Constructing farms in Minecraft can be fun if you are passionate about creating your own designs. Though, those can sometimes require a lot of Redstone components, like a tree farm for instance. For that reason, we have already made separate guides on building a sugar cane farm and a bamboo farm. And in this guide, we will focus on building a cactus farm. For this super easy farm, you don’t even need complex Redstone components, so you can build it early in your world. Without further ado, let’s learn how to make a cactus farm in Minecraft.
How to Get Cactus in Minecraft
In order to grow cactus and make a farm for it, you’ll first need to gather a few cactus blocks. Lucky you, we already have a detailed guide on how to get cactus in Minecraft, so make sure to check it out.
Things You Need to Make a Cactus Farm
This farm is straightforward, so you won’t need any complex Redstone components. Instead you need a few basic things to build a simple cactus farm. Everything you need is listed below:
- Slabs (as many as you want)
- Sand (as many as you want)
- Cactus (as many as you want)
- Fences (as many as you want)
- Water Buckets
- 3 Hoppers
- 6 Chests
- Solid Blocks
- 1 Stair
Minecraft Cactus Farm: Step-by-Step Tutorial
1. Collection System
- Place a double chest with a hopper facing into its end.
- Then, place another chest above that hopper and attach another hopper to its end from the opposite side of the first hopper.
- Next, repeat the same thing once again, as shown in the picture below. This is a large storage for the cactus farm, and it will make sure you don’t lose resources in Minecraft.
- Now, place a row of solid blocks 8 blocks above from the upper hopper in the direction parallel to the chests.
- On the last blocks, place another solid block and build a one-block tall wall around the entire line. Make sure to place a stair above the chest, so you can open it.
- Also, you need to add water at the end of those holes.
- Now, let’s create a platform with flowing water, as it is going to collect all the cactus drops.
- Make a 17 blocks-long and 8 blocks wide platform attached to the hole we created away from the chests.
- Then, go ahead and build a one-block tall wall around that entire platform, including the hole with flowing water. Start from the corners we already placed.
- Finally, add water to the edges of the platform flowing towards the hopper.
2. Cactus Growing and Breaking System
- Two blocks away from the edges of the collection system, place a top half slab two blocks above the bottom of the platform.
- Place three sand blocks on it. Then, place fences on all four sides of the topmost sand block.
- Place the next slab one block apart from the first one and repeat the sand and fence placing. Then, repeat the entire process across the platform. In the end, it should look something like this.
- For the last step, remove two sand blocks from the top of each of these sections and place a cactus on the remaining sand block.
- All that’s left to do is to wait for the cactus blocks to grow and get collected.
3. Expand the Cactus Farm in Minecraft
The farm we built is completely functional, though it’s a bit slow. We can easily change it using two different ways and improve the output.
Extend the Collection System
We can just continue building platforms attached to the first one, that we can cover with more water, Simply, create a new 17 blocks-long and 8 blocks-wide platform attached to the first one, also away from the chests.
Build a one-block tall wall around it and fill the edges with water, so that it flows towards the rest of the collection system. After you built the platform, you can then rebuild the same cactus stations two blocks away from the edges and the platform below.
Extend the Cactus Farm Upwards
Besides expanding the collection system, we can also make more layers of the cactus modules. You can even use the fences to place new sand blocks on top of them and continue the entire sand, fence, and cactus placement process. You can definitely place a lot of cacti this way.
The other option is to pillar up a couple of blocks from the fences below and create identical cactus stations as below.
You can continue expanding your farm in any way you want, according to your resources, needs, and space in your Minecraft world.
Minecraft Cactus Farm Mechanics Explained
Cactus grows just like other plant blocks in Minecraft. When the top cactus block receives 16 random ticks, a new block of cactus grows above it, only if there is space above. That takes about 18 minutes on average and the cactus can grow up to three blocks tall. The most relevant mechanic about a cactus block is that it doesn’t like any blocks attached directly to one of its sides.
That means, if you have already placed a cactus on a sand block, you will not be able to place any blocks next to it. However, when a cactus grows, it checks only if there is space above the topmost cactus block, and it doesn’t check whether there are any blocks next to that space. Therefore, when a cactus grows, it will get broken instantly if we leave a block next to it. So yeah, we are purposely leaving some blocks so the cactus breaks, and we can then collect it in an item form.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, the sand block that a cactus is planted on doesn’t affect the growth rate.
No, you can’t. Only food items can be cooked in a smoker.
Unfortunately, in Minecraft survival mode, you can’t speed up the rate at which cactus grows. Bone meal works on most other plants, but it doesn’t work on cactus. You can speed up the cactus growth by changing the randomTickSpeed gamerule with cheats.
