How To Breed Minecraft Animals

The latest Minecraft release, 1.9.2 pre-release has an exciting new dynamic to its gameplay - animal breeding! You can now farm animals in Minecraft by pairing them up and convincing them to bear live young.Here's how to make animals breed in Minecraft.

Items Needed For Minecraft Animal Breeding

Wheat is the key to successfully breeding Minecraft chickens, sheep, pigs and cows. Holding wheat in your hand will convince mobs to follow you. That's right, just one sheaf of the golden grain and you'll become the pied piper of your Minecraft world. You can feed the animals the wheat if you want to breed them, or you can lead them off a tall cliff if their population numbers are so high that they justify culling or if you're looking to simulate a stampede - and let's face it, in today's world, who isn't?

How To Feed Minecraft Animals Wheat

You can feed a chicken cow, pig or sheep wheat by holding wheat in your hand and right clicking on the animal in question. You'll know when they've eaten and are ready for breeding because they'll stop following you like a zombie chasing a truck of fresh brains and instead moon about the place with red love hearts bubbling up around them. Get two animals in such a state, and you have a recipe for reproduction. 

How Minecraft Animals Breed (Where Are The Baby Animals?)

Once you have fed two animals of the same species a nice snack of wheat, they will approach one another and sort of bump against one another awkwardly for a few seconds. At the end of the process, another animal of the same species will spring, fully formed from their union. There are no baby animals, you just get another adult of the same species. With enough wheat in your inventory (or infinite wheat as you'll soon find you have in creative mode) things can get out of hand very quickly.

Minecraft Breeding Genetics

At this stage of the minecraft breeding program, you'll find that there isn't any scope for genetic inheritance. Sheep are the only real potential candidate for genetic experimentation because they occasionally have colored wool naturally, however it would appear that mixing various colors of sheep in your breeding program has no real effect. This could change in later versions.