Farming cows, sheep or pigs will provide a ready source of meat for food.
Cows also provide leather, which can be made into armour, and is essential for crafting books. Cows can be milked by right-clicking on them whilst holding a bucket.
Sheep provide wool, which is used to make beds, banners and can be used as a building block.
Pigs can be ridden, after a fashion, but you would be better off with a horse
The same techniques also apply to chickens, but they also lay eggs, which is an easier way to increase their numbers. You can farm chickens the same way as other animals (see the basic tutorial), but you might want to use an improved farm design that collects the eggs for you.
What you will need
Food
The essential thing you will need for farming is food for the animals. Get some of that before you start!
Cows and sheep eat wheat. Pigs eat carrots, potatoes or beetroot. Chickens eat seeds (most easily obtained from wheat or long grass, but they will eat any kind of seed, such as pumpkin or melon seeds).
###Wood
You will also want to harvest some wood to construct fences and gates to build enclosures.
How to build the farm
Build an enclosure
First you will want to build an enclosure, either a small pen or a large field, in which to keep your animals. This can be indoors or outdoors, but it needs to be somewhere that you can lead the animals to, so outdoors is easier. If you’re raising sheep for wool, you will need a large grass floor so that they can eat and regrow their wool.
Fences and Gates
Fences form a barrier that is 1½ blocks high, so that mobs (or players) can’t jump over it. Fences are crafted from wooden sticks, and automatically connect together when placed next to each other. Gates act as a way to get through fences, and are opened or closed with a right-click.
An alternative to gates is to place a block of dirt one block away from the fence, so that you can jump out of the field.
####Enclosure design
You can just fence off an area and build a gate to get in and out, but if you build so that the ground is higher on the inside than the outside, then you can make an animal pen that is easy to get into from any direction.
This animal pen can be entered in any direction. The player can either use the gate to get out, or just jump off the dirt block.
Find some animals
Find some animals: you will need two of the same kind to breed. There are no males and females in Minecraft. Hold some of their favourite food out (wheat for sheep and cows; carrots for pigs; seeds for chickens).
When they notice the food, they will look at you and follow you. Lead them back to their new home!
If you built the kind of pen suggested above, it will be easy to get them to follow you in.
TIP: if you’re using a gate to exit the animal pen, make sure you equip something other than animal food to stop them from trying to follow you.
Animal Breeding
To get your animals to breed, you just need to feed them. Right-click on an animal whilst holding wheat, and hearts will appear above its head so show that it’s in the mood. Right-click on another animal nearby, and, well, nature will take its course.
Next something complicated to do with birds and bees and storks and cabbage-patches will happen. Mercifully we don’t need to know about all that, we just get to see the results. Awwww!
For the next 5 minutes, the adults will not respond to further attempts to make them breed. However, pretty soon you will have four animals that can be bred, and you will quickly be able to raise a large herd.
TIP: To make babies grow up faster, you can feed them their favourite food.
Slaughter
The most efficient way to harvest meat from your cows and pigs is just to enter the pen, equip a sword and slay all of them except a few that you save for breeding the next herd. If you kill pigs by setting them on fire, then your pork chops will be ready-cooked, but you will have to live with the knowledge that you are a horrible person.
Wool
Shearing
Sheep will drop one block of wool if you kill them, but they will drop more if you right click them with shears. Sheep will regrow wool after shearing, if they have grass to eat, so you can get lots of wool over time.
###Dyed Wool
If you want coloured wool, you can dye the sheep first for greater efficiency. After shearing, the wool will grow back the same colour you dyed it. You can, of course, dye coloured sheep white with bonemeal.
If you breed coloured sheep together, the babies will be the same colour as one of the parents, not a mix.
Farming, either of crops or animals, allows players to plant vegetables on farmland or create ranches for animals to produce food, or other important materials such as leather or wool.
To grow crops, you need access to 4 things: seeds, a hoe, dirt, and water. Seeds for any of the growable plants can be found when harvesting grass, killing zombies, looting dungeons, or in village farms after harvesting their crops. Fully mature plants will also drop seeds of the same type when harvested.
Seeds can be sown into farmland which is dirt or grass blocks that have been tilled by a hoe. After using a hoe on the selected block, the dirt will become grooved and will be a pixel lower than the untreated block next to it. Then, you’re ready to plant your first seed! To keep your farmland healthy, make sure that there is water within 4 blocks of your planted crops, otherwise the land will eventually dry out and revert to dirt. Crops will grow on dry farmland, though very slowly. Hydrated farmland is much darker than dried out farmland, helping you see if your crop field is properly maintained.
Which plants can you farm?
Wheat - Used to make bread and breed animals such as cows, pigs and sheep
Potato - Can be cooked to create baked potatoes
Carrot - Can be eaten and used to control pigs and rabbits
Beetroot - Used to create rose red dye or crafted with a wooden bowl to create beetroot soup
Pumpkin - Used to create jack o'lanterns and both iron and snow golems
Melon - Used to create glistering melon slice
Sugar Cane - Used to create sugar and paper
As well as farmland and water, plants also need light to grow. This can either be sunlight, by building your farm in the over-world or by using torches when creating underground farms. Once plants have all these conditions, they will start to grow. Growth happens at random intervals for each individual crop, so your seeds may not mature at the same time. Plants can take anywhere between 5 minutes to 35 minutes real-time to fully mature, depending on their conditions and the luck of the draw. Growth can be sped up by interacting with a crop while holding bone meal.
Wheat will grow slightly yellow when fully matured, whereas carrots, potatoes and beetroot will show the vegetable protruding from the ground. Crops can be harvested by breaking them with or without a tool, but will only produce one seed if they are broken while still immature. Melons and Pumpkin seeds create stalks that don’t need to be broken as they will consistently grow fruit as long as the previous one is harvested.
Harvesting crops one at a time can be tedious, so if you want to find ways of optimising your farms production, there are plenty of sites that offer easy to follow guides on how to set one up such as the Minecraft Wiki’s article on Crop Farming.
Farming animals
Animal farming is slightly more straightforward than crop farming, and can produce some of the best food in the game, as well as useful items!
The only problem with animal farming is that it can be tricky to get started, especially if you don’t have a lead or other ways to make animals follow you. Because of this, most players start with crop farming, then use the crops to set up animal farms.
To make animals follow you to their new home, you need to carry the food that you breed them with. They will then follow you as long as you stay within 8 blocks of them, or they’ll start wandering off. Once you've got them into your pen, start feeding them their favourite food. They will then go into love mode and produce one baby animal. You can breed the animals about every 5 minutes, however babies will take about 20 minutes to grow up.
Which animals can be farmed?
Cow - Bred by feeding them wheat
Mooshroom - Bred by feeding them wheat
Sheep - Bred by feeding them wheat
Chicken - Bred by feeding them seeds
Pig - Bred by feeding them carrots, potatoes or beetroots
Rabbit - Bred by feeding them carrots or golden carrots
Goat - Bred by feeding them wheat
After breeding a significant number of animals, set to work with your sword, killing as many as you need to gather the materials you want, but make sure you spare at least two of each animal so you can repeat the cycle without having to search the world for more animals to replace them.
There are limits to how many animals you can keep in a pen. If it gets too crowded, animals will be pushed into the walls and either suffocate or, if the walls are fences or glass, pushed right through them. Also if 24 or more animals occupy the same block space, they will start to suffocate as well as seriously slow down your game.
When farming sheep, you don’t have to kill them to get wool, just dye them as desired, and shear them regularly. They also need a fairly large pen filled with grass to recover their wool after shearing.
Chickens are a special case. Not only do they breed after eating seeds, but they also lay eggs which can spawn chicks when thrown, making them very easy to multiply. The annoyance of having to gather the eggs led to the development of egg farms, where eggs are gathered to some central place. Hoppers allow the eggs to be automatically stored, and even brought to a dispenser for auto-hatching. You can find layouts for this design online!