seconds by mining this and i’m gonna call it now

I’m pretty certain we do i’m fairly certain we will end up with more raw iron from this then we would get processed iron from the iron farm but now i’ve called the shot i guess it’s time for me to put my money where my

Mouth is so uh see you in an hour i guess hey folks welcome back so after a long time spent mining underground we returned to the surface i’ve flushed all of the iron out of the iron farm in here and put it in this chest so that we can

Accurately compare the results of our investigation and i’m pretty confident in saying that this is a decent amount of iron for one hour’s worth of an iron farm i’m going to be doing the exact maths involved here but it’s a little less than seven stacks which means like a little bit

Less than 480 iron per hour which is what i might expect from these villagers if they were producing an iron golem every 30 seconds but it’s looking pretty decent we have a couple of stacks of poppies there as well however when we look at the results from

Our huge iron vein we can see that it looks like a little bit less until you realize these are full blocks of raw iron and we have a little bit of raw iron left over as well and we’ll get onto the rest of the contents of this

Ender chest here in a second but of course these were not the only things that we got from underground let’s break all of this down into the proper raw iron so we can take a look at it and you can already see that it’s almost going

To fill up a single chest here in fact that gets us to yeah like that’s that’s a lot that’s 23 stacks of raw iron pretty much give or take a couple of raw iron missing from that stack there so if you compare the two side by side the

Huge iron vane is going to win but i decided there are a few other parameters that we really wanted to talk about here so we’re going to go through the pros and cons of each method one step at a time starting with the basic facts of

The output i’ve just done the maths this is 409 iron that we got in the space of about an hour give or take maybe a little extra in fact because there was a little bit of time that it took me to get up here once the hour of caving was

Up during which the farm may have produced a couple more iron ingots so roughly 400 iron per hour that varies depending on whether the iron golems drop three ingots or fives so there might be a little bit of variation in there meanwhile in the same amount of

Time or perhaps a little bit less given the time we spent going down there to get it we got 1406 1466 raw iron which is roughly three times in fact it’s it’s a little bit more than three times the output that our iron farm had in the same time so it’s fair

To say in terms of just raw output from one hour the huge iron vein definitely wins of course we have to consider a little bit of the setup time involved in both but i think we can probably nullify this and say that they are roughly equivalent setting up the iron farm

Requires capturing and curing some zombie villagers you need to capture a zombie and make sure it’s persistent with a name tag or a held item you’ve got to do some basic water streams set up and make sure that the golems have something to fall into a lava source

Down there and you’ve maybe wanted to get some supplies from the nether for potion brewing and for the woods that we need to secure that lava source in place so that’s roughly equivalent to the amount of time it really takes to get a fortune 3 pickaxe go caving and find one of

Those huge iron veins so i think probably in terms of setup time neither is really more or less efficient to do it’s really just about which approach you prefer to take in terms of the frequency of iron drops we can see that this farm is still producing iron golems

On a very consistent basis of one golem every roughly 30 seconds i think i had a bit of correspondence in the last video that said it was technically 35 seconds because it takes the villagers five seconds to check for an iron golem in their surroundings after the 30 second

Cooldown from having produced one so maybe the maths is a little bit off there and that might account for why we’re getting slightly less iron than i expected within an hour but even so it makes sense that they’re producing iron golems very consistently and from what

I’ve seen so far this iron farm has been pretty foolproof the frequency with which we get raw iron out of a huge iron vein varies a little bit because it is after all player motivated the vein runs dry in some areas and you have to kind of puzzle your way around the landscape

Figuring out what is part of the huge iron vein where you need to keep digging through the tuff and where the tough is just a large blob that’s generated down there to throw you off the scent a little bit and so it does require a little bit of trial and error in order

To find some of this so the frequency isn’t necessarily a guaranteed thing it’s not like you’re going to find an iron every couple of blocks but even so it seems like the output overall kind of makes that worthwhile there’s also a bit of time variation in whether or not you

Dig out through the side of the vein into a cave and whether you have to deal with other stuff in there and we’ll get onto that aspect in a second in terms of the player input to these that’s sort of where the differences start to really take effect because of course the iron

Farm is passive once we’ve set this up it will run indefinitely whatever the player does and in this case it’s in the spawn chunks so it will do that regardless of where we are in the overworld if we go to the nether or the end the farm will shut down because the

Dimension completely unloads in a single player world but on a multiplayer server the chunks would be permanently loaded here in the overworld even if we were in other dimensions because that’s just how servers function so the iron farm is a passive way of generating iron while the player can run around doing anything

Else you want to including mining for more iron actually so it actually works out in your favor to have something passively producing iron in the background meanwhile the huge iron vein is by definition a very active way of finding iron the player has to be involved in the process 100 of the time

And it is really fun to mine one of these things out in much the same way as it was the copper vane you’re kind of squirreling your way through the landscape trying to find those individual nuggets of iron ore and even those large iron blocks the full raw

Iron blocks that you can occasionally encounter whilst you’re digging around one of these things so it’s quite a fun process but you have to be fully engaged with it you can’t exactly switch your brain off even though for some people the mindless mining aspect of it might be kind of therapeutic

The next thing to consider is the longevity of the farm is this a long-term or a short-term solution for getting iron and this is really where the iron farm wins hands down this is an infinite farm it will produce iron for the duration of your minecraft world and potentially even longer it’s expandable

As well which is another major selling point if you wanted to build another module of this iron farm next door or over by 16 blocks or so so that the villagers wouldn’t detect the iron golems in the nearby radius then this thing would be producing iron for you

Basically forever whereas the huge iron vein we encountered at deep slate level was abundant but it is ultimately finite you can get a ton of iron out of these things but sooner or later that supply is going to dry up and the same goes for most of the resources around you in the

World sooner or later you’re going to need to go further and further afield to get hold of those resources and that’s where having renewable farms really becomes a useful strategy for minecraft because you can spend less time running around the world desperately scrambling to find some of those resources that

Were abundant at first and you have now depleted or you can make a renewable permanent farm that will get you iron for the remainder of your days where things swing back in the direction of the huge iron vein though is in other resources because this iron farm produces iron ingots and poppies those

Are the only two things it can produce give or take if we decide to rig up a composter attached to this and siphon off some of the poppies to be turned into bone meal obviously from that point on we can use the bone meal from the

Farm to power a variety of other things so potentially the poppies can be used for some cool stuff however if you’re looking at the raw iron mining we also consider some of the other resources that you’re going to find down there in the caves i have a few mob drops on me i

Have a little bit of flint we got a decent amount of cobbled deep slate and tough but also the other stuff here in my ender chest with the exception of these two which we know about from previously all of this was acquired during my mining session we found 26

Deep slate diamond ore one of which i accidentally broke with the non-silk touch pickaxe but we found 25 diamond ore that was all the stuff that was not exposed to the air so larger veins of diamonds that could only be found through digging through the rock and we

Weren’t even at the lowest points of the world so if you find a huge iron vein that’s really low down in the world you’re much more likely to find some of that hidden diamond ore and therefore multiply the amount of diamonds that you’re able to collect we also found a

Bunch of redstone ore some lapisor and gold all of which generates at the same sorts of levels that you’ll find these huge iron veins generating aside from the tough and deep slate there are other blocks on offer as well we found a geode while i was digging around so i was able

To get some smooth basalt calcite and amethyst blocks from that and it’s even possible to dig into spawner dungeons which are more frequent once you get below the y zero threshold in the world once you’re into the deep slate layers you’re gonna dig into some dungeons

Every once in a while so it’s possible to find all of this stuff while you’re just mining for iron and if you’re in the mood to collect that stuff it can be a very lucrative thing for you so that’s definitely a plus in the huge iron veins

Column although as with the iron itself you’re going to find that eventually the resources you could find around it would end up depleting as well so when it comes to infinite resources the iron farm still has it beat just in terms of it producing iron for its conceivable

Lifespan next up what are the dangers inherent in both methods what can potentially go wrong in some of this that can lead to us being in danger well first of all if we want to cure the zombie villagers and capture a zombie we have to potentially put ourselves in

Harm’s way to get both of those but of course you could move a villager in from a an existing village for example you could do a variety of things to mitigate that and a single zombie is as we saw in the previous video relatively easy to

Trap you can get it in a boat and that’s really all you need to do there is also an element of lava being present which can be a little bit dangerous but we all know how to work with lava at this point you might even potentially hit one of

The iron golems the villagers have spawned and that could be disastrous considering that naturally spawned iron golems are neutral to the player and will be hostile if you attack them so those things deal a lot of damage if you hit one in the process of this you’re

Gonna take a lot of damage very quickly but you can also avoid that very easily and the golems won’t attack you by default even when they’re taking damage in lava the dangers of going caving for your iron on the other hand are the standard deep slate level caving dangers

There are going to be hostile mobs down there in areas you haven’t lit up there are steep drops there is even the occasional chance to fall in lava once you get down into deep slate levels so you really have to manage those dangers in the same way that you would on a

Normal caving expedition when you’re going after a huge iron vein the last thing i really want to compare about these two is upkeep like what exactly is necessary to keep both of these methods going and in this case since the iron farm is pretty passive we don’t really

Need to think about too much we need to make sure the villagers here are protected from lightning strikes they’re protected from enemies spawning in areas that can be attacked and that’s pretty much it you might want to check in on them every so often just to make sure

That they are still getting the sleep that they need to produce the iron golems but outside of that we don’t need to worry too much about that and making sure the zombie is name tag will keep him up there pretty much permanently in terms of the huge iron vein we’ve

Obviously taken a bit of durability on our pickaxe which has mending so there’s no problem there we can go and repair that at an xp farm but you do need to be aware of the durability on your pickaxe when you’re going mining just in case it

Gets close to breaking you might need to repair that you also need to bring torches and food with you i brought a bit of extra food in the form of all of this cooked fish that i’ve got now from fishing but i didn’t quite run out of golden carrots through mining most of

The hunger i ended up accumulating was just down to running around those caves trying to find the iron vein in the first place and that’s where i ate most of my food so as long as you bring enough torches or materials for torches and bring some food with you you’re

Probably going to have a reasonable enough time and just make sure that you mend your pickaxe by attacking some mobs mining some of the ores that drop xp or visiting your xp farm if you need to so i’d say that’s a pretty decent comparison between the two and to be

Honest i like both methods a great deal i’m not gonna say really which one is better because they’re both better in different circumstances if you want some iron in the short term and you’re able to find a huge iron vein or even honestly just go caving in an area

That’s going to be abundant with iron like the y16 coordinate or thereabouts i think you’re going to find plenty of iron in the short term and that will be faster to acquire than putting together an iron farm like this however in the long term the marathon strategy if you

Will the iron farm absolutely wins out because even while i’ve just been standing here comparing the two it’s generated a few more stacks of iron so we can now add those to our growing reserves of iron and frankly it is better to have one of these long term

Just so you can occupy yourselves with things other than mining now one final thing which is something i hadn’t really considered until i started doing this was the type of output we get from each farm not the overall quantity but the materials themselves because of course

From the iron farm we get iron ingots and from the raw iron vein we get raw iron so we would need to smelt all of this which would require a decent amount of fuel it would generate a lot of xp in the process more than enough i think to

Repair our fortune 3 pickaxe but we would need to smelt everything here in order to turn it into the type of iron that we need to make hoppers and anvils and all of the stuff that we’ll end up manufacturing in larger quantities using iron mine carts rails all of that kind

Of stuff but since the iron farm here is producing iron ingots for us infinitely why don’t we keep all of this as raw iron there isn’t a whole lot you can do with raw iron aside from turn it into blocks or smelt it but frankly i think

It’s kind of cool to keep some raw iron blocks around they’re an interesting texture they’ve got a kind of cobblestoney vibe to them but definitely have a metallic glint to them in a lot of places and i was thinking maybe we’ll end up using these to decorate the

Outside of our iron farm pit here as though there’s been a geological buildup of iron alongside the iron golems being processed in here some of it has kind of melted down and has maybe even formed like a shimmer a sheen over the rocks here and there so i kind of like the

Idea of having spikes of iron mixed in with some of the tough and the deep slate around here and i might build this up with a few other materials like the smooth basalt that we ended up getting from the geodes since that will mix in with these surroundings pretty well we

Could even get some basalt from the nether to use to decorate this as well but i kind of like the idea of using these raw iron blocks more decoratively and it is frankly an opportunity that is not afforded to us by the iron farm because if we turn any of these into

Full blocks they just end up as blocks of iron like this which we can use for storage of course to compact all of this stuff down but they have a much more processed look while the raw iron block has a lot more of a natural look and so

We can use these two blocks for very different things and so i think there is actually merit to keeping all of this raw iron as raw iron and using it for building in areas where we feel like that’d be appropriate those of you who see a raw iron as simply a resource

Waiting to happen can of course end up smelting your raw iron and using it for all of the stuff that we’re using the iron ingots from the iron farm for but frankly i see this as an opportunity to explore some of the beaten path building blocks and get to know those a little

Better so i’m gonna pepper these in around the outside of my iron farm here so that we have a little bit more of an interesting decor to the place and i feel like it cements the idea that this is a place that produces a lot of iron

Yeah i kind of like that now i like the aesthetic i think it blends in and stands out at the same time really and it does look like a kind of different sort of cobblestone to the whole thing but it really does have that metallic vibe to it especially against all of the

Deep slate and tough and ironic really that we got so much deep slate and tough from the huge iron vein we’re decorating the permanent iron farm with all of the stuff that we’ve mined up from the ground i guess you have the option to just keep these in reserve as well and

Break them down for more iron if you ultimately need to if the iron farm hasn’t produced enough for your needs then it’s good to have some of this stuff in reserve that’s really where i wanted to leave it for this episode i hope you’ve enjoyed this look at huge

Iron vein mining and the iron farm in comparison let me know if you’ve found a huge iron vein in your world already and you’re considering using it instead of or as well as an iron farm because more iron can only be a good thing that’s where we’re going to leave it for today

Thank you 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 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