What do animals eat in Minecraft? Food, breeding and taming

Cows, sheep, goats and mooshrooms eat wheat, pigs eat carrots, potatoes or beetroots, and chickens eat seeds. Give two adults of the same species one piece of their food each and they’ll have a baby.

The table below lists the food for every animal you can breed or tame, checked against Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.52. Where Bedrock works differently, we say so.

What does each animal eat?

Mules come from breeding a horse with a donkey and can’t have foals of their own. Happy ghasts don’t breed either: a ghastling grows out of a dried ghast left in water, and snowballs help it grow faster.

How do you breed animals in Minecraft?

1. Find two adults of the same species. They can be related, even a parent and its own baby.
2. Hold their food. Animals follow you while you hold it, which is the easiest way to walk them into a pen.
3. Feed each one a single item. Hearts appear and they walk to each other, from up to eight blocks away.
4. Wait a few seconds. A baby pops up between them and you get a little experience.

The parents then need five minutes before they can breed again. Babies grow up in twenty minutes, and feeding them their food speeds that up. Chickens hatch a chick when bred, but they also lay an egg every five to ten minutes without any feeding. Turtles, frogs and sniffers lay eggs instead: turtle eggs on the beach where they hatched, frogspawn on water and a sniffer egg that you place yourself.

Want a lamb or piglet that stays small forever? Since Java 26.1 and Bedrock 26.10 you can craft a golden dandelion from eight gold nuggets around a dandelion. Use it on a baby and it stops growing. A second one starts it again. It doesn’t work on villagers; for those, see how to breed villagers in Minecraft.

Which animals can you tame?

• Pets that follow you: the wolf (bones), the cat (raw cod or raw salmon) and the parrot (seeds). Each bone or fish has a one in three chance to tame a wolf or cat; each seed has a one in ten chance with a parrot, so bring spares.
• Mounts: horses, donkeys, mules and llamas are tamed by riding them until they stop throwing you off. Feeding them makes it quicker. A zombie horse is tamed the same way, and a nautilus underwater with pufferfish.
• Trust: foxes and ocelots never become pets, but they can trust you. An ocelot may start to trust you when you feed it raw cod or raw salmon, a fox only when you bred it yourself.
• Rideable without taming: a pig with a saddle and a carrot on a stick, a strider with a saddle and a warped fungus on a stick, a camel with a saddle and a happy ghast with a harness.

How do you lead animals back to your base?

Hold their food and walk back slowly: most animals tag along. For longer trips, use a lead, which you can also tie to a fence. Rabbits run away unless you’re holding their food. Llamas travel in caravans, so leading one brings up to nine others along. And pandas love cake, although it won’t get them breeding. If you need one anyway, here’s how to make a cake in Minecraft.

What’s different in Bedrock?

• Wolves only breed with meat in Bedrock. Fish and rabbit stew just heal them.
• Pandas in Java breed with a single bamboo plant nearby. Bedrock wants eight bamboo plants within five blocks.
• Breed two ocelots in Bedrock and the kitten trusts you straight away.

Breeding on a server: keep it tidy

On a server with friends, everyone breeds animals and the numbers climb fast. Every animal is an entity the server keeps updating, so a field with hundreds of cows shows up in performance. Agree on a limit per pen. In Java, animals packed together with more than 24 others also start taking damage, thanks to the max_entity_cramming game rule. To see how much memory your server can handle, read how much RAM a Minecraft server needs.