Turtles in Minecraft are absolutely adorable. How many times have you seen one slumped on a beach and thought ‘man, I wish I had an entire farm of those guys’? Exactly, it happens all the time, and it’s pretty simple! Here’s everything you need to know about how to breed turtles in Minecraft.
How to Breed Turtles in Minecraft
Before you get started, you want to make sure you have some shears with you in your inventory. Shears are incredibly useful, and have more versatile uses beyond giving your sheep a good haircut. For instance, we are going to be using the shears to harvest Seagrass, the food required for turtle breeding.
Incase you are unfamiliar, you can craft a pair of shears using two iron ingots placed diagonally (one in the middle of the second row and the other diagonally below it on the left) in a 3×3 crafting grid.
Seagrass can be obtained in underwater areas where it will naturally spawn, and these include swamps, oceans, and occasionally rivers. Alternatively, you can bone-meal an underwater area to allow Seagrass to grow immediately.
Use the shears to harvest as much Seagrass as possible (the more the better, just incase!), and then return to your turtles with the tasty treat. Feed it to two of them, and watch as the love-hearts fly! The turtles will then lay an egg, breeding like any other mob would once in love-mode.
Like sea turtles in the real world, the pair will decide that this beach/area will be the ‘home beach’, that they will return to every so often. The turtle with the egg begins to flap about in the sand as if making its baby a comfortable nesting space.
Now begins the more time-consuming stage of turtle breeding. When you have some eggs, heavy babysitting is required to make sure they stay safe!
Eggs are at risk of being jumped on by zombie mob variants at night, which isn’t ideal, so protect them at all costs! Be careful not to step on them as this will also cause them to crack prematurely.
Tricks to Speed Up Turtle Breeding
The eggs will go through three phases of hatching, and this does take a while. If you enchant a pickaxe with the silk touch enchantment, you can carefully collect eggs that are slower to hatch, and group them with other eggs in later hatching stages. This allows the other eggs to automatically reach the same stage as the main egg.
Eventually your babies will hatch, and your turtle colony will be well on the way! The babies do have a tendency to swim off though, so make sure you keep watch!
The Turtle Shell Helmet
Another tip to be aware of is that the Aquatic update for version 1.13 added the turtle shell helmet, a rare piece of armour that grants the player longer time underwater. This is only possible to get through breeding turtles, and don’t worry, no turtles will be harmed in the making of this helmet!
That’s everything you need to know about how to breed turtles in Minecraft. For more tips on the game, be sure to search for Twinfinite.
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