Farming animals

Cooked meats are the best all-around foods in the game. To have meat readily available, one must farm animals. Farming animals also provides several other useful items: leather, feathers, wool, and eggs. A manual-slaughter farm can also provide a fair bit of experience.

(Note: This Video is Outdated, Because the Animals no longer spawn, See the new tutorial at the bottom of this page)

A "manual" animal farming is pretty simple:

• Slaughter most of them, and profit. Breed some more.

To lead animals around, you need to wield the same food that you can breed them with (or a lead if you have slimeballs): Wheat for cows, mooshrooms, and sheep; carrots for pigs; seeds for chickens. Once you've got them into the pen, start feeding them — as they go into love mode, they'll pair off and produce babies. (They will also produce experience orbs, make sure to collect them!) You can breed the animals about every 5 minutes, getting one young for each two adult animals in your herd. The babies will take about 20 minutes to grow up, so don't slaughter too many adults too fast.

There are natural limits to how many animals you can keep in a given pen — In particular, if it gets too crowded, animals will be pushed into the walls of the pen. If those are solid blocks, the animals will then suffocate; if the walls are fences, glass, or other transparent blocks, the animals can be pushed right through them, to wander the landscape! Usually the latter is better, since you can always hunt down escapees. Crowding through the walls is a particular problem after breeding, as baby animals can push the adults into the walls.

For sheep, you naturally shouldn't slaughter them, just dye them as desired, and shear them regularly. They will also need a fairly large pen filled with grass, to recover their wool after shearing. However, with the recent updates, sheep now drop meat as well, so you can kill them if you have no other sources of meat.

Chickens are a special case, because not only do they breed with wheat seeds, but they also lay eggs, and throwing eggs has a chance to produce chicks. This makes them very easy to multiply in general. The annoyance of having regularly gather the eggs prompted the development of "egg farms", where a flock of chickens are kept on water, and their eggs are gathered by the current to some central place. The recent introduction of the hopper now allows the eggs to be automatically stored, and even brought to a dispenser for auto-hatching.

A building to house all of the animals (like a barn) is useful and can be an aesthetic addition to any base. Consider the two videos below of a barn build:

Poor Man's Beef Farm[edit | edit source]

Function

An easy and simple way to farm raw beef. This farm utilises water currents and fall damage to kill cows for beef. Cows can be bred within the farm itself, making the farm a renewable source for beef.

Construction

1. Build a 12x12 fenced area.
2. Build 4 upward facing dispensers at all 4 corners and fill them with water buckets.
3. Hook all the dispensers up with redstone.
4. Dig a hole of 13 blocks deep in the center of the fenced area.
5. Build a hopper collection system at the bottom of the hole

Preparation

Usage

1. When the farm is full of cows, activate the dispensers.
2. Keep off some of the cows for beef while leaving some for breeding and re-population.
3. Breed the remaining cows until the farm is full again and repeat the process.

Cruddly's Steakatron 2000[edit | edit source]

To greatly ease and speed up the production of steak, raw beef and leather.

1. Start with a double chest. This will be the front. To dress it up, put two item frames on the front, with a raw beef on the left and a steak on the right. This will help you remember which button to push to slaughter the cattle. Optional: use an anvil to rename one of the chests "Meat locker" and place it first.
2. Above the chest place a 2×2 of red stained glass (keeps the cleaning to a minimum!). (NB: Chests will open into transparent blocks).
3. Make a rear wall of glass.