How do you find and farm Minecraft slimes? This rare Minecraft mob can be a little hard to find, but once you know how, you can farm hundreds of slimeballs – destroying these green gelatinous cubes might be harder than you think though, once you get up close to their cute faces (geometry pun).
Possibly one of the cooler Minecraft mobs, the slime comes in a variety of sizes, and while they’re technically hostile, they become passive in their smallest form and make the cutest of Minecraft housemates. The best place to find them, as we discuss in more detail below, is underground, so you might come across this lime-green companion when hunting for Minecraft diamonds, making your mining trips even more fruitful. So, if you aren’t sure what to do with a Minecraft slime when you find them, or wish to know how to farm them, read on for all the details.
How to get slimes in Minecraft
Minecraft slime are naturally found deep underground, in specific slime chunks. They also spawn in swamps – but only after dark.
There is no trick to finding slime chunks as such, but you can use an online slime chunk finder. If you’d rather go about it the old fashioned way though, go digging below y-level 30 and keep your sound high or subtitles turned on. Slime make a distinctive squelching noise when they bounce, so you’ll know when one is near.
If and when you find a slime underground, it must have spawned in a slime chunk, so press F3 + G (on Java edition) to bring up your chunk borders, and find which one they’re generating in. You’ll need to know to build a Slime farm like the one in the tutorial below.
How to make a Minecraft slime farm
The first step is to find a slime chunk, but if you’re struggling with our instructions above, we’ve included a handy video below of how to do this, along with a top-notch Minecraft slime farm design.
How the Minecraft slime farm works is that it uses lit up layers to trap Minecraft slimes as they spawn, and uses Iron Golems at the edge of the farm to lure any slime that’s up to 15 blocks away to drop onto a magma floor until they eventually explode. This will shower slimeballs for you to collect in minecarts zipping around underneath, placing collected slimeballs into chests via hoppers.
It makes clever use of lighting to make sure other hostile mobs such as skeletons and creepers don’t spawn with your slime, and can be scaled either way depending on your slime needs.
Minecraft slime behavior
Minecraft slime might look cute enough, but they can pose a small danger. The largest slimes deal some damage when they hit you, but can be attacked to reduce their size as they break into more smaller slime cubes. Killing the tiniest slime, which don’t hurt you, ‘rewards’ you (“reward” doesn’t feel like the right word for killing something so cute and innocent) with drops and experience orbs.
These bouncy boxes can swim in water and even climb ladders and scaffolding in their hunt for players, creepily continuing their chase even when you’re not close by. In fact, they search for enemies at a 16-block distance, and if they don’t find any, they continue to rotate and look for players to attack. Failing that, they will attack either snow or iron golems – this is useful to know when it comes to building your Minecraft slime farm.
Slime drops and uses
These persistent little blocks drop a maximum of five slimeballs if killed with the Looting enchantment, and up to two without. These slimeballs are actually surprisingly useful, so there are many reasons to build a slime farm.
Lead
To craft a lead in Minecraft, you need:
- Four string
- One slimeball
Probably our most used slimeball recipe, leads can be attached to mobs to lead them around safely and easily, which is ideal for creating mob farms and if you want to find a horse and you haven’t found a saddle yet. More importantly, it’s the best way to grab hold of a rare skeleton horse if you ever see one, so it’s always worth having a spare lead on you.
Magma Cream
To craft Magma cream in Minecraft, you need:
- One Blaze Powder
- One slimeball
Magma cream is most often used as an ingredient in Minecraft potions, as it is required to make one of the best potions in the game: Fire Resistance. The Magma Slime drop is also needed to craft magma blocks, which make a great – if dangerous – decorative light block.
Slime Block
You can craft a Minecraft slime block from nine slimeballs. Other than perhaps being an interesting building block, the slime block is most useful to Redstoners, who can use the item in a multitude of ways, not least to make flying machines and automated farms.
Sticky Piston
To craft a Minecraft Sticky Piston, combine:
- One piston
- One slimeball
Speaking of Redstone, the last crafting recipe involving the slimeball is for sticky pistons – they work the same as pistons, but grab onto items they touch, meaning they can move entities around.
That’s how to build a Minecraft slime farm and take control of these hostile blocks. If you’re looking for a swamp biome to set up camp, be sure to check out these Minecraft seeds, along with other Minecraft farm ideas to gather resources.