Experience points are perhaps the most underrated resource in Minecraft as it’s pretty much necessary to enchant your gear, fix tools, or combine books and items on an anvil if you want to have a good time. Some XP methods are quick and passive, while others need a bigger setup but pay off much faster. This guide walks through the best ways to get XP and where each one fits.
How Experience Works in Minecraft
XP appears as glowing green orbs that you pick up by walking near them. Each orb carries a certain number of XP points, and those points fill the green bar above your hotbar. When the bar fills up, you gain a level and the XP required to get to the next level increases. For example, getting to level 1 takes just 7 XP points, while getting all the way up to level 30 takes 1395 XP points in total.
XP orbs cannot be picked up by hoppers or go into chests – they only count when a player walks through them. That matters for farm designs, since you always need to be physically present to collect the XP even if the killing or smelting happens automatically.
When you die, you drop a part of your XP orbs at your death location. Those orbs despawn after 5 minutes if the chunk stays loaded, however the amount that will drop to the ground upon death is limited to one-seventh of your XP pool or a maximum of 100 points. That is why high-level players usually spend levels before risky fights instead of carrying everything around at once.
Method 1: Mob Farms
Killing hostile mobs is the fastest XP source in the game and the method most serious farms are built around. Each mob you kill drops XP orbs – the amount varies by mob type, but most standard hostiles like zombies and skeletons tend to give 5 XP, while some like blazes give 10. The key here is volume: killing many mobs quickly turns that small per-kill amount into a very fast XP stream.
The two main approaches are spawner-based farms and dark room farms. Spawner farms are built around a dungeon spawner – you clear the area around it, add water channels to funnel mobs into a drop shaft or kill corridor, and stand at the end to finish them off. Dark room farms work without a spawner by creating large dark chambers where mobs can spawn naturally – these take more building but can produce higher output.
Both designs follow the same basic principle: mobs fall or walk into a spot where you can kill them in one or two hits, keeping the XP flowing as fast as possible. A well-built spawner farm can give you level 30 in a few minutes. The trade-off comes in the difficulty of obtaining a spawner and putting some effort into building the whole thing.
Key Things to Get Right with Mob Fams
- Keep the kill area dark: any stray light source stops mobs from spawning in dark room farms.
- Stay between 24 and 128 blocks from the spawn area: get any closer than 24 and mobs will not spawn, go any farther than 128 and they despawn before reaching you.
- Use water channels or trapdoor tricks to funnel mobs rather than letting them wander: this keeps the kill rate consistent.
- A campfire under a fall-damage pit deals damage without killing, leaving mobs at low health so a single hit finishes them off and results in XP drop.
Method 2: Furnace Smelting
Every item you smelt in a furnace stores a small amount of XP, and that XP releases all at once when you take the smelted output out of the furnace by hand. The key word is "by hand" – if a hopper auto-pulls the output, the XP stays locked inside the furnace until a player manually takes something from it or breaks the furnace.
Raw metal ores and cooked food give the most noticeable XP returns. Smelting a large quantity of raw iron, gold, or ancient debris gives a solid XP payout when you collect the output. Simpler items like cobblestone, sand, or wood still give small amounts per item, but you need to smelt enormous quantities to make those worthwhile as a primary XP source.
The cleanest use of furnace XP is letting it run passively while you do other things. Set up a bank of furnaces with hoppers feeding ore in and collect the output in a batch at the end of a session. That payout, combined with XP from other activities, keeps your levels topped up without dedicating specific time to grinding.
A Few Important Notes on Smelting
- XP is stored per furnace, not per item. All the stored XP releases when you take even one item out manually.
- Blast Furnaces and Smokers work the same way – they smelt twice as fast but give the same XP per item.
- Do not burn wooden tools or books as furnace fuel if you want the XP – the XP comes from the smelted output, not the fuel itself.
Method 3: Fishing
Every successful catch while fishing gives 1 to 6 XP regardless of what you reel in. Fish, treasure, and junk all award the same XP range per catch, so the goal is just catching things as fast as possible.
Fishing is one of the safest and most passive XP methods – you can stand in one spot and repeat the cast-and-reel loop indefinitely. It is slow compared to mob farms but requires almost no setup: just a fishing rod and water. The Lure enchantment reduces the time between bites, which meaningfully improves how fast XP accumulates. A Mending enchantment on the rod lets the XP you earn repair the rod itself, so the rod effectively never wears out.
AFK (away from keyboard) fishing setups using observers or other redstone triggers can automate the cast-and-reel cycle. These designs change between versions, so if you want to build one, make sure the design you follow is confirmed for your specific version.
Method 4: Animal Breeding
Breeding two passive animals gives 1 to 7 XP per successful breeding pair. The exact amount varies randomly within that range. You trigger breeding by feeding each animal its specific food item – wheat for cows and sheep, carrots or beetroot for pigs, seeds for chickens, and so on.
Breeding is a very slow XP source on its own. You need to feed both animals each time, wait out the 5-minute breeding cooldown per pair, and the per-event XP is low. It is worth doing if you are already running an animal farm for food, leather, or wool – the XP is a free bonus on top of those resources.
That being said, breeding in Minecraft is generally considered to be a very inefficient way of gaining XP.
Method 5: Villager Trading
Trading with villagers gives a small amount of XP each time a trade completes, so it is useful as a bonus but not as a primary farming method. If you are already running a trading hall, the XP adds up in the background while you buy gear, books, and resources. On its own, though, it is too slow and too expensive to compete with a real XP farm.
Bottles o' Enchanting are the one villager-related XP source worth calling out separately, because they come from a Master Cleric and work very differently from standard trade XP.
Method 6: Bottles o' Enchanting
A Bottle o' Enchanting is a throwable item that releases 3 to 11 XP when it breaks. In vanilla Minecraft, the renewable source is a Master Cleric villager trade, and bottles can also appear in loot structures such as ancient cities, pillager outposts, and shipwreck treasure chests.
They are best used as a quick top-up when you are close to a target level or want portable XP for enchanting, anvils, or Mending. They are useful, but they are not an efficient main farming method because the XP per bottle is low compared to any other farm method.
Best XP Methods by Game Stage
Early Game: Furnace XP and Simple Mob Spawners
In the early game, most of your XP usually comes from whatever you are already doing. Furnace smelting is the easiest passive option because it stores XP while you smelt ore or cook food, then pays out when you collect the output by hand.
If you find a dungeon spawner, that becomes your first real XP farm because it gives steady mob drops and levels without needing rare materials.
Mid Game: Spawner Farms and Steady Furnace Setups
Once you have better gear and more resources, mob farms become the most reliable way to gain XP quickly. A good spawner farm can get you back to enchanting levels in just a few minutes, while a bank of furnaces can give you passive XP in the background. Fishing and animal breeding can still help, but at this point their contributions will be very negligible.
Late Game – Enderman and Guardian Farms
Late-game XP farming is where the biggest gains happen. Enderman farms are popular because they are relatively cheap for their output once you reach the End, and they can get you to level 30 in minutes.
Guardian farms are even stronger if you want raw speed – a fully optimized guardian farm is one of the fastest XP farms in the game and can outperform Enderman farms, but it is also much harder to build.
Best Overall Minecraft XP Method
For most players, the best overall XP method is an Enderman farm. It is much more realistic to build than a top-tier Guardian farm, it gives extremely fast levels, and it also drops ender pearls at the same time.
If you only care about absolute maximum XP output and do not mind the build complexity, a Guardian farm can be even better. For passive everyday use, furnace XP is still the best backup method to run alongside everything else.
Mods for Better XP Management
XP Tome
XP Tome adds a single craftable item called the XP Tome, which lets you store and retrieve XP. Sneak and right-click to transfer XP from your bar into the tome, and right-click to take it back out. By default it holds up to 1395 XP, which is the equivalent of 30 levels.
The retrieval percentage config option is worth knowing about – it controls how much XP you get back when you withdraw. It is set to 1.0 by default (full return), but it can be lowered to introduce a loss on retrieval as a cost for using the tome. There is also an option to release XP in orb form rather than directly to the player, which makes it compatible with Mending on tools and armor since orbs are what trigger Mending repairs.
Bottle Your XP
Bottle Your XP lets you create Bottles o’ Enchanting directly from your own gathered XP. Hold an empty glass bottle, crouch and right-click, and the bottle fills with XP drawn from your bar. By default the process costs 10 raw XP points per bottle and deals half a heart of damage to the player – the mod describes the conversion as not entirely painless. Both the XP cost and the damage amount are configurable, though.
Both the damage on creation and the raw XP consumed per bottle can be adjusted in the config file. The damage can be set to zero if you want a painless conversion, and the XP cost can be tuned up or down depending on how valuable you want each bottle to feel.
How to Install Minecraft Mods
You can install the above mods automatically using the CurseForge app or manually by placing the mod files within your game’s mods folder. Both methods allow you to easily add custom features and enhancements into your vanilla Minecraft experience.If you want to learn more, you can read our detailed guide on how to install Minecraft mods.
Common Issues and Quick Fixes
Mob farm is not producing anything
The two most common causes are light and distance. Any light source reaching the spawn area stops mobs from spawning. Check every block in the chamber, including slabs and partial blocks that can have different light levels than you expect.
In terms of distance, mobs only spawn between 24 and 128 blocks from the player. If you stand too close the spawning stops, while standing too far away will make them despawn before reaching the kill area.
My Furnace XP keeps disappearing
It may seem this way at first, but it is actually locked inside the furnace waiting for you to collect it manually. If you used hoppers to auto-collect your smelted output, then your XP is “trapped” in the furnace.
To solve this, go back and take at least one item from each furnace by hand to release it, or break the furnaces to collect the stored XP along with them.
XP gained from fishing is too little
Unenchanted fishing is genuinely slow. The main upgrades that help are Lure for faster bites and Luck of the Sea for better loot. However, neither directly change the XP per catch – they just increase how often you catch something. If speed matters, Lure III cuts the average wait between catches significantly.
Game doesn’t load or crashes after installing mods
Double-check that each file matches your exact Minecraft version, mod loader, and any required dependencies listed on the mod page are installed in your mods folder.