I’ve had an idea for building a ruined tower to use as a survival “dungeon” for a while and finally had a chance and a good spot to build one. I found a zombie spawner at the right level to be converted into our tower spawner. The idea is to use the spawner to fill the tower with zombies for us to go in and fight against. My kids like to do “monster hunting” at night time by roaming around or caving to find mobs. Like many things when you’re looking for them is when they seem to be the scarcest.

Idea

The idea is pretty simple, a ruined tower built above a zombie spawner with the water elevator feeding the zombies to the top of the tower. With some holes in the floor edged with trap doors the zombies will bump into each other and force more down to the lower tower levels. After a few minutes we can raid the tower now filled with zombies plus the normal spawns.

Design Plan

Control room within 16 blocks of spawner with lighting to shut off spawns when needed.

The highest level needs to be within the 40-block radius from the control room to prevent despawning.

Tower needs to be closed enough to prevent too many zombies burning in day time.

The Tower Build

Building a ruined tower can seem more difficult than building a normal tower. If I do another one I think I will build the full tower first then come back and break the holes and make it look ruined. For this one I built the outer shell with the stripped wood and stone bricks. To texture the build I mixed in mossy and cracked stone bricks along with wall blocks and stairs.

For the broken sections spruce fence worked well to look like the inner framing being exposed as the bricks collapsed. This also keeps most of the zombies inside the tower.

Adding vines to the tower gives it more of the abandoned look and they will fill in more while I am working on the spawner.

The Spawner

The spawner area is built just like any other zombie xp farm with a water system to force the spawns over to a soul sand elevator. The elevator on this one simply takes them up into the tower instead of dropping them back down to a kill chamber.

To help control the spawns there are 4 redstone lamps in the walls of the spawn chamber tied to a lever in the control room. I like being able to see the spawns so the ceiling of the chamber is stained glass with the control room above. There is a tunnel leading up top the surface behind the tower.

Terraforming

To keep the ruined and spooky image going we planted a dark oak forest around the tower with some spruce and jungle trees mixed in. Adding vines to the trees and mossy cobblestone scattered around as broken walls helped it look even better. To force more spawns into the tower area all the caves nearby were lit up and closed off. Some lighting in a ring around the tower also helps increase the rates.

Zombie Tower Operation

To run the tower I simply go to the control room and AFK for about 5 minutes. This is long enough for the tower to have 15-20 zombies and usually a few spiders, skeletons, and even creepers. Since the build is specifically a mob tower it’s not a big deal if the creepers explode, I keep a chest with the build materials hidden to the side to make quick repairs.

With the holes in the floors along with a few open trap doors they tend to drop down so each floor has several mobs to fight against. With a few walls added to break the levels up it can get pretty interesting, especially on hard mode.

For an extra reward beyond the XP I stock two chests at the top with extra treasure. I use diamonds, emeralds, horse armor, and whatever other rare items I happen to have a few extra of.

This build was way more fun than I expected. I’m already planning out another one with two spawners and a larger ruin so check back soon if you like this build.

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