Mob XP Calculator - Drops and Farm Rates

How Much XP Mobs Drop

Most hostile mobs drop 5 experience orbs when killed by a player. Blazes, guardians, elder guardians, evokers, and breezes drop 10, while piglin brutes and ravagers give 20. Slimes and magma cubes scale with size (1, 2, or 4). The Ender Dragon is the jackpot at 12,000 XP on its first defeat. Looting never affects XP; only equipment a mob is carrying adds 1 to 3 bonus orbs per item.

Every mob has a fixed XP reward baked into the game. The common overworld threats (zombie, skeleton, creeper, spider, enderman, witch, drowned, husk, stray, pillager, vindicator, phantom, shulker) all give 5 XP. The high earners are the blaze, guardian, elder guardian, evoker, and breeze at 10 XP, and the piglin brute and ravager top the list at 20 XP each. The endermite and vex are unusually low at 3, and the iron golem drops none at all. Slimes and magma cubes are special: their XP scales with size, so a huge one gives 4 while the small splits give 1 each, which is why the table above lists them by size.

Two things people get wrong: Looting does not increase XP (it only boosts item drops), and a mob that spawned wearing armor or holding a weapon drops 1 to 3 extra orbs per equipped piece on top of its base reward. Mobs also only drop their full XP when a player lands the killing blow within a few seconds; fall damage, lava, and natural despawns give little or nothing, which matters for farm design.

This page is about mob drops and farm throughput. If you want to convert between raw XP points and levels or plan enchanting and anvil costs, use the XP Calculator instead.

The Level Cost Formula

XP does not buy levels at a flat rate. The cost to go from level L to level L+1 follows three bands taken straight from the game code: 2L + 7 below level 15, 5L - 38 from 15 to 29, and 9L - 158 from level 30 up. That means level 0 to 1 is only 7 XP, level 14 to 15 is 35, the band switches so level 15 to 16 is 37, and by level 30 to 31 each level already costs 112 and keeps climbing by 9 every level after.

Adding those costs up gives the cumulative totals that matter for farming: level 15 is 315 total XP, level 16 is 352, level 30 is 1,395, and level 50 is 5,345. The jump from 30 to 50 alone is 3,950 XP, nearly triple the cost of reaching 30 from scratch, which is why most players farm to 30, spend it enchanting, and repeat rather than banking high levels.

Turning a Farm Into Levels Per Hour

The farm calculator multiplies your kills per hour by the mob's XP reward to get XP per hour, then walks the level formula upward from your starting level to count how many whole levels that buys. Because each level costs more than the last, the same XP per hour yields fewer levels the higher you start. As a baseline, 1,000 zombies per hour at 5 XP each is 5,000 XP per hour, which takes you from level 0 to level 48 (with 212 XP into level 49). Start that same hour at level 30 and you gain far fewer levels because every level past 30 costs 112 or more.

For comparison, the tool reads real furnace smelting XP from the recipe data: an iron ingot is worth 0.7 XP, a gold ingot 1, and cooked food 0.35, all collected when you take the item out of the furnace, not while it cooks. A thrown bottle o' enchanting releases 3 to 11 XP (about 7 on average). Stacked against a mob farm those trickle in slowly: the same 5,000 XP per hour would need about 7,143 iron smelts or roughly 714 bottles, which is why a dedicated mob farm is the fastest route to enchant-ready levels.

In practice, blaze farms (10 XP each) and guardian farms (10 XP each) hit the highest sustained rates, while a basic mob spawner or a dark mob-grinder of 5 XP mobs is the easy early-game option. Enderman platforms in the End reach level 30 fastest of all when you can attack safely, since spawn rates there are very high.