What do foxes eat in Minecraft? Breeding and trust

Foxes in Minecraft will eat almost any food they can get their paws on. They pick food up off the ground, raid sweet berry bushes and hunt chickens, rabbits and fish. To breed them, though, you need sweet berries or glow berries, and a kit you breed yourself will trust you for life.

Foxes arrived in 2019 with Village & Pillage (Java 1.14). Our news post from back then gave them a single line: they love chickens and they’re adorable. Both still true. Here’s the rest, checked against Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.50.

What do foxes eat in Minecraft?

A fox will pick up any item you could, but food always wins: it drops whatever it’s carrying to grab a snack. About half a minute later the food is gone, effects included. Chorus fruit makes it teleport, and an enchanted golden apple gives it regeneration, among other things. The one food a fox won’t eat is cake. It just carries it around. As a company named after cake, we find that hard to understand.

What do foxes hunt?

Foxes hunt chickens, rabbits, cod, salmon, tropical fish and baby turtles on land. Red foxes prefer prey on land, while snow foxes would rather go fishing. Before an attack a fox crouches low, then pounces, clearing fences and walls if it has to.

A fence around your chicken coop still helps. Foxes can jump fences but can’t see through them, so a fox ignores a chicken behind a fence at the same height. At night, foxes sometimes wander into nearby villages, and according to Mojang some are there to steal chickens.

If a bush within 16 blocks has ripe sweet berries, a fox sprints over and picks it. The berries drop to the ground and the bush stays put. Mojang’s own tip is to put foxes to work on your berry farm. The thorns don’t bother them one bit.

Food and other items, and what they do to a fox

Item	What it does
Sweet berries	Breeding (one berry per fox) and faster growth for kits. Wild foxes also pick them from bushes.
Glow berries	Work just like sweet berries.
Other food, like raw chicken or bread	Picked up and eaten after about 30 seconds. Won’t breed foxes.
Chorus fruit	The fox teleports, just like you would.
Enchanted golden apple	The fox gets the effects, such as regeneration.
Cake	Carried around, never eaten.
Golden dandelion	Not food. Stops a kit from growing up. A second one lets it grow again.

How do you breed foxes in Minecraft?

You need two adult foxes and two berries.

1. Collect berries. Sweet berry bushes grow in taigas, snowy taigas and at abandoned camps. Glow berries hang from cave vines in lush caves.
2. Sneak up on two foxes. Hold the sneak key (Shift by default on PC). Wild foxes run from players who walk normally, and a sudden move can scare them off too.
3. Bring them home if you need to. Put them on a lead and walk them to a fenced area near your base.
4. Give each fox a berry. They walk up to each other and a kit appears between them.

The kit’s colour comes from its parents, not from the biome it’s born in. Cross a red fox with a snow fox and it’s a coin flip. After breeding, the parents need five minutes before they can go again. A kit grows up in about 20 minutes, and feeding it berries speeds that up.

How do you tame a fox in Minecraft?

Strictly speaking, you can’t. A fox never gets a collar, won’t sit on command and won’t trot after you like a wolf or a cat. What you can earn is its trust, but only from a kit you bred yourself. A wild kit you find in the forest will never trust you.

A fox that trusts you never runs from you, even once it’s grown. It won’t despawn, and it has your back: if a zombie or another player attacks you, your fox goes after them.

• Use a lead. Kits follow adult foxes when they bolt, which is why Mojang suggests a lead.
• Keep it tiny. A golden dandelion, crafted from eight gold nuggets around a dandelion, pauses a kit’s growth. A second one starts the clock again.
• Make it a guard fox. A fox’s mouth works like a main hand, so a sword makes its bite hurt more and a totem of undying saves its life. Drop one near it while its mouth is empty, and keep food away or it’ll swap your gear for a snack.

Where do foxes and snow foxes spawn?

Foxes spawn in groups of two to four. Which colour you get depends on the biome:

• Red foxes: taiga, old growth pine taiga, old growth spruce taiga and the dappled forest from 26.3.
• Snow foxes: snowy taiga and grove, the snowy spruce forest on mountain slopes.

Planning a fox sanctuary? Try a dappled forest: it’s the only biome where foxes spawn and wolves, which foxes fear, don’t. If a fox pounces into a layer of snow, it gets stuck nose first for a moment. Exactly as cute as it sounds. And one in five foxes spawns with something already in its mouth, like a feather, an egg or, once in a while, an emerald.

How do foxes behave?

They sleep during the day

By day a fox naps in the shade, unless there’s a thunderstorm. Walk up and it wakes, but sneak and you can get right next to it. At night foxes hunt and let out the odd loud screech. Mojang says a weird noise in the dark is probably a fox. It only screeches with no player within 16 blocks, so you always hear it from a distance.

They carry things in their mouths

Anything lying loose on the ground is fair game. Did a fox run off with your diamond pickaxe? Toss a sweet berry in front of it. Chances are it drops your stuff and takes the berry.

They run unless you sneak

Wild foxes run from wolves, polar bears and players who aren’t sneaking. They never attack a player on their own, with one exception: hurt someone a fox trusts and it will come for you.

Java vs Bedrock: what’s different?

Both editions have the golden dandelion and the dappled forest, and foxes mostly behave the same. The differences:

• Defending you: in Bedrock a trusted fox attacks anything that hurts you, other players included. In Java it helps against melee attacks and against arrows, fireballs and wind charges, but leaves attackers such as iron golems and bees alone.
• Growing up: in Java each berry takes 10% off the remaining time. In Bedrock it’s 10% of the total time, so ten berries at most will do it.
• Spawning: in Bedrock foxes can spawn on any block and 5% of them spawn as kits. In Java they only spawn on grass, coarse dirt, podzol or snow.
• The pounce: Bedrock foxes wiggle from side to side before they jump and paddle their legs in mid-air.

Raising foxes with friends on your own server

Trust is personal: a kit trusts the player who bred it. On a server with friends, everyone can raise their own. Punch a friend as a joke, though, and their fox may come after you.

As the server owner you get one more switch. If foxes keep walking off with your loot, set the gamerule mob_griefing (Java) or mobgriefing (Bedrock) to false. No mob will pick up items any more, but creepers also stop blowing up blocks. Think it through before you flip it.

Half the group on PC and the rest on console or mobile? Here’s how to play Java and Bedrock together. Not sure about memory? Read how much RAM a Minecraft server needs. Setting one up for your kids? Start with our parent’s guide to a Minecraft server for kids. Bring cake on fox-spotting night, just don’t expect the foxes to share.