The money ladder
- Stage 1: kelp and simple crop farms. No investment, fully passive, funds your first tools.
- Stage 2: iron and general mob farms. Higher throughput, still no purchase required, gives you building materials as well as income.
- Stage 3: bought spawners. The real jump. Spawner rooms out-earn everything else per hour once you can afford the first few.
- Stage 4: reinvest. Every payout buys another spawner until the farm pays for itself several times a day.
- Stage 5: trade and flip. Market knowledge beats grinding at the top end; buy underpriced stock and resell.
What actually pays
- Spawner rooms: the highest income per hour, and the most expensive thing to lose in a raid.
- Kelp: the safest passive income, ideal while you're offline-vulnerable.
- Iron farms: steady income plus the material you need for every redstone build.
- General mob farms: drops plus XP, useful when you're gearing rather than saving.
The mistake that resets people
Almost every player who loses everything lost it the same way: farm, storage and stash in one place, with a visible entrance. Split them. Farm in one location, valuables in a separate hidden stash, regear kit in a third.
Assume you will be found eventually. The question is only how much a raider gets when it happens.
Build it from a schematic
Every farm in the library is a working build exported from DonutSMP, so you get a tested layout and a material list instead of guessing from a five-year-old YouTube tutorial that no longer works on 1.21.