How To Start An Animal Farm in Minecraft

Cooked meat is one of the most sustainable food items that can heal a ton of health points for the player in the game, if not the best one so far. But before obtaining cooked meat, the player should farm for raw meat themselves to cook them. And to keep themselves healthy at all times, they should farm for raw meat from passive animal mobs in the game. There are many benefits in farming for animal mobs as they are a source of important basic crafting materials more than just a source of food. Farming for animals provides several useful items that players can use for various purposes, such as feathers, wool, leather, and eggs. But there are certain animal farms in the game that veteran players have used to make their farming life easier and hassle-free. These animal farms can either be manual animal farms or automatic animal farms. This guide will teach you the basics of animal farming and all you need to know about how to start your animal farm in Minecraft.

How To Start An Animal Farm in Minecraft

You can use a few ways to create your animal farm in the game. There are also tips and tricks around animal farming that most players often use to utilize their animal farm for their base fully. To start, you must build an animal pen that you can keep the animal mobs in. Generally, fences are great as they cost less crafting materials than other methods, and you can infuse a fence gate between the fences to make it easier for you to enter and exit the pen. You can also try digging a two-block deep hole in the ground if you cannot craft fences. Once the animal pen is secured, you will need to lead animals next by using either a lead or their favorite food item. Each animal mob has a specific food item to which they are attracted, and they will follow anyone holding the food item in their hand. This is the simplest and most common way to lead animals around, but this does not guarantee that the mob will completely follow you, as they can become disinterested once the player gets too far away. Listed below are each of the animal mob’s corresponding favorite food items to make them follow the player:

On the other hand, leads are great at leading mobs around as the mob is completely attached to the player, although leads are a little hard to craft due to the rarity of slimeballs. Alternatively, you can obtain leads by buying slimeballs from wandering traders as they have a chance to sell slimeballs for an emerald each. You can also kill the wandering trader to make them drop the two leads attached to their llamas. Make sure to lead them into your animal pen to start the breeding process.

Once you have at least two of the same kind of animal in a pen, start feeding each with their favorite food item to trigger the breeding process. Remember, you can only breed each mob once every five minutes. When two of the same kind of mobs are fed, they will start breeding and produce a baby animal mob. You will then be shown red hearts on top of their heads and be rewarded with experience points when they have successfully bred. The baby animal mob will then follow the adult mob around for 20 minutes until it reaches adulthood, and it will be ready for breeding. Take note that the parent mobs cannot breed again for the next 5 minutes after successful breeding occurs.

For chickens, they can be bred in two ways, namely by feeding them seeds or breeding by simply throwing chicken eggs on the ground. As a chicken can lay an egg every few minutes, throwing those eggs on the ground has a certain chance to produce a chick. This makes chickens one of the easiest passive mobs to breed in Minecraft.

As for sheep, they are mostly farmed for their wool, and in this case, you do not need to kill them to collect their wool. You can easily dye their wool by pressing right-click on them while holding a dye on your hand and then collecting the wool by using shears. Once they are sheared, they will regrow their wool back by eating the grass on top of grass blocks. When breeding sheep for wool, you must place them in a large pen with enough grass blocks to easily recover their wool while allowing sufficient time to let the grass blocks grow back.

Breeding Tips For Animal Farming

Once you start your animal farm, you are bound to breed them at some point to let them reproduce. Be sure to breed them at least twice the rate you slay them to keep their population enough for breeding without running out of mobs for the next harvest. The same goes for chickens when breeding using the egg method. Make sure to have enough eggs to breed a whole new batch of chickens if you plan on harvesting all of your current batch of chickens. Keep in mind that there is a breeding cooldown timer of 5 minutes per mob when breeding animal mobs. Therefore, you should always have more available mobs for your next batch of breeding than mobs you plan to kill.

Another thing to note is that when you are breeding, especially in a fenced-in pen, it is difficult to go in and out of the pen, even with the fence gate when the pen gets overcrowded. If a pen contains too many mobs for it to hold, there may be times when a mob or two will escape. A few tips on how to deal with this situation are as follows:

• Go to the farthest side of the pen, away from the pen’s entryway, and hold the favorite food item of the mobs inside the pen in your hand. Once all the mobs are gathered near you, quickly switch the item out and run towards the entrance to enter the pen without any mob escaping safely. This is only effective for pens that are not too crowded.
• For fenced pens, placing a carpet on top of the fence allow you to freely jump on top of it without the risk of any mobs crossing over the fence with you.
• You can try creating a double fence by placing a fence around your pen’s initial fence. This creates an “airlock” that secures any mob from escaping.
• As a last resort, any mob that escapes your fence can be deftly handled by killing them for loot and drops.