How To Make A Sculk Farm In Minecraft 1.19

The 1.19 update of Minecraft is finally out, introducing a number of new mechanics for players to explore. With sculk and the Deep Dark being the new featured biome, most of these new mechanics involve the sculk blocks. Some of them are useful for redstone builds, while others are for decorative purposes only. The best use for sculk, however, is to create XP farms.

In this article, Gurugamer is going to showcase how to make a sculk farm in Minecraft 1.19.

1. Why do you need Sculk Catalyst in XP farms?

Sculk Catalyst is a new type of block added to the game in 1.19. If any mob dies and drops experience within 8 blocks of a sculk catalyst, it spawns sculk at that spot. The catalyst can generate other types of sculk blocks, including regular sculk, sculk sensor, and sculk vein.

The best part about sculk blocks is that they drop XP when mined. This means doing a mob farm in combination with a Sculk Catalyst can yield extra XP when you break the sculk generated by your kills.

This XP stacks. Several sculk charges may end up on the same block and merge, up to 1000 XP per block.

2. How to Get a Sculk Catalyst

There are two ways to get sculk catalysts in the game. Players can either harvest them in the Deep Dark biome or kill the Warden.

These sculk catalysts can easily be found in the Deep Dark biome, with an even higher spawn rate in the Ancient City. Players need to use a hoe with the silk touch enchantment to pick it up. Otherwise, prepare your gear and go against the Warden - upon death, they drop a catalyst and 5 XP.

As the Warden is the strongest mob in Minecraft currently, killing them for catalysts is not really worth the effort.

3. Preparations for a Minecraft Sculk farm

Overall, creating a sculk farm is rather straightforward. You only need to build a normal farm, then add a number of sculk catalysts onto the killing zone. In this guide, we will spawn a variety of hostile mobs in a close rooftop chamber just like a regular farm.

Afterward, use flowing water to direct the mobs toward a pit, making them fall to their death. As soon as the hostile mobs die, the sculk catalyst will activate and generate sculk features containing XP. The only thing left for you is to break these blocks with a tool to collect the XP.

Players need the following items to create a Sculk farm in Minecraft 1.19:

• A Sculk Catalyst
• 1600 building blocks (25 stacks)
• 2 Water buckets
• An Open Area (at least 9*9)
• A Hoe (any)
• 64 trapdoors (1 Stack)

Other than the sculk catalyst that can only be found in the Deep Dark, everything else is easily obtainable. Just use cobblestone for building blocks, as they are the easiest to acquire.

4. A step-by-step guide to making a Minecraft Sculk farm

Create Base for Farm

• Go to an open area of at least 9 blocks in radius and place a block in the middle of it. This is the spot to place the catalyst later on.

• Put 4 blocks to mark the range of the sculk catalyst (exactly 8 blocks away from the center block, in all 4 horizontal directions).
• Place hoppers with chests around the middle block to collect items from mobs.

Create a natural mob spawner

• Build a pillar on top of the 4 blocks that mark the farm's range. These pillars should be at least 25 blocks high for enough fall damage.

• Create a floor for the spawning chamber and join the 4 pillars together. Create a 3-blocks high wall on top of them.

• Don’t forget to leave a 2 x 2 hole in the middle for the mob death trap.

Floor for the death chamber

• Create 2-blocks high platforms in all 4 corners of the chamber. Leave a bridge-like area of 2-blocks in width and place a trapdoor on each upper block of the bridge and place water on the wall-side edge of each bridge.

• This way, the water will flow towards the opening in the floor, bringing all mobs entering the stream to their death.
• Create a roof above the chamber so that mobs can spawn in the day.

5. How to collect XP from Sculk farm

With everything completed, just wait a few minutes for the mobs to spawn. Each time one of them falls and dies, the sculk catalyst will activate and spread sculk features. Wait a bit for the area to be covered by sculk.

Mine all the new sculk blocks to get the XP. Replace the blocks you mined with common building blocks to repeat the process. The XP gained is directly proportional to the experience collected by the sculk catalyst. Therefore, if you can use mobs from the Nether, you can get better results from your farm. Alternatively, a mob spawner can also yield similar results.

>>> Read more: 5 Biomes For Base Building In Minecraft 1.19 Update