How to tame a wolf in Minecraft

To tame a wolf in Minecraft, feed it bones until it gets a red collar. Each bone has a one in three chance of working, so you need three on average, but it’s worth bringing a few extra.

Below you’ll find where wolves live, what your new dog eats, how to protect it with wolf armor and which nine variants there are. Everything is checked against Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.52.

Where do you find wolves?

Wolves roam in packs through forests, taigas, groves on mountain slopes, savanna plateaus, wooded badlands and sparse jungles. Each of those biomes has its own variant of wolf, listed in the table further down. In the badlands packs can be up to eight strong, while the grove wolf roams alone.

A wild wolf is neutral: it leaves you alone until you hit it. Do that and the whole pack nearby comes after you, and an angry wolf (red eyes, growling) can’t be tamed. Wild wolves hunt sheep, rabbits, foxes, baby turtles and skeletons themselves.

How many bones do you need?

1. Collect bones. Skeletons drop 0 to 2 each.
2. Find a calm wolf. Walk up to it, but don’t hit it.
3. Feed it bones. Hold a bone and use it on the wolf (right-click on PC). Each bone has a one in three chance.
4. Red collar? You’ve done it. In Java your new dog sits down straight away. Use it again to make it stand up and follow you.

There’s no limit to how many wolves you can tame. A tamed wolf has 40 health points, five times as many as a wild one, and the higher its tail, the healthier it is. It teleports to you once you’re more than 12 blocks away, unless it’s sitting. Dye changes the colour of its collar.

What does your dog eat?

A tamed wolf eats meat, raw or cooked. It can even eat rotten flesh and raw chicken without getting sick, which finally makes that zombie loot useful. It eats fish and rabbit stew as well, but only in Java do those breed wolves.

If your dog whines, it’s low on health and ready for a snack. Feed meat to a wolf at full health and it goes into love mode, which is how you breed them.

How to make wolf armor

With wolf armor your dog survives almost anything. It soaks up all damage until it breaks, apart from things like drowning, freezing, suffocation, magic and the void.

1. Find armadillos. They live in savannas and badlands. Don’t sprint at them or they’ll roll up. There’s more about them in the sniffer and the armadillo.
2. Collect six armadillo scutes. An armadillo drops one every 5 to 10 minutes on its own. A brush is quicker: every brushing gives you a scute.
3. Craft the armor. Put the six scutes on a crafting table: one in the top left, a full middle row and one each in the bottom left and bottom right.
4. Put it on your dog. Use the armor on your tamed, adult wolf.

Wolf armor absorbs 64 points of damage. Use a scute on your dog to repair 8 points, or fix it on an anvil. Shears take it off again, and dye gives it a colour. Puppies can’t wear armor yet.

How to breed wolves, and every wolf variant

Give two tamed wolves at full health a piece of meat each while they’re both standing. A puppy appears, and if the parents are yours, so is the puppy. It grows up in twenty minutes and has a 50% chance of taking after either parent’s coat.

Tame one of each in Java and you earn the advancement The Whole Pack. Separate from its coat, every wolf also has one of seven voices, from cute to grumpy.

Java vs Bedrock: what’s different?

• In Java you can also breed wolves with fish and rabbit stew. In Bedrock those only heal, and breeding takes meat.
• After breeding, parents wait five minutes in Java and one minute in Bedrock.
• In Bedrock 10% of wild wolves spawn as puppies, and you can heal a wild wolf with meat too.
• A sitting wolf in Java stands up when it touches water or gets hurt.

Wolves on a server with friends

A standing tamed wolf attacks whatever you attack, and anyone who hurts you. With PvP switched on, that includes the friend who punches you as a joke. Players on the same team and animals with the same owner are left alone. Going through a portal to the Nether? Your wolf stays behind, because wolves can’t teleport between dimensions.

Leave your dogs sitting at home when you go mining or fighting. Wondering what the rest of your farm eats? See what animals eat in Minecraft. A cat keeps creepers away, so read how to tame a cat too. And foxes are terrified of wolves, as you’ll see in what foxes eat in Minecraft.