What items can be farmed fully automatically?

minecraft-java-edition

Cacti have always been farmable completely automatically. With pistons in 1.7, sugar cane can now be farmed in a fully automatic fashion as well. Mobs and animals can be farmed as well in giant mob grinders. To my knowledge these are the only items that can be farmed in a fully automatic fashion in vanilla Minecraft.

Cobblestone can be farmed fully automatically using mods, or in a semi-automatic fashion using TNT. Wheat can be farmed semi-automatically on a massive scale, but unfortunately requires replanting and tilling.

What I'd like to know is if there are any contraptions people have contrived to harvest any other item in a fully automatic way without using any mods.

Solution 1:

Aside from the things you mentioned:

Fully Automatic (no need for player's presence):

As long as you keep the chunk loaded, you can go on an adventure while your farm is producing

Anything that uses a smelter (cooked food, experience generators, etc.)
Honey Bottles, Honeycomb

Fully Automatic, as long as player is within 128 blocks of farm

Melons & Pumpkins can be farmed using BUDs.
Mushrooms are easily farmed, since they spread by themselves.
Eggs can be farmed
Wheat can be fully automatic using a farmer villager
Bread with farmer villagers
Cactus
Coal
Iron ingots
Gold nuggets
Steak, Raw Beef, Leather (if you are lucky enough to find a mushroom island)
Cobblestone with Wither or Ghast
Cooked Chicken, Raw Chicken, Feathers
Redstone, Gunpowder, Glowstone Dust, Sugar, Wooden Sticks with a witch farm
Slime Balls
Sand & Gravel Duplicators and Flint (actually a bug, but still possible)
Carrots and Raw Potatoes with farmer villagers
String, Spider Eyes
Bones, arrows, bows
Rotten flesh
Seeds and any kind of 1 block flower
Ender pearls
Any kind of potion
Prismarine Shard
Magma cream
Ghast tears
Kelp
Bamboo
Sugar Cane
Wool (dispenser equipped with shears)
Records

AFK farms:

You may need to jam the click button, and you wont be able to play while harvesting

Snow (at some time pre 1.15, this was fully automatic. No longer.)
Any experience farm
Wooden logs (any type)
Tree saplings (any type)
Fish, Name tags, Nautilus shells, saddles, enchatment books
Blaze Rods
Any kind of 2 block tall flower
Animal breeding farm
Dragons Breath
Cocoa beans
Nether Wart
Ice with a BUD to detect the freezing water (not sure if withers can destroy ice)
Stone (needs silktouch pickaxe)
Any Type of Wooden Planks just craft the output of the log farm
Glass and Panes (smelt and craft the output of the sand duplicator)
Flint and Steel (craft the outputs of the Iron farm and the gravel duplicator)
Mushroom Blocks
Grass and Mycelium (although it is not technically infinite, it is practically infinite)
Emeralds trading the output of another farm if you get a perfect villager
Full diamond toolkit and armor trading emeralds with a blacksmith villager
Mob heads except wither skeleton (with a charged creeper farm)

Solution 2:

The lists above are excellent!

But, this question was asked before Minecraft 1.8 so a few things have changed.

Now you can use Villager Farmers to automatically harvest and replant Carrots, and Potatoes, and Wheat. You can also automatically collect the Bread that Villager Farmers make with the wheat.

Another source of automated carrots and potatoes are from zombie mob grinders.

You can fully automate Pumpkins and Sugar Cane, but not melons. Any automation will break them into Melon Slices. So Melon Slices can be fully automated.

Villagers can also be farmed. Because you can have them automatically shipped away from the village and stored somewhere else so that more can breed. I manually do this right now but am building an automated system.

I've built a minecraft world that fully automates most almost everything I can think of. I made a video tour of this world that you see at:

Solution 3:

After a little more than a hour looking up things and figuring out stuff, I think I have a list of all items you can make farms for. (Only the automatic farms). Here is the list and hope this helps.

Planted Crops

Cacti - Cacti farm.
Sugar Cane - Sugar Cane farm.
Mushrooms - Mushroom farm.

Mob Grinders

Iron - Iron golem farm.
Roses - Iron Golem farm.
Eggs - Chicken farm.
Bones - Skeleton farm.
String - Spider farm.
Rotten Flesh - Zombie farm.
Blaze Rod - Blaze farm.
Ghast Tears - Ghast farm.
Sticks - Witch farm.
Glass Bottles - Witch farm.
Glowstone Dust - Witch farm.
Redstone Dust - Witch farm.
Sugar - Witch farm.
Assorted Potions - Witch farm.
Gunpowder - Creeper/Witch farm.
Ender Pearl - Enderman farm.
Magma Cream - Magma Cube farm.
Gold Nugget - Zombie Pigman farm.
Gold Sword - Zombie Pigman farm.
Slime Ball - Slime farm.

Solution 4:

I've built a 11x11 tower with a hopper floor, which feeds into a trap chest. The trap chest activates pumpkin and sugar cane farms. Chickens on the hopper level drop eggs, above that is a squid farm creating ink sacs, above that is a cactus farm, and above that is a zombie/creeper/skeleton farm that spawns them and pushes them out, they drop all the way past the farms onto the hopper floor and die. It's almost fully automatic, if not for the trap chest mechanism. Eggs, reeds, pumpkin, ink, cactus, potatoes, bones, arrows, rotten flesh and sulphur are constantly filling my chests.