Tutorial:Dripstone farming
Dripstone farming is the renewable way to farm pointed dripstone and dripstone blocks. Dripstone is used to farm lava, and can also be used as fall damage traps for mob farms or for pranking, as it quadruples the amount of fall damage you take.
A few key points
- For a Pointed Dripstone to grow it must be placed under a Dripstone block with water above it. Pointed Dripstone meeting these requirements will, on average, grow a single block every 100 minutes. Players hoping to farm dripstone faster than it can be collected by hand should be prepared to build an enormous farm.
- You have a 1/4 chance to be able to buy 4 dripstone blocks for one emerald from a stone mason in Bedrock Edition, and in Java Edition the chance is 2/7.
Manual farming
To be able to manually farm dripstone, all you will need is some dripstone blocks, an equal amount of pointed dripstone and 2 water buckets. First you will need to place the amount of dripstone blocks you want dripstones to grow from, and water sources a layer above that. Now plant pointed dripstones on the dripstone blocks, and the farm is done. To harvest it, every 20 minutes or Minecraft day, check on the dripstone and harvest the second parts of the ones that are 2+ high and also the stalagmites on the floor.
Automatic farming
Automating the farming process of dripstone is necessary for any large scale project including them, like a shop or trap in an SMP, or a big-scale lava farm. The following designs below automate the process and allow you to get more dripstone and have more free time on your hands.
JC Playz's design
JC Playz's design uses the same design the manual farm used, however there are observers and pistons to detect the dripstone as it grows. There is also a collection mechanism which funnels the dripstone into a chest for you. The farm itself is very resource friendly and produces a decent amount, however it is not very compact, since if you want to farm a massive scale of it you will need to build it in several strips.
Flying machine design
The flying machine design is self-explanatory. You have a normal dripstone farm but with more blocks of air gaps to fit a flying machine which will harvest the second stalactite dripstones and higher. There also needs to be a shifting floor or another flying machine to harvest the stalagmites on the floor, and a collection system to pick up the dripstone on the floor. That all sounds complicated to most Minecraft players, so here are 2 tutorial videos to help you.
Silentwisperer's design
This is designed on Bedrock Edition, but most of the mechanics work on Java too.
Mysticat's design
This design is designed on Java Edition, but it also works on Bedrock. However, bear in mind that the stalagmite dripstones won't be harvested because of the water flow, and that will reduce the efficiency. Due to the slow speed at which pointed dripstone forms, a multiplicative hopper clock with an edge detector may be used in place of a daylight sensor if a longer harvesting interval is desired.
