Copper golem workers

Your first worker in five steps

1. Get a copper golem: place a copper block and put a carved pumpkin on top. The copper chest that appears under it becomes the worker’s home chest, so put a tool, torches, spare tools and some cobblestone in it first.
2. Craft the helmet for the job: a leather helmet, a copper ingot (a copper block for the Quarry) and one job item. Lantern for the Tunneler and Quarry, hay bale for the Farmer, any log for the Lumberjack. The recipes are in your recipe book.
3. Right-click the golem with the helmet, or drop the helmet into the chest and close it. It becomes your worker, is waxed so it never oxidises, equips a tool from the chest and takes the rest of the kit.
4. Right-click it with the tool for the job: a pickaxe or shovel for miners, a hoe for the farmer, an axe for the lumberjack. It starts at once.
5. Right-click it with an empty hand to open its backpack. Stock torches, spare tools, a copper chest and a stack of cobblestone.

Tunneler

Digs a 3x3 tunnel in the direction it was hired and keeps going until something stops it. With torches in its backpack it lights the tunnel every nine blocks.

Quarry

Clears a 9x9 pit straight down to bedrock, one layer at a time, and leaves a spiral staircase along the wall so you can walk in and out. Torches go on the pit wall every nine layers.

Farmer

Stands in your field and harvests wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot, nether wart, melons and pumpkins within ten blocks, replanting as it goes. It waits for crops to regrow, so leave it where it works.

Lumberjack

Works a 25x25 patch around the spot where you hired it: it walks to the nearest natural tree in that patch, fells it log by log at axe speed, replants the sapling and clears the leaves, then waits for the patch to regrow. It never roams beyond the patch. Logs, saplings, sticks and apples land in its backpack. Nether stems count as trees.

The backpack

Every worker carries 27 slots that only its owner can open. Spare tools in the bag are used when one breaks. A copper chest in the bag is placed and filled when the worker runs out of room, and it keeps going. Cobblestone, dirt, stone or planks let miners seal water and lava and bridge gaps instead of stopping.

Shovels and buckets

A tunneler or quarry works with a pickaxe, a shovel, or both: with both in its kit it swaps to the right one for every block, so stone goes with the pickaxe and dirt, sand, gravel and clay with the shovel at full speed. Empty buckets in the bag turn a miner into a liquid harvester: when it meets a water or lava source it fills a bucket first and only patches with blocks when it has no bucket left. Filled buckets take one slot each and unload into chests like any other loot.

The home chest

The copper chest a golem was built on is its home chest, renamed after you. Open it and you are looking at the worker’s backpack itself, live, from any distance: take anything out, and send in what a worker uses, meaning tools, torches, cobblestone and the like, copper chests, buckets and saplings. Other items only go in at the golem, so the chest is a supply line, not a teleporter. Close it and a worker that had stopped for a broken tool or missing blocks gets back to work on its own. Nobody else can open it. If the golem has wandered off its chest, the nearest copper chest within eight blocks of where you hire it is used instead, and /workers home <number> assigns one by hand while you stand next to a chest. Right-click the chest while holding a helmet and the worker comes home.

Terrain only

Workers break natural terrain and ores. They stop at anything a player placed, at chests and other block entities, and at blocks their tool cannot break, and their name tag says why. Break through by hand, then open and close the backpack to send them on. Every block they break is logged under your name.

Real tools, real durability

Workers use real tools with real enchantments, and mine at half the speed you would with the same tool, never faster than five blocks a second. Mending works, but slower than in your own hand: the tax is paid in XP the worker would have collected, and the surplus comes back to you as bottles of enchanting.

Commands and limits

/workers lists every worker you own with its job, coordinates and a bearing. /workers dismiss <number> retires a lost worker from anywhere and frees the slot; its backpack drops where it stood. You can own six workers: up to three tunnelers, two quarries, two farmers and two lumberjacks. A worker that is killed drops everything it carried.

Questions about workers

In game, /guide and /workers show the short version.