Our next project is to get an ice farm up and running. Savannah has been wanting to build a tower from ice, and what we have in mind will be packed ice with quite a bit of blue ice. Plus, now that we have made it to the Nether we will be needing Ice in large quantities to build out the roads from the hub. Since we are around the Taiga village quite a bit, we decided to build it on top of a hill near the village.

Design Ideas

The only ice farm we had built on a previous world used the basic water pool with diagonal blocks across the top. Simple and easy to put up but it takes a little longer to harvest.

There are a few fully automatic designs but most still require manual harvesting. We found this design from Avomance on YouTube and decided to modify it slightly. With the easy harvesting, auto collection, and resetting the water it is quick to use. This works on Java or Bedrock (Win 10, Console, PE).

First Design

We built the first version and it worked great. We made a quick stone hideout for night time and started harvesting.

After making our first stack of blue ice I figured out that we needed to expand. So, a few modifications to the design and now it has a mirrored second side. I added the cabin for us to work in while waiting for the water to freeze and wired the reset pistons back to the buttons inside.

Basement

The control room seemed crowded, and I wanted to keep the small mountain cabin look so we dug out a basement to put our beds in. Just a few simple decorations and a furnace for cooking.

Harvesting

Harvesting the ice is simple, we keep the silk touch pick on the wall so any of us can hop on and harvest the ice easily. Here’s a quick video tour of the farm that shows harvesting the ice and resetting the water.

Next Up

Next, we will get the Nether Portal finished and start on our hub. I want to relocate the Nether side portal into a tunnel and we should have enough ice then to start building out the roads.