How to Tame a Sheep in Minecraft

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Minecraft Sheep Love Wheat

You’ve seen them grazing peacefully in the hills and meadows of Minecraft. Sheep are common animals in the game, and with just a little know-how and effort, you can tame and breed them. The approach is similar to how to tame a chicken, but you’ll be using fully grown and harvested wheat instead of just seeds.

Step-by-step Guide to Tame a Sheep

  1. First, you need wheat which you can grow from seeds in the ground. Find some empty ground next to water and then use a hoe (right-click) on the empty ground to cultivate and prepare it. Equip your seeds and then right-click on the ground to plant them. Wait a day or two (Minecraft time) until the wheat is fully grown and then click on it with your hoe equipped to harvest the wheat.
  2. Equip your wheat and approach a sheep. It will start to follow you and will continue to follow you as long as you have the wheat equipped.
  3. Guide the sheep into an enclosed space. This can be the inside of a building or a special pen that you construct using wooden fences and a gate.
  4. Once the sheep is inside your enclosure, close it off with a gate or door and you now have a pet sheep.

Breeding Sheep in Minecraft

When you tame and capture two or more sheep in Minecraft, you can breed them to produce baby sheep and shear them to produce wool. Sheep regrow wool very quickly, so you don’t need too many to produce a lot of wool.

  1. Tame and enclose at least two sheep using the steps mentioned above.
  2. Feed wheat to the sheep by right-clicking on the wheat in your hotbar while standing in front of each sheep.
  3. You will see hearts appear above the sheep.

    Minecraft Sheep with Hearts
  4. Soon, a baby sheep will be born. It’s so cute!
  5. Repeat a few times to create a family of sheep.
  6. Use a pair of shears on each sheep to harvest wool. With a small family of sheep (3-5) you will have plenty of wool in a very short time.

When you breed two sheep of the same color, they produce a baby sheep of that color. When you breed two sheep of different colors, they will either produce a baby sheep of a compatible dye color (example: blue + white = light blue). Otherwise, the baby will randomly inherit the color of one of the parents.

Shorn Sheep in Minecraft

Starting a Sheep Farm

It’s easy to go from breeding just a few sheep in Minecraft to building a large sheep farm. A good tip is to organize your sheep by color into multiple pens. Most of the time, sheep are white, but they can appear in many other colors, like black, dark gray, light gray, brown, and even pink! Note that pink sheep are very rare, and only spawn 0.164% of the time (just over 1 in 1,000).

Keeping your sheep separated by color helps with making sure you’re breeding sheep of the same type.

A sheep farm in Minecraft
Organizing sheep by color into pens.
Leading sheep through a village in 
Minecraft
Leading sheep through a village.
Enjoying a sunset in Minecraft with sheep.
Enjoying a beautiful Minecraft sunset with wooly friends after a long day of sheep breeding.

Shepherd Skin

If you’re going to make breeding sheep a hobby, why not go all the way, and get a shepherd skin? You can find a great shepherd skin on NameMC:

Shepherd Skin for Minecraft

Shepherd with Pink Sheep in Minecraft
A shepherd tends to his rare Pink Sheep in Minecraft.

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