Frogs and Froglights in Minecraft: Every Colour Explained
Published on 27 October 2026
A froglight in Minecraft comes from one place only: a frog that eats a tiny magma cube. The colour of the block depends on the frog. An orange (temperate) frog gives an ochre froglight, a white (warm) frog gives a pearlescent one and a green (cold) frog gives a verdant one. So if you want all three froglights, you need all three frogs.
Below you’ll find where frogs spawn, what they eat, how breeding and tadpoles work, how to raise a frog of each colour and how to turn that into a small froglight farm. Everything is checked against Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.52 (Bedrock 26.60 is planned for 27 October 2026).
| What | Answer |
|---|---|
| Health | 10 health points (5 hearts) |
| Spawns in | Swamps and mangrove swamps, in groups of two to five |
| Breeding item | Slimeball |
| Babies | Frogspawn on water, which hatches into 2 to 5 tadpoles after 3 to 10 minutes |
| Growing up | 20 minutes as a tadpole; each slimeball takes 10 percent off the time that’s left |
| Hunts | Small slimes and the smallest magma cubes, nothing else |
| Froglights | Ochre (temperate frog), pearlescent (warm frog), verdant (cold frog) |
Where do frogs spawn?
Frogs spawn in swamps and mangrove swamps, in groups of two to five. Look on lily pads and big dripleaves: frogs love to jump onto them, and they usually hop towards higher spots. On land they wander slowly and can jump surprisingly high. In water they swim fast and stay near the surface, and they never drown.
Which frog you meet depends on the biome. Ordinary swamps have temperate (orange) frogs and mangrove swamps have warm (white) frogs. Cold (green) frogs don’t spawn in cold biomes, because there are no swamps there. You only find one in the wild where a swamp borders a cold biome. In every other case you raise a cold frog yourself, as explained below.
What do frogs eat and how do you breed them?
Frogs eat small slimes and the smallest magma cubes. They pull them in with their long tongue, and the mob vanishes without a death animation. They never go after bigger cubes. Slimes and magma cubes can’t hurt frogs either, because those only attack players and iron golems. A small slime that a frog eats always drops one slimeball.
To breed frogs, you feed them a slimeball:
- Hold a slimeball. Frogs within 6 blocks follow you, so you can walk two of them to a pond.
- Feed both frogs a slimeball. They go into love mode, and one of them becomes pregnant.
- Wait for the frogspawn. The pregnant frog looks for water with air above it and lays frogspawn on top.
- Wait for the tadpoles. After 3 to 10 minutes the frogspawn hatches into 2 to 5 tadpoles.
As with most animals, the parents can’t breed again for five minutes. You can’t pick up frogspawn: it drops nothing when you break it, even with Silk Touch, and pistons can’t move it. So let your frogs breed where you want the tadpoles.
Slimeballs come from slimes. In swamps and mangrove swamps they spawn in dim light between Y=51 and Y=69, most often on a full moon and never on a new moon. Wandering traders sometimes sell a slimeball for 4 emeralds, and a slime block crafts back into 9 slimeballs. For the food of every other animal, see what animals eat in Minecraft.
Why frogs have three colours
A frog doesn’t get its colour from its parents. It depends on the biome where the tadpole grows up. That’s unique to frogs: two orange frogs can have white or green offspring.
| Frog | Grows up in, for example | Froglight |
|---|---|---|
| Temperate (orange) | Swamp, plains, forest, taiga, river, beach, meadow, lush caves | Ochre |
| Warm (white) | Mangrove swamp, desert, jungle, savanna, badlands, warm ocean, every Nether biome | Pearlescent |
| Cold (green) | Snowy plains, snowy taiga, frozen river, grove, ice spikes, the deep dark, the End | Verdant |
So the trick is to move tadpoles, not frogs. Use a water bucket on a tadpole to pick it up as a bucket of tadpole. Take it to the right biome and release it in water there. It keeps its age and health, so it simply grows up in its new home. Tadpoles you release from a bucket don’t despawn. Keep them in water, though: on land a tadpole dies within 20 seconds. And keep them away from axolotls, which hunt tadpoles but leave adult frogs alone. More about that in axolotls in Minecraft.
A tadpole takes 20 minutes to grow up. Feed it slimeballs to speed that up: each one takes 10 percent off the time that’s left. Want to keep it a tadpole? Feed it a golden dandelion, crafted from eight gold nuggets around a dandelion. That stops it from growing up until you feed it a second one.
Java and Bedrock mostly agree, with a few biome differences. Cold oceans and stony peaks give cold frogs in Bedrock but temperate frogs in Java. Lukewarm oceans give warm frogs in Bedrock and temperate frogs in Java. And while frogs deal 10 damage to a slime or magma cube in Java, in Bedrock they kill it instantly.
How to get froglights in Minecraft
A frog that eats a tiny magma cube drops a froglight, in the colour that belongs to that frog. In survival that’s the only way to get one. Magma cubes live in the Nether: in basalt deltas, around Nether fortresses and now and then in the Nether wastes. The treasure room of a bastion remnant has a magma cube spawner too.
Frogs only eat the smallest size. When a magma cube dies, it splits into 2 to 4 smaller ones: a large cube becomes medium cubes, and a medium cube becomes small ones. So you break the big ones down, and the frogs eat what’s left.
The easiest way is to bring frogs to the Nether. Put a frog on a lead and walk it into a nether portal. The frog goes through, but the lead breaks and drops on the other side, so put it straight back on. Don’t have a portal yet? See how to make a nether portal. A grown frog keeps its colour in the Nether, so an orange frog still gives ochre froglights there.
Froglights give light level 15, the brightest a block can be. You can place them in three directions, like logs, and they break and drop with any tool or by hand.
Build a small froglight farm
A froglight farm is really a magma cube farm in which frogs do the last kill. Every design has the same four parts:
- Magma cubes. Build in a basalt delta, near a Nether fortress or around the spawner in a bastion treasure room.
- A size filter. Medium and large cubes must be split first, while the small ones drop through to the frogs. The Minecraft Wiki farm tutorial uses a layer of single candles with powder snow above it: small cubes fall past, the bigger ones stay on top and die in the powder snow, which hurts fire mobs much faster than other mobs.
- Frogs at the bottom. One frog of each colour if you want all three froglights.
- Collection. Put hoppers under the frogs, or a minecart with a hopper below the floor, so every froglight ends up in a chest.
Magma cubes need a free space a little over two blocks wide and high to spawn. No magma cube of any size can spawn in a space only two blocks high, so low ceilings around your farm keep the spawns where you want them.
No farm yet? Do it by hand. Bring two or three frogs into a basalt delta, kill the large magma cubes yourself and let the frogs snap up the small ones. Wear armour: unlike small slimes, small magma cubes can still hurt you.
Building a froglight farm with friends? On your own server the world keeps running when you log off, so the farm and the frogs are there for everyone. See the Minecraft Java server plans.
