Automatic Sand and Gravel Farm in Minecraft: Infinite Resources Made Easy

A Minecraft world without sand and gravel just wouldn’t work. Both blocks are essential to the game and are perfect for your world thanks to their unique properties! Not only are they great blocks for natural constructions, but they can also be transformed into a variety of other materials. For the automatic farm, we will use the aspect that sand and gravel are affected by gravity and therefore always fall downwards. This allows us to exploit a mechanic with which we can generate infinite blocks! So, let’s take a closer look at gravel and sand and show you what you can do with them.

Why Sand and Gravel are Essential for Minecraft

Sand in Minecraft: Properties and Uses

Sand is a natural material that you can find in abundance in your Minecraft world. It is particularly common on beaches and in deserts. There is also red sand, which you can find in the Badlands or Mesa. Sand is best mined with a shovel, and the desert is probably your best bet for mining a lot of sand. If you invest enough time, you will rarely run out of sand in your world.

And that’s a good thing because sand is needed for a huge number of crafting recipes and other things. It is an incredibly valuable resource for your world.

From sand you can:

• Make glass. Melt it in a furnace and use glass to design your base and other buildings. This is probably the main reason you need a lot of sand.
• Create sandstone. A great building block for desert structures!
• Craft TNT. Together with gunpowder, sand becomes an explosive weapon.
• Create dry concrete. Here sand and gravel come together to create a unique block.

Gravel in Minecraft: Uses and Creative Applications

Gravel is not quite as useful as sand but is still a great block for decoration. Before the introduction of paths, it was the block used to build paths in your Minecraft world! Its texture is unique and pairs well with other stone blocks. You can find gravel in some biomes in the Overworld, in caves, or even in the Nether.

From gravel you can:

• Make flint. Mine gravel, and it has a 10% chance of dropping as flint. Increase the chance with the “Fortune” enchantment.
• Create coarse dirt. A wonderful block for decorations.
• Create dry concrete. Here sand and gravel come together to create a unique block.

Building Guide: How to Create an Automatic Sand-Gravel Farm

Although sand and gravel are common in your world, it can take quite a while to gather enough resources. Especially if you want to make a lot of glass or concrete, both resources are indispensable. However, with an automatic farm, this is no longer a problem! The design is a bit more complex and requires knowledge of Redstone, but we’ll go through everything step by step.

Note: This method is based on duplicating items. If you don’t want to cheat, this might not be the right choice for you. Unfortunately, there are no other methods to naturally produce sand and gravel. A shovel and the right biome are otherwise a manual alternative.

Building Materials for Your Automatic Farm

Duplication Machine:

• Dirt + red mushroom + bone meal
• Building blocks
• 9 Redstone dust
• 3 Redstone repeaters
• 2 Redstone torches
• 6 slime blocks
• 3 leaves
• 5 sticky pistons
• 1 lever

Nether Collection Station:

• Temporary building blocks
• 10 leaves
• 2 hoppers
• 2 carpets
• Chests

Step-by-Step Building Guide

First, find one of your strongholds, activate it with Eyes of Ender, and defeat the Ender Dragon (if you haven’t already). The portal is our starting point for this farm. Remove everything in the room except the portal itself.

With a red mushroom, which we grow one block in front of the End portal, we remove three of the End portal blocks on one side. If you want to repeat this design on all four sides, you need to remove all sides with the mushroom trick.

We’ll go through the Redstone step by step so that you set everything correctly. We build a kind of small, endlessly running catapult for sand and gravel. These are brought into the Nether through the portal but remain in the Overworld as well.

Place a building block at the bottom edge of the portal. Place a sticky piston in front of it. Then draw a line of 3 Redstone dust. Behind it, dig a 3-block-long hole. Place a repeater at one end and set it to the last setting.

Extend the line in the ground with 3 Redstone dust from the hole. Place two building blocks over the repeater and the block behind it. On the first block, place dust and on the second another repeater with no settings. Attach another building block to the repeater. Attach two Redstone torches to the back and top.

The machine is now running, but it is best to turn it off with a lever on the block with the Redstone torches. Continue with a sticky piston on the upper torch. On the torch and piston, place two building blocks, onto which we again place dust and a repeater on level 1. Then build a staircase two blocks further and place dust on the first block.

Under the top block of this staircase, place the last three pistons next to each other, facing downwards. Then we must place the slime blocks on the two individual pistons, each in a row of 3. Under the pistons opposite the portal, place the three leaves.

Activate the farm by placing your sand or gravel directly on the slime blocks at the portal. Flip the lever and the farm should work!

In the End, we now need to build the collection mechanism. First, determine in which direction the machine throws the sand/gravel by building walls at the edge of the obsidian platform. We were lucky as our platform was directly on the main island.

On this side, you need to build a small wreath of leaves (so no Endermen spawn). Below, place two hoppers and a chest for collection. Place carpets on the hoppers, also to prevent Endermen.

If you now return to the machine in the stronghold and activate it, everything should work smoothly! The materials are duplicated through the portal and end up in the hopper in the End. Turn off the machine and then collect your sand or gravel in the End.

Conclusion

Gravel and sand are essential materials in your world. And with our automatic farm, you can hopefully collect many of these resources without having to dig them out yourself with a shovel. Build without interruption with infinite sand and gravel on your own server. Rent your Minecraft server and start your building projects without restrictions!