How to make a mushroom farm in Minecraft

Despite being renewable resources, Minecraft’s mushrooms are in particularly short supply. Only capable of spawning naturally in swamps, certain taiga forests, the Nether, or in the incredibly rare mushroom biomes, the only way to efficiently gather lots of them is to grow them yourself. However, mushrooms have very specific conditions that they need to be in for them to grow, making the process of farming them a bit complicated.

Growing small mushrooms in underground tunnels

When planted on dirt, mushrooms will only grow in areas of very little to no light. This includes both direct sunlight and artificial light sources like torches, such that a placed mushroom will break if planted on the surface and the sun rises, or if a torch is placed nearby. Because of this, it is very common to grow them underground.

A planted mushroom in the dark has a chance to sprout a new mushroom on an unoccupied dirt block within a three-by-three cube around itself. To maximize the available space to grow new mushrooms, dig a three-block wide, two-block tall tunnel with a floor of dirt blocks. The length of this tunnel can vary, growing longer with the number of mushrooms grown.

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Once a proper tunnel has been dug, plant a mushroom on the central line of blocks along the length of the tunnel, leaving two blocks of space between each mushroom. This will allow each planted mushroom a total of eight connected dirt blocks on which to grow new mushrooms on all sides. The natural growth process is rather slow, so planting more mushrooms will increase the rate at which the tunnel produces new ones.

Growing mushrooms in this way can be perilous, as the dark tunnel has about as much a chance to spawn a hostile mob as it does to spawn a new mushroom. When you harvest, be sure to enter the tunnel with both weapons and armor, and watch out for potential threats.

Growing giant mushrooms

A far safer method of farming mushrooms is to grow giant mushrooms and chop them down with an ax. This can only be done by planting a standard mushroom and using bone meal on it. Each mushroom block has a chance to drop up to two mushrooms when broken, and every block, including the stem and cap of the giant mushroom, can be harvested.

Often growing anywhere from five to seven blocks tall, giant mushrooms are most commonly grown by planting them on the surface. While this cannot be done while planted on standard dirt, mushrooms planted on podzol or mycelium can be grown anywhere regardless of the surrounding light level. While Podzol only naturally spawns in certain taiga forests or bamboo jungles, and mycelium can only be found in mushroom biomes, both alternative dirt blocks can only be collected using a Silk Touch tool.