Zombie Spawner Sculk Farm! ▫ Minecraft 1.19 Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [S2 E116]

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’re gonna be taking a look at skulk growth and how we can use that to set up a skulk block farm or for xp for building blocks for

Basically whatever you want to use them for and for folks who might be familiar with this concept already it may be because you’ve seen my recent episodes of empires smp where i’ve been working on designs for farms like this kind of freestyling it in survival just based on

What i know and i think i have a slightly better grasp on the mechanics now so despite the fact that we are using sculpt catalysts as part of the wall design here i am going to have to take a couple of these away and we’re

Going to put them to use in a nearby location because you may remember when we first came to the deep dark here above our portal above the ancient city we discovered a zombie spawner down here in this room and it is here that i think we’re going to set up our first skulk

Farm based on the spawns that we get from a zombie spawner because the remainder of the deep dark biome around us is going to be free of mob spawns but i did want this to be relatively close to the city project so that we could

Come back here and work on it when we wanted to the other possibility is of course using the cave spider spawners that we’ll find in this abandoned mine shaft up here but as i mentioned in the previous episode where we were looking at powder snow farms and just idly

Exploring this it doesn’t seem like there are two cave spider spawners close enough to be activated together they might be buried further in the mine shaft down there but honestly i think it’s going to be better off to use one dedicated spawner for this and at that

Point the simple fact is that zombie spawners are much easier to control than cave spider spawners if we’ve just got the one here then it’s even simpler but honestly cave spiders are a bit of a pain they climb everywhere they do spider things you know the spider things

And so our first action if we really want to use this spawner as the fuel for our skulk farm is to dig this entire area out we’re going to prepare the spawner as we normally would digging out a 9×9 area around the spawner so it has the maximum possible area in which it

Can spawn mobs and then once our 9×9 area around the spawner is all dug out we’re going to start digging downwards and we’re going to dig down quite a way because we want these zombies to die automatically that is really the advantage of the skulk farms is that you

Don’t actually need to be standing there killing the zombies yourself for them to spread to the skull and the skull can be harvested later for experience we’re effectively making a delayed xp farm if we want to use it for that now naturally digging this entire thing out using our

Regular tools is going to be a bit of a pain which is why i have brought some moss with me we’re going to spread the moss to all of the deep slate in here and then it’s going to be nice and easy to insta mine with a diamond hoe or

Another right one since that’s what i’ve got in fact i think everything from an iron hoe on upwards is going to insta mine moss just uh be careful of the durability and wouldn’t you know it we found some diamonds on the way but while we’re doing this i guess it’s probably a

Good idea to talk about skulk mechanics and which blocks the skulk will spread to so what better way to do that than to actually activate this spawner and fight a couple of the zombies it produces this can teach us that any zombies that get killed in here will spread the skulk

When they are killed near the skull catalyst but you’ll notice that the skulk only spreads two blocks that moss can convert so basically any of the stone types and their variants that you’ll find naturally generated in the world and any dirt types and their variants can be converted as well but it

Will leave blocks like gravel and sand gravity affected blocks especially but also blocks that players have had a hand in crafting all of those will be left alone by the skulk growth maybe some skulk vein will generate on them but the skulk blocks themselves will not end up

Replacing those blocks it can however take over sections of the floor and wall in materials that are skulk convertible and if we press f3 right here you’ll notice in the long list of tags down the side it will say minecraft skulk replaceable the minecraft wiki has a

Great list of all of these if you’re not able to refer to them in game using the debug screen but it’s best to keep an eye on what blocks you are using to both decorate and build your skulk farm for now i think i’m going to stick to moss

Because moss is honestly slightly easier to control slightly faster because we’re relying on the speed of the mob spawner to produce zombies and it doesn’t leave these massive trails up the walls so i’m gonna dig this whole thing out until we’re about 30 blocks down and i’ll meet you on the other side

So why you might ask are we 30 blocks down well the main reason in this case is that that’s where the bedrock is unfortunately we can’t go any lower than this because the spawner dungeon generated around y30 and once i dug about 30 blocks down i start to

Encounter layers of bedrock now i’ve dug out this line around each of the walls to kind of show that we can’t really go any lower than this if we want to place any contraptions without straight up breaking a block of bedrock which isn’t possible with a pickaxe you have to use

Glitches to do it and we’re not going to cover that in today’s episode but instead yeah i wanted to point out that we need to place a row of sticky pistons about where this level of the floor is but bedrock is stopping us from doing that on all sides which means we are

Going to have to build this contraption one block up from the bedrock layer before we go though i am gonna grab these diamonds because it’s always kind of cool to find them down here but with me i have brought a bunch of materials that we’re going to use to build a stone

Generator which is going to supply this farm with a constant flow of blocks which can be converted into skulks since natural stone is one of those things that it’s pretty easy for a player to generate and it’s also something that is easily converted into skulk blocks so

Along one side of our 9×9 area i’m going to remove a section of the wall here so that we can place a bunch of sticky pistons they’re going to face upwards along this wall and their job is to pull the stone down from the area where it generates one block above this shortly

After they do that a row of regular pistons is going to push those stone blocks outwards into the room making sure that a flat floor of stone is constantly being generated underneath this farm and once the zombies rain down from the spawner above and die from fall

Damage on that stone floor the skull catalysts are going to convert it into skulk and the stone floor is going to keep generating more this means we all need a little bit more room to work with around the back here and in fact we’re probably going to have to eliminate a

Lot of the other skulk convertible blocks around here in order to make this happen because of course the skulk can travel and when it spreads it’s going to spread downwards and up the walls as well as we saw in that example earlier so one of the things we want to avoid is

Having any sculpt convertible blocks in the area of the farm so it’s only going to target the stone blocks that we generate here for conversion another way we can potentially get around that is by converting a bunch of the deep slate that we’ve been gathering into slabs or

Stairs since skulk blocks and indeed skulk vein will not be able to generate on or replace either of those blocks so now most if not all of the deep slate blocks have been weeded out of this patch of bedrock we’re going to cover the floor underneath here in slabs just

To be on the safe side and just to prove that through the debug info on the right hand side there you’ll see that the only tags this block has is minecraft slabs and mineable by a pickaxe so no skulk conversion no moss conversion these slabs are going to be safe from any of

That now to set up our stone generator here we need to work on the piston timing portion of things the stone is actually going to be generated one block above these pistons so the stone is actually going to be generated right here the sticky pistons will fire pulling these blocks down into this

Space and then after that the regular pistons will fire pushing the stone blocks out into the room this naturally means we have to have the sticky pistons fire first which means this row of pistons here needs to be on a delay and in another circuit built in another

Place i would probably want to open up this area underneath these pistons and have some target blocks that we could power with a single line of redstone running alongside them here unfortunately that’s not going to be possible here since we have a bunch of bedrock down this low which means we’re

Going to have to power the pistons directly from the side since any solid blocks that we place in this position here are going to find themselves activating both pistons so i’m going to grab a handful of repeaters and probably from the looks of things craft a few

More and we’re going to insert a bunch of those into the sides of these pistons not add any delay on those just make sure that all of these pistons are going to be powered by a single line of redstone dust here so that when we activate the farm this row of pistons

Fires first it’s going to be nice and easy to fire the second row of pistons on a delay we just need a repeater with a longer delay than these repeaters feeding into a line of redstone dust along these blocks here but once again we need to make sure that these blocks

Are not blocks that can be converted into skulk blocks just so the skulk doesn’t think it can travel that way they’re not at risk of being destroyed it’s not going to displace the redstone it’s just a matter of making sure that the skulk doesn’t have an escape route

Through these blocks here so we’re going to have a repeater up here we’re going to set that to three ticks that should be enough if we activate both of these two redstone lines at once say for example if we put something feeding a redstone signal into this block here

Then that should hopefully activate this row of pistons and then that row of pistons this needs to be a very short pulse from something like an observer because if it’s a longer pulse the sticky pistons are going to stay extended and the second row of pistons

Isn’t gonna have a chance to fire so we couldn’t use a button or a longer piece of redstone timing it’s gonna have to be a short pulse but now if i place some redstone dust in front of this observer you’ll notice that the sticky pistons there fire and then the other pistons

Fires shortly afterwards like so it’s gonna drag the stone blocks down and push them out into the room and as long as we’ve got the room to do it which i think we should do here if we build the sideways version we’re gonna time all of

This out using an etho hopper clock so if i now put a handful of items in here let’s use 32 deep slate for example yep that’s fired that once because the observers detected the update from the sticky piston and it should do the same once these two pistons shuffle the

Redstone block over to one side yep perfect that’s worked out splendidly well so once again this is the etho hopper clock it’s two hoppers with a set amount of items moving between them the redstone block locks one hopper allowing the other hopper to push the items into it these comparators reading the hoppers

Output into solid blocks either side which transfer the signal via this redstone dust to the pistons and this observer here detects one of the moving components of the mechanism which allows it to fire a single pulse of redstone signal through this system now successful at this stage has been i

Realized that our next task is to get the lava and water moved in and the water is going to be provided by a set of water sources along this edge which means we probably need to set it back one block further from the walls so i’m just going to move this whole mechanism

Back one block and having done that we’re gonna place a row of blocks in front of this whole setup just so the water doesn’t leak out anywhere else then we’ll build a couple of blocks up the sides here like so in fact it would make a lot more sense if the blocks up

The side were not converted into skulks so let’s make sure we do that and along either this front row of blocks here or this back row of pistons we’re going to be placing a series of stairs it doesn’t really matter which way you do it as long as they don’t have the opportunity

To leak water out of the sides because we are going to be waterlogging this set of stairs but if you’re putting the row of stairs along the back of the pistons like this you’ll probably also want to have a row of stairs along the front wall here just to make sure that the

Lava stays contained but also to make sure that skulk vein and skulk blocks don’t take over this front wall we’re gonna briefly pause our hopper clock using a lever so that we can create some water sources inside of here and we’re gonna fill every stair along the side of

Here with a water source making sure that we eliminate all of the water sources from the bottom here and everything is just flowing into this trench on top of that trench we’re going to put the lava and we are once again going to use a row of stairs to make

Sure that the lava cannot escape and that the blocks here cannot be converted into skulk or have skulk vein growing on them then we’re gonna place the lava next to these stairs so that it flows out over the top of the water and converts it all into natural stone we’re

Gonna put another one three blocks in from this side as well they should flow together in the middle but they should also flow out to either side that entire row of blocks there is now converted into stone and then if we re-enable our hopper clock we should find that a row

Of natural stone is pushed out from behind here and it’ll keep producing natural stone this way every time the hopper clock activates now that’s one of the major parts of this contraption done and converting these blocks into skulk is going to be relatively simple all we need to do is

Place a couple of skull catalysts nearby stand near the zombie spawner so it activates and watch them all rain down take full damage and die spreading the skulk blocks to the stone and the placement of the skull catalyst is really up to you on the empire’s smp i

Placed mine in the center of this square of stone but you might also want to put them out towards the edges i think in a nine by nine area though putting it directly in the center directly below the mob spawner while some mobs might take damage and die on the skull

Catalyst block itself you’ll find that any mobs that die in this nine by nine area should trigger the catalyst to produce more skulk blocks the only other minor concern we might have is collecting the drops from a farm like this in case you want to store all of

The rotten flesh you get from the zombies but you’re not gonna get anything more interesting than rotten flesh out of this farm so i think it makes the most sense to just ignore the drops entirely let the rotten flesh despawn and focus on the skulk blocks as

The product if you do want to keep the drops though replacing the slabs in this floor with a simple minecart track with a hopper minecart running underneath it and then a place to unload the hopper minecarts contents should be a nice straightforward thing to do we’ve done

Something similar in the frog light farm recently but now honestly our most important concern is having somewhere for the skulk blocks to go because right now the floor of this room is just going to fill up and in order to harvest the skulk blocks we need to come down here

And completely remove the floor so that’s not really something we want to do in fact the ideal scenario is that the skulk blocks are fed up towards the player where they are standing near the mob spawner so that the farm can constantly be running the solution is to

Set up another row of pistons that are going to push the skulk blocks up this wall effectively turning this into a kind of printer this is just going to be a row of nine normal pistons lined up with the stone as it’s ejected from the machine here and turned into skulk we’re

Going to have a wall here which is going to change shape when a block comes into contact with it on this side that change is going to be detected by an observer and an observer is going to fire all of these pistons similar to how we recently

Did the piston feed tape in our mud farm so that should do the job a wall here an observer detecting it and a line of redstone dust running alongside blocks adjacent to these pistons when the stone reaches this point here it’s going to be pushed upwards by the pistons

Automatically freeing this machine up to produce more except of course hopefully it’s not going to be stoned by that point it’s going to be skulk blocks now these pistons are naturally going to have to obey the 12 block piston push limits so once they get 12 blocks up

Here we’re gonna set up another mechanism similar to the one we’re using to pull blocks into our stone generator here except instead of pulling the blocks down and then pushing them out it’s going to pull the blocks back and then push them up but the mechanism

Should be largely the same yep there we go perfect it’s working as intended and once this is all skulk blocks that’s going to form a wall of skull traveling up towards the player i’m actually going to ride this wall up right now so that we can make sure that we’ve cleared out

Enough blocks above this that once it reaches the push limit we can set up our next mechanism and there we go 12 blocks up the wall that’s where we need to put the mechanism that’s going to pull the blocks back and then continue pushing them upwards before we do any of that

Though i’m going to take away all of the torches that might be preventing this mob spawner from spawning any mobs i’ve got a couple of them placed on the walls around here that one down there is probably fine just so we can see what’s happening further down we’re gonna

Remove the torch from this wall and then break the one on the mob spawner which should start spawning zombies more or less immediately there we go we got three zombies right there and they don’t take enough full damage okay we’re gonna have to do something about that yeah i

Was worried this was going to happen because we’re starting with a spawner that’s relatively far down and once again killing mobs in the radius of the skull catalyst but outside the radius of our stone platform has led to some of the skulk blocks spreading so if this

Fall is not enough to kill regular zombies and it’s definitely not going to take care of the armored variants of zombies that we’ll find spawning here occasionally we need to install some sort of trap that’s going to mean the zombies take additional damage once they

Are down there and if we want to use some of the resources around us to do that then i think we might have a decent shot at using powder’s snow if we end up placing a full layer of powdered snow at head height for these zombies then while

It’s going to cushion their falls so the fall damage is going to be more or less irrelevant it will eventually kill them and crucially there is an air block between the powder snow and the floor when i initially tested this in my creative flat world i figured why not

Use lava one block above the surface here and that could be held up by signs or fence gates or something like that but unfortunately having things like fence gates and signs on top of these blocks meant that they wouldn’t convert into skulk blocks in the first place and

Putting lava all over the floor also doesn’t allow these blocks to convert into skulk so while powdered snow is going to be a lot slower of a kill this spawner is not going to be producing zombies exceptionally fast anyway so i have a feeling that might be our best

Option and even though our powder snow farm has not produced a great deal since i used the last batch for the frog light farm there is thankfully a bunch of powdered snow on a nearby slope of this mountain this right here is a drift of powdered snow in fact so i’m probably

Going to dig myself out of this by bucketing up a couple of blocks of it and using those in the farm so having put it all in buckets and oh boy it takes a lot of shelter boxes to transport this much powdered snow i’m going through placing it all in the 9×9

Footprint of this farm pick blocking as i go so i don’t have to open my inventory every couple of seconds and even then i didn’t quite have enough to fill out this entire platform so we need a lot of powdered snow but hopefully this is going to be worth it of course

If you’re looking for a solution that doesn’t involve powder snow you could probably have the zombies fall into a trail of water as we typically do with them have them shoot up a bubble column and then come down at a point where they’re going to take more fall damage

Somewhere over the top of this the skull catalyst doesn’t even need to necessarily be underneath the zombie spawner itself but i think one of the benefits of designing the farm like this is the random distribution we get from zombie spawners so when i break this torch zombies are going to fall in a

Variety of different positions and yeah that’s the other thing this one doesn’t really account for baby zombies does it in the meantime more zombies have spawned and this just kind of looks like a weird set of wriggling plants i guess right now but if we light up this spawn

Out wait for the remainder of the zombies to die and then go down and look at what’s happened to the stone underneath give or take the fact that the baby zombie was still down here you’ll see that a decent amount of this has now converted into skulk blocks

We’ll get our last piece of the piston feed tape set up over here and from that point we should have a decent supply of skulk blocks coming up to the area where a player would stand the only other thing that remains is the timing of this

And we need to make sure that we have enough items in this hopper that it’s going to push out some fresh stone occasionally but not constantly because otherwise we’ll end up with a lot of stone coming through this farm and not a whole lot of skulk either way we just

Need to get that piston feed tape fixed up down here and we should have a decent supply of skulk blocks coming through all right our second part of our piston feed tape is in place we’ll probably need a third actually because i think the ideal setup for a farm like this is

Not necessarily that the player stands here and harvests all of the blocks as they arrive i think the best thing to do would be to set up a kind of network of piston feed tapes feeding them all into giant cubes of material which should be pretty straightforward to do you just

Set things up the same way we have them here with an observer detecting a wall target blocks underneath and we have the luxury of using target blocks at this time and that can shift their direction between left to right and up and down which is really useful when you want to

Compact things into a large enough area and i think we’ll probably cover that in a part two of this farm in the meantime though the last thing i need to do is set up the timer down here once we get past the powder snow and as you can see

This thing is already producing the occasional skulk sensor but once again that’s not going to be a huge issue when we’re just focused on getting the skulk blocks out of this farm the main thing we need to be concerned about here is the amount of items that go into our

Hopper clock because that spawner is going to produce a cluster of zombies anywhere between about 10 and 40 seconds between cycles so every 10 to 40 seconds probably averaging out to about 30 seconds you’re gonna find a group of zombies dropping from here and it could

Be one zombie it could be up to four zombies so potentially we’re looking at converting either five skulk blocks or 20 skulk blocks out of this pad of stone we’re generating because each skulk block basically equates to one xp that the mob would drop one single point of

Xp and since zombies drop five xp they’re going to produce five skulk blocks each time so effectively i think on average we want to generate a row of stone here about every 60 seconds and that should guarantee that every time a row of stone is generated here it gets

Converted into skulk blocks the push speed of hoppers the speed that dictates how fast items leave hoppers is roughly one item every 0.4 seconds or two and a half items per second so if we want to break this down 150 items that is two stacks and another stack with 22 in it

Is going to be the amount that will cause this clock to change state every 60 seconds and i think that is going to be ideal for what we want to do here we’re also going to wire up a control lever to switch off either one end or

The other of this hopper clock basically all it needs to do is power this redstone dust permanently so we’ll have a lever up there somewhere and that’s going to allow us to turn the clock on and off because whenever we light up the spawner that’s going to stop producing

Zombies but it’s not going to do anything to this stone generator down here that’s going to keep producing stone so we want to make sure we can switch that on and off from some sort of control room and up here gathering stone just so i can craft together a couple

More repeaters i have made a discovery ladies and gentlemen we have our first block of deep slate emerald oh i literally just looked over to kill a creeper because i heard some footsteps and the creeper was standing over here and there’s some deep slate emerald ore

Right here oh my goodness is it just the one block it looks like it is i have to make sure that i’m using silk touch for this yeah we got our first deep slate emerald ore this block is probably the rarest ore block in the game only generates in the

Deep slate layers underneath mountains where emerald generation is typically gonna dwindle to about nothing anyway so happy that i spotted that incredible anyway back to the farm this isn’t necessarily the smartest way of doing it but i’ve run the redstone wire up behind the wall here so that it comes out

Around this spot and we’re also going to put a bridge over to this spawner which is going to transfer the redstone power to a redstone lamp so every time we switch the light off we’re also going to switch the stone generator on follow our trail of redstone dust all the way down

Here and collect this lever from the machine that’s gonna start the stone generating again and now a lever attached to this block will both switch on that redstone lamp to disable the spawner and we’ll also disable the stone generator now we can take the torch off

Of that and activate the farm using one lever i think we’ll want to get some tinted glass or something in here just so that we can block off any other light getting to the farm and so that we can see what’s going on in here without disturbing the mechanism one other thing

To note is that unfortunately our powder snow compromise isn’t going to work out 100 of the time because there is the chance that a zombie will occasionally spawn wearing leather armor which is going to protect it from the effects of powder snow freezing in much the same

Way that wearing leather armor on a player does so once again the ideal scenario for this farm is that we build it high up enough that the fall damage from landing on the platform is going to kill the zombies instantly instead of the powdered snow set up that we’ve got

Here this is just unfortunately what we had to do considering the spawner was too low down for them to take any impact on fall damage and stuff like drip stone or weather roses that might be able to damage them more passively as they fall or once they’re on the platform isn’t

Going to stay planted on the platform considering that it’s constantly moving producing stone underneath there speaking of which it looks like our stone has started to creep up here and that’s the last little bits of stone that weren’t converted into skulk during this process if we take a quick look at

The wall down there you can see that a pretty steady line of skulk is now creeping up from the bottom of that and some of that is even getting converted while the zombies are dying here in the farm but in the meantime it seems like

The farm is doing its work give or take the occasional baby zombie which i might have to find another way of dealing with but for now i think we’ll just do a quick fast forward until we’re ready to make our first harvest of skulk blocks

Well here we are at last facing a wall of skulk blocks and we can harvest a bunch of these and they’ll keep getting made by the system there is one block of stone seems to have come out of this thing and that is all so that was

Probably the last remnant of the blocks that weren’t able to be converted so we can use our silk touch hoe to gather these for the blocks themselves we can use a fortune hoe or just you know a regular kind of hoe to get the xp out of

Them fortune won’t give you any more xp orbs sadly but i do think this farm is in need of improvement while it works kind of for now and it’s really interesting to hear the equip sound changes where the uh the zombies actually make that equipping noise when

They first spawn in wearing armor i do think we could do this farm better i think this whole setup is going to work wonders for anybody who has a spawner that’s high up enough that they can kill the zombies by fall damage but this compromise with the powder snow the more

I think about it the less i like it really it doesn’t deal with the leather armored zombies or the baby zombies particularly well or at all quite frankly and that’s kind of a problem when you consider that eventually those are just going to be taking up the mob

Cap down there unless the player is standing far enough away that they can despawn with the lights out though i think this farm is actually producing three or four zombies each time which means potentially that the zombies per minute or the zpm i guess is a little

Higher than i was expecting and so i think it may actually be worth decreasing the amount of items in that hopper clock because it’s taken a little while for these zombies to die but in that time the farm has not really produced that many extra stone blocks

And so as you can see from it creeping up the walls around here the skulk is having to find other places to go it’s also producing a heck of a lot of skulk sensors which we can actually gather from this farm if we really wanted to

But as you can see it’s actually turning the blocks in here into skulk before they even get pushed out from underneath this row of stairs and so that’s leading me to question whether or not it’s possible to convert skulk blocks with something else on top of them which is

An interesting prospect but i think we honestly need to do this whole farm a little differently it works super well if we didn’t have to make the compromise of the powdered snow so instead what i’m thinking we might end up doing is building something like this building a

Fall trap for the zombies but building it in the next chunk over and instead of having this issue where the zombies can’t take in a full damage have them fall into a water stream direct them up a bubble column and then down into a drop where they can die of full damage

Making sure that they convert the skulk blocks instantly i think that would lead to the farm running a little faster i’m still happy to put out this video because it’s obviously been a pretty detailed walkthrough of creating one of these farms as a full trap but we need

To work on the full trap part of that for just this specific set of circumstances where the spawner is not high up enough one other thing to bear in mind is that if you see a zombie down there in the farm and it’s not dying because it’s got some sort of leather

Armor or whatever on be careful what you’re shooting at it with because if you end up shooting powdered snow with a flame bow the arrow is actually going to burn away some of the powder snow blocks and if the mob gets set on fire the mob

Is a gonna be put out by the powdered snow but any of the blocks it touches in the process of that are also going to be erased and it’s a good thing that we can farm the stuff because that just destroys the block outright now i’m not worried about those blocks right now

Because we’re going to redesign this farm in the next episode but for now i think that’s probably where we’re going to leave it for this episode of the minecraft survival guide folks i hope you’ve enjoyed a little look at the trial and error process of setting up

One of these skulk farms and hopefully this is information that you’ll find useful in setups where you have a spawner that you can just kill the mobs using full damage stay tuned for part two where we’ll be trying to explore this in a slightly more intelligent way

And in the meantime 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