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What Do Cows Eat In Minecraft?

Cows are harmless and passive mobs that are often found roaming around the overworld dimension in Minecraft.

You can find them easily everywhere, especially in biomes like plains and forests. 

Cows are an important creature in Minecraft. They provide several useful resources to players, making them a great farming option.

Hence, it is crucial to know what cows eat in Minecraft so that you can harvest these resources. 

Let’s get into details and learn more about them!

What Do Cows Eat In Minecraft?

Just like actual cows, cows in Minecraft have a plant-based diet. 

Their main diet is grass. Grass is usually found on dirt blocks, which are commonly used to build stables. Thus, it is normal for cows that are kept in stables as pets to eat grass found on these blocks.  

For this reason, your stable can look messy. However, it is not a big issue as that is how a stable looks in real life anyway. 

Aside from grass, cows also eat wheat. Wheat is usually fed for breeding purposes as it makes the cows go into love mode. 

There are few ways to get wheat. You can either harvest them in villages, grow them yourself; or loot various locations like villages, shipwrecks, dungeons, etc for chests. 

Unlike grass, cows are unable to eat wheat directly from ground, or even pick up dropped wheat items. So how do we feed wheat to cows to reach the breeding goal? 

How To Feed Wheat To Cows

The only way to feed wheat to cows is through the player’s hands. 

When you have wheat in your hands, any cows within a close distance will rush towards you to get the wheat. They will act in a way almost like begging to get fed by you.

To feed them, right-click on the cow with wheat in your hands. Red hearts will then appear above their heads after eating, indicating that the cows are in love mode and ready to breed.

What Do Cows Eat In Minecraft

The breeding cows then create adorable and tiny baby cows that are available to spawn for your farm. In addition, you will also gain some XP for breeding the animals. 

Once the cows have bred, you need to wait approximately 5 minutes before you can feed more wheat and start the breeding process again. 

For each Minecraft word, there is a maximum amount of mobs you can spawn in an area. Once this number is reached, you’re unable to feed wheat to the cows and have them breed with each other. 

Where To Find Cows In Minecraft

The cows pretty much will appear anywhere in places with grass and open space in the Java Edition. 

These gentle animals spawn in almost all the biomes in this edition, with the exception of Meadows, Snowy Plains and Wooded Badlands.

What Do Cows Eat In Minecraft?

The cows will spawn when certain criteria is met, which is having light level above 7 and at least 2 blocks of free space. Then, there will be somewhere between 1 to 4 cows spawning, with some percentage spawn as baby cows.  

On the other hand, in Bedrock Edition, there are different methods when it comes to cow spawning. 

The cows solely spawn when the light level is above 9, despite having the same biome and physical space parameter. When spawning, they usually come in a group of 2 or 3, with some chances of getting baby cows in the group.    

What Cows Are Good For

Cows provide players raw beef, leather and milk; with each of them serving different purposes to the player. 

Raw beef and leather are dropped by adult cows, and you will get around 1 to 3 raw beef as well as 0 to 2 leathers from them. Raw beef can be cooked into steak and it is one of the best food resources in Minecraft. 

As for leather, you use it to make books, which is needed in making bookshelves to enhance your enchanting. Besides that, leather is also used to make other important items.

What Do Cows Eat In Minecraft

The milk can remove any negative status effect, making it a life-saver if you get yourself poisoned. In addition, it can also be used to make cake, another wonderful food resource. To get milk buckets, you just need to use an empty bucket on cows. 

Conclusion

Cows are great passive mobs to have around as they provide useful resources needed by players to survive in Minecraft. You can get raw beef, leather and milk from cows, with each of them serving a different purpose that ensures player survival. 

Cows also spawn pretty much everywhere, and are easy to breed. All you need is to give them wheat and you can get cute and adorable baby cows running in your farm. 

Now that you know what the cows in Minecraft eat, you can go ahead and start building your cow farm!  

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