How to Build a Raid Farm in Minecraft 2026

Raid farms are one of the most efficient ways to get ominous bottles, totems of undying, and all those precious Raid drops without endlessly hunting Pillager Outposts. Building one right is where most people stumble. Let me walk you through the whole process, from scouting to spawning mechanics.

What You'll Get From a Raid Farm

Here's the thing: raid farms aren't just for the flex. These things pump out totems of undying on demand, which is genuinely life-saving in deep caves or during late-game PvP. You'll also get emeralds by the stack, enchanted books, iron, diamonds, and those ominous bottles everyone's been collecting for potions.

If you're running a server with friends, having a communal raid farm changes the whole economy. Suddenly everyone's swimming in resources that would take months to gather normally. The problem is they're finicky to set up right.

Finding and Preparing Your Location

Scouting for the Right Outpost

You need a Pillager Outpost, obviously. But not just any outpost. You want one in an area with plenty of flat ground nearby and ideally away from your main base (raids can get loud, literally and figuratively). Use a seed mapper or just fly around in creative mode first to get a feel for your world. Check our server list if you're playing multiplayer and need suggestions on where communities have been building.

The outpost itself sits at a specific Y-coordinate. In Java Edition 26.1.2, make sure you're working with terrain that doesn't have massive height variations nearby, because water will be involved.

Clearing and Leveling

Clear everything in a massive radius around the outpost. I'm talking 200+ blocks. Remove trees, water, random blocks. Make it flat. Pillagers are picky about where they spawn, and having random terrain will mess with your farm's efficiency. You'll want a completely clear, flat plane for the spawning platform.

Understanding Raid Spawn Mechanics

This is where people go wrong. Raids don't spawn like regular Pillager patrols. When you trigger a raid with a Bad Omen effect, the game spawns raid waves in specific waves with specific mob types. The waves come in a set order: Pillagers and Vindicators first, then Witches, then ranged units, then melee units again, then some mixed waves.

Entities can only spawn on solid blocks, not in water, not in air. This matters because your farm design needs to funnel mobs into a specific area while preventing natural spawning everywhere else. But actually, that's not quite right for what we're building here - you want mobs to spawn on a platform, then fall into a collection system.

The key insight: mobs spawn in waves at increasing distances from the Raid Center (usually the Bad Omen player). Building your farm means creating a platform where they naturally want to spawn, then controlling the flow.

Building the Farm Structure

The Spawning Platform

You'll need a flat platform made of spawning blocks (dirt, grass, stone, etc.) roughly 20-30 blocks away from your farm center. This platform should be about 50x50 blocks, but not too close to other surfaces where mobs might spawn instead. The player holding Bad Omen should be positioned so that mobs spawn on the platform and nowhere else.

Cover the ground in slabs or glass beyond your spawning area. This prevents strays from spawning during nighttime raids, which they actually do.

The Collection System

Once mobs spawn on your platform, you need them to fall down into a funnel. A simple system is a 1x1 hole that drops straight down to a killing area. Use water streams to push mobs toward the hole. Flowing water moves entities, so a simple 2x2 channel with water running toward the hole works beautifully.

Pro tip: the hole doesn't need to be deep. Witches are the problem mobs because they heal themselves. You want damage to be instant, so suffocation is your friend here. A 2-block suffocation box under the collection point kills everything except witches. For those, use fall damage or lava combined with suffocation.

The Killing Chamber

Below the collection hole, create a chamber that's roughly 3x3 blocks. This is where mobs land. Add suffocation blocks (use pistons or pushing water to crush mobs against the blocks above). Most mobs die to suffocation after a few seconds. Witches need special handling - use fall damage or lava, though lava burns their drops.

For a cleaner system, use drowning with a 1x1 vertical water column. Mobs can't escape, and their drops float to the top where you collect them.

Getting the Farm Running

Triggering the First Raid

Find a Pillager Outpost and kill the Pillagers until one drops a Bad Omen effect (they drop it when killed by a player). Then drink a bucket of milk to get the Bad Omen, head to your farm, and enter a village. Bad Omen + Village = Raid trigger.

The first raid spawns 5 waves of increasingly dangerous mobs. Waves 3-5 are where the totems and ominous bottles really show up.

Optimizing Spawn Rates

Mobs spawn in waves only while you're within a certain distance of the Bad Omen player. If you run too far away, the raid pauses. Stay close, but also get to a safe spot where you can observe or AFK. Many people build an observation tower or afk platform at exactly the right distance.

Wave timing matters too. Each wave takes about 20-40 seconds to spawn completely. You don't want to trigger the next raid before the first one finishes, or the waves merge and break your farm.

Common Problems and Fixes

Mobs spawning in random places? You've got other solid blocks or elevated terrain nearby. Flatten everything within 200 blocks. Witches healing faster than they're dying? Switch to drowning or fall damage only. Lava plus suffocation sometimes doesn't work fast enough.

The raid not triggering? Make sure you've the Bad Omen effect (not a status effect potion, but the actual Bad Omen from a Pillager captain). And you need to enter a village with it - an actual village, not just a few houses.

Drops disappearing? They despawn after 5 minutes in Java Edition. Make sure your collection system actually pushes items to a hopper or collection point. If you're running a server, use our server properties generator to adjust entity-tracking-range if you need more visibility.

Performance Considerations

Raid farms can tank server performance if you're not careful. Hundreds of mobs dying simultaneously = lots of particles, sounds, and entity updates. Build your killing chamber away from your main base. Most people put these farms at least 500 blocks away from spawn, sometimes in another dimension entirely if they're really paranoid.

If you're playing single-player, just monitor your FPS. If you're on a server, talk to your admins. Some servers disable raids entirely or limit how many can run simultaneously.

One more thing - make sure you're actually afk-able during raids. The last thing you need is aggressive mobs chasing you while you're trying to position yourself. Build defensive walls or stay in a 1-block-high tower where Endermen can't reach you.

Advanced Optimizations

Once you've got a working farm, you can optimize it for speed. Some builders use multiple spawning platforms to get waves starting before previous waves finish. Others use multiple killing chambers to distribute the load.

The absolute best farms run multiple raids simultaneously by having several Bad Omen players spaced out, each triggering their own raid. Obviously this requires cooperation and setup, but it's the difference between hundreds of totems per hour versus dozens.