Which Mob is Best for XP farm? (Not what you think)

You may have a goal to get a lot of experience quickly, or maybe you just want to optimize your time playing Minecraft (nobody like to spent hours farming XP levels). You are at the right place, I’ll give you the best way to farm XP in Minecraft.

Overall, the dragon is the creature that give the most experience in Minecraft. However, it can only be killed once. As a general rule, blazes and guardians are the best mobs to farm XP in Minecraft. It’s pretty simple to build a farm for them.

We’ll go straight to the point, I’ll give you the top 10 mobs you can kill to farm XP in Minecraft.
And don’t miss the end of the article, with all the strategies about XP farming and a few tips you maybe don’t know yet.

Best mobs for XP farming in Minecraft

1 – Bosses: Dragon and Wither

As explained in the introduction, mobs giving the more experience in Minecraft are bosses.
Killing the dragon will give you 12000 XP the first time. For Withers it’s only 50 XP but you can summon them several times and gain XP each time.

If you haven’t killed it yet and need a lot of experience, it might be a great solution.
But it will take a lot of time, you can’t repeat this, and you might need many steps do to achieve it.
I’ll give you better solutions later.

2 – Baby zombies

On second position, we find baby zombies and pig zombies.
Depending on your level and stuff in your game, they may be a bit complicated to kill, but they give 12 XP for each kill.

You can find them in both worlds (overworld and nether), they can also spawn when you kill an adult zombie.
However, I still don’t think it’s the best strategy to farm a lot of XP in a short amount of time. We’ll find better options.

3 – Riding mobs / jockeys

That’s probably not the first thing you think about when you are looking to farm XP in Minecraft, but riding mobs can give you a lot of experience.

Indeed, you’ll get the equivalent of two mobs XP when you kill it. And sometimes you’ll also get a bonus.
A spider jockey give between 10 and 13 XP (it depends on the skeleton stuff).
And for the chicken jockey it’s between 22 and 25 XP!

But once again, there is no easy way to automate that kind of mob farming. It’s good to know, but you won’t use it in game.

4 – Blazes and guardians

So, blazes and guardians are the first mobs in this list that can be used in an XP farm.
They both give 10 XP when you kill them.

The good news is that it’s pretty easy to farm these creatures.
I’ll give you two videos to learn how to build your XP farm:

To farm blaze, you’ll need to find a spawner in the nether. For a small farm, you can just protect yourself by building walls around the spawner. Then you just open one block to kill the blaze without any damage.
But you can also build a semi-automatic blaze farm by following this video:

If you prefer working underwater, guardians are also a great solution 🙂
You’ll need to find an ocean monument and build a guardian farm there. You can find the details in this video, that will be easier to understand than a long text:

5 – Other aggressive creatures

Obviously, if you prefer something easier to build, you can always create something with the other mobs.
You’ll probably find a zombie, skeleton or spider spawner next to your base, that you can optimize to farm a bit of experience there. This won’t be the “best” method, but it can be enough to enchant a few things from time to time.

Here are the creatures I’m talking about:

• Spider (cave or normal), Creeper, Skeleton, Zombie
• Enderman, Witch
• Wither skeleton, Ghast, Pig Zombie
• Vex, Stray, Vindicator
• Silverfish and shulker

All of them give 5 XP for each kill.
And there is also a bonus for stuffed mobs.

For some of them, you can find spawners (or ways to farm them), so that you can automate the process a bit.
Even if they are not the best mobs to farm XP, it’s still a great way to farm because you’ll easily find them or build a farm.

6 – Big slimes and magma

Don’t forget slimes in your list of possibilities. They are a great source of experience in Minecraft. Magma cubes too.

If you have slimes chunks next to your base, you can easily build a farm there.
Most of the tutorials you’ll find on the topic will kill them to farm slimes balls, but you can adapt the farm to keep the mobs alive at the end.

7 – Endermites

Just for your information, endermites and vex give 3 XP for each kill.
It’s not really interesting for us, but they are still in the top 10 🙂

8 – Passives mobs

Passive mobs also give XP in Minecraft. They are 8th in our list.
They give between 1 and 3 XP for each kill, which is still interesting if you have a giant breeding (cows, pigs, chickens, etc.).
Also, don’t forget that you’ll get experience while breeding (between 1 and 7 XP), so overall it’s pretty good (we’ll talk more about this later).

You can optimize the production by moving babies somewhere they will be killed as adults. But I don’t think it’s necessary if you are not interested in loot farming.

9 – Medium slimes

Medium slimes give 2 XP for each kill.

10 – Small slimes

And finally, small limes give 1 XP each time.

If you sum the slimes XP for big, medium and small, it’s still interesting to farm them.
But I don’t think you’ll get a lot with that kind of farm (maybe with many chunks?). There are better solutions above I think.

No XP mobs

Then, don’t forget that some mobs don’t give XP when you kill them, so there is no need to farm them:

• Bats
• Iron and snow golems
• Villagers

So no need to kill these poor mobs to try to gain XP 🙂

All about XP farming in Minecraft

Experience math

All the mobs listed above will drop experience orbs when they die.
For these experience orbs to be dropped, you must have hit the mob within 5 seconds of its death.

If the mob dies from a fall, fire or in lava, you won’t be awarded any XP.
When you build farms, it is therefore important to make sure that it is you who kill the mobs.
They may have been set to 0.5 hearts before, but the last hit must come from you.

Level up

The experience required for each level is different, it is an exponential curve.
For example, you’ll only need 7 XP to go from level 0 to 1, while to go from 29 to 30 you will need 107 XP.

Experience calculator

So, it’s not that easy to find how much XP you need to reach a certain level, let alone how many mobs you will need to kill.

There are tools you can use, like this one, that allow you to fill your current level, the desired level and deduce the number of mobs to kill.

Other sources of experience in Minecraft

Killing mobs is not the only way to get experience in Minecraft. Here are a few other ways you can consider.

Mining

You can also gain experience by mining, and this can be interesting because it allows you to do something more useful than killing mobs.

Experience is given only on ores, and each ore gives a different amount:

• Diamond and emerald give between 3 and 7 XP
• Lapis lazuli and quartz give between 2 and 5 XP
• Redstone give 2 to 5 XP
• And coal also give a bit, between 0 and 2 XP

Farming quartz in the Nether can be a great option, once your stuff is powerful enough to say alive easily in the Nether. You’ll find it everywhere, it’s fast to mine et you can use it in your builds.
All of this while farming XP 🙂

Breeding

I have already wrote on the subject quickly in the previous paragraphs, but breeding can also be interesting for farming XP.
You will earn XP three times:

• By feeding the animals (between 1 and 7 XP)
• By killing the animals (between 1 and 3 XP, we saw it above)
• And finally 0.35 by cooking the meat, we will talk about it a little further down

Players

If you’re on a server where PVP is allowed, killing players is a great way to gain experience (even if it’s more risky).
You will indeed gain 7 XP per level of the player you kill.

Note that this experience is limited:

• If you kill a level 10 player, you will gain 70 XP
• If you kill a level 30 player, you will gain 100 XP

You can’t earn more than 100 XP per player killed.
But it still represents a lot of experience compare to the other options, that’s the equivalent of two withers 🙂

Cooking

Cooking doesn’t give a lot of experience in Minecraft, but when you cook stacks of items, it can still help with your XP goal :

• Rares ores (diamond, emerald, gold) give 1 XP for each item (64 XP per stack)
• Iron and redstone give 0.7 XP
• While lapis and quartz give 0.2 XP

Other items (like sand, meat, etc.) will all give you between 0.1 and 0.35 XP for each item you cook.
It doesn’t seem interesting, but consider a double chest of sand, after cooking you’ll get 364 XP!
In some cases, it might be faster than waiting close to your zombie spawner 🙂

Fishing

The last option to farm experience in Minecraft is to use your fishing rod 🙂
Each time you catch a fish, you’ll get between 1 and 6 experience, plus 0.35 if you cook it.

Final thoughts

That’s it, you now have a great overview of all the ways to farm XP in Minecraft, and which mob is the best choice depending on your game and progress.
Which one do you prefer?

I think my favorite is the blaze farm, once you have built the perfect spawner, it’s really fast to farm for a few items.