Breeding animals in Minecraft is relatively simple, so an animal breeding guide is more of an index to show what you need to feed the animals. There are no animal genders, all you need is to have two of the same animal. Then trigger love mode, this will make the two animals jump at each other for a bit and then a baby will pop out. You will know an animal is in love mode because there will be love hearts rising from the animal. Triggering love mode is not the same for every animal. The table below lists the different animals in the game and shows how to make them breed.
Animal | Food | Notes |
Pigs | Carrots | Carrots are usually found in NPC villages. You will sometimes find them in chests too. If you find some carrots growing in a farm, harvest them and replant some. Use 2 of the carrots to breed the pigs. |
Cows | Hay / Straw | Hay is grown in almost every NPC village in the game. If you cannot find a village then you can harvest seeds from long grass. Destroy the grass to get seeds, plant the seeds to grow hay and feed this to the cows to trigger love mode. |
Chickens | Seeds | Seeds are dropped when you harvest hay. If you do not have hay then you can get seeds from destroying long grass. |
Sheep | Hay / Straw | Same as breeding cows. |
Wolves | Any Meat | You need to use bones to tame a wolf, but once tamed you use meat to breed wolves. Any meat should do the trick, even rotten meat ( but you love your dog more than this! ). The wolf will only enter love mode when it is at full health. If the wolf is not at full health, feeding will only heal the wolf. Once the wolf is at full health it will enter love mode and be ready to breed. |
Ocelots | Fish | You must first tame an ocelot before you can breed it, to breed you use fish. There are a few different types of fish. The quickest way of getting a fish is to use a fishing rod on the nearest body of water. |
Horses | Golden Carrot | Golden carrots are made by combining a normal carrot with 8 gold nuggets. This can be quite annoying since you dont want to be wasting your gold on this. It has been reported that using hay will also work for this. You can breed a horse with a donkey to create a mule. |
Rabbit | Carrot | The obvious food for a rabbit! |
Once you have successfully made two animals breed, they will be unable to breed again for another 5 minutes. The baby will take 20 minutes before growing up into an adult. If you feed a baby animal with the food used to breed, it will speed up the time it takes for the animal to grow up by 10%.
Breeding Villagers
You do not directly make villagers breed in the same way you make animals breed. Villagers will only breed if there is enough room/houses for them to breed. You cant feed them anything to make them breed. If there are enough houses villagers will begin breeding. The definition of a house in Minecraft is a door and a roof. The more doors, the more houses, even if the doors are connected to the same roof. With this logic in mind you can build a house dozens of doors and the game will treat this as multiple houses. Once there is enough “houses” the villagers will begin breeding on their own. Eventually you will notice small villagers running around. Villagers tend to be quite difficult to control, so it’s best to build a wall around an NPC village to stop the villagers running away and from getting attacked. Once there are enough villagers, golems will begin to spawn to protect them.