How to make automatic fuel farm in Minecraft

Bamboo is one of the best items to farm in Minecraft. It can be turned into sticks and traded with a fletcher for profit at a Minecraft villager trading hall or converted into planks and used as a wood alternative as of update 1.20. It's even valuable to the building side of the community, as it is needed to make scaffolding.

Bamboo can even be used as fuel in a furnace, even if it's not one of Minecraft's best fuels. However, this lack of efficiency is more than countered by how quickly it grows. Setting up an automatic bamboo fuel farm, detailed below, is a cheap way to get so much bamboo that fuel is effectively infinite.

NOTE: This article is subjective and reflects the views of the writer.

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How to make an automatic bamboo farm in Minecraft

1) Collect the materials

The materials used in the example farm (Image via Mojang)

This fuel farm is not particularly expensive, with the most costly components being the six pistons, six observers, and 13 total needed hoppers. Other than that, the farm is almost free, only requiring a few building blocks, light sources, rails, redstone, and chests.

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2) Build the collection system

An example of a functional rail setup for the bamboo fuel farm. (Image via Mojang)

The collection system will act as both the basement of the farm and the determining factor in how long it will be. For these reasons, it's the best place to start building. Place down a double chest or a series of double chests attached via hoppers, and then add a row of connected hoppers leading into the chests.

Place rails on top of these hoppers, ensuring that each hopper in the chain is covered. This will allow the minecart hopper traveling underground to collect and dispense the bamboo into storage. Add a row of powered rails along one side and use a redstone torch to power them. Add a few more powered rails than you think you need, as this will ensure that the system does not eventually stop.

Placing this collection system two blocks into the ground will ensure that the farm remains level with the floor.

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3) Add in the bamboo harvesters

Both sides of the bamboo harvesters (Images via Mojang)

Next, you'll need to add in the machinery to harvest the bamboo. Build up a wall along each side of the farm, as tall as you want the bamboo to grow before being broken. Then, add pistons to each wall facing inwards so that when extended, the two-block bamboo area will be completely filled. Place observers facing inwards towards the bamboo on top of the pistons.

On each side, add blocks just below the pistons, along with a line of redstone dust, and on the backs of each observer. When the observer sees a bamboo grow, it will power the block behind it. This passes a signal through to the redstone below the block, powering the chain of pistons on that side and breaking any bamboo growths.

The bamboo growths will then fall to the floor and be collected by the Minecraft hopper minecart.

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4) Plant bamboo and finish up

Bone meal is recommended to skip the bamboo's initial growth period. (Image via Mojang)

With the bamboo harvester walls built, the final steps are to actually plant the bamboo and preferably hit it with Minecraft bone meal to skip an annoyingly long farm warmup period and to add walls to the sides of the farm, along with a roof.

The extra sides and roof should keep any bamboo from being violently flung outside of the reach of the hopper minecart. Take advantage of Minecraft's best light source blocks to keep the build lit. This will let the bamboo grow at night. Optionally, add some carpets or half-slabs to the roof to keep mobs from spawning up there.