Minecraft Goats: Taming, Breeding, and Making Farms (2022)
Much like other Minecraft mobs, goats have a variety of game mechanics built around them. We have divided our guide into sections to cover everything, ranging from how to find goats to how to breed them in-game. You can use the table below to explore each of them at your convenience.
What is the Point of Goats in Minecraft?
Goats are animal mobs in Minecraft that are neutral in nature and don’t attack other mobs in general. But every few seconds, they ram into stationary players and mobs, banging their heads into their bodies. As for the spawning, you can only find goats in the mountainous biomes of Minecraft.
Types of Goats
Minecraft has two types of goats:
Regular GoatsScreaming Goats (Screamer Goats in Bedrock)
Most goats in Minecraft are regular goats, making screaming goats hard to find. Even if you come across one naturally, there is no way to distinguish between a regular and a screaming goat. Instead, you have to observe their behavior. The screaming goat rams its head into nearby entities more often than a regular goat. Moreover, its voice is very high pitch and almost resembles a scream.
What Do Goats in Minecraft Eat?
Minecraft goats only eat pieces of wheat, but you have to feed it to them. The goats cannot eat dropped or planted wheat crops. Instead, you have to hold the wheat and use it on the goats with your secondary action key (right-click) to feed them. The goats keep following you around as long as you have wheat equipped in your hand.
Wheat is useful for goats in the following ways:
Baby goats grow at a 10% faster rate after eating a piece of wheat.Eating wheat helps the goats restore their health.If you feed wheat to an adult goat who’s fully healed, it will make the goat breed.
What Do Goats Do in Minecraft?
The most unique and popular aspect of goats in Minecraft is their tendency to ram into. If a mob or a player close to a goat is stationary for a few seconds, the goat will ram its head into that entity. This action is powerful enough to push the affected entity multiple steps back. And since Minecraft goats live in mountains, make sure you know how to survive fall damage in Minecraft before going to meet them.
If an entity gets too close to the goat, that might also trigger their ramming in certain cases. Other than ramming their heads, the goats are also known for their high jumps. They can easily get on top of houses and across walls with simple tall jumps. The only other mob with a jump comparable to goats are the frogs in Minecraft.
Do Goats Get Fall Damage?
Goats are used to living in the mountains and making high jumps. Because of that, they take 10 points less fall damage than the players. So, they can easily fall from about 10 blocks without taking any damage at all. Moreover, the goats also avoid walking into small holes or powder snow. They can recognize the places where they might get trapped. So, goats either stop or jump to cross tricky locations. If you trap them into a border without a roof, the goat can jump and escape from there too.
Drops and Mob Loot
Contrary to popular belief, the goats don’t drop any food after getting killed. They only drop experience orbs, which aren’t enough to justify killing them. However, you can use a bucket on the goat to milk it. Goat milk has the same effect as cow milk. You can use it as food and also remove any potion effects from your character.
But if milk isn’t good enough, you can also try to make them drop a goat horn. These are practically the first musical instrument of Minecraft that the players can use. But more on goat horns later.
How to Find Goats in Minecraft?
As mentioned earlier, the goats only spawn within the mountain biomes of Minecraft. You can use our best mountain seeds to reach them easily. These mountain biomes include:
MeadowGroveSnowy SlopesJagged PeaksFrozen PeaksStony Peaks
Within these biomes, the goats spawn in small groups if the area’s light level is above 7. They don’t spawn at night. Most of these goats are normal goats, but each group has a 2% chance of spawning with a screaming goat (Java) or screamer goat (Bedrock). You have to be lucky to find this rare variant of goats in your Minecraft world.
How to Transport Them
If you want to move a goat from one place to another, crafting lead is the most reliable option. You can use the lead on a goat to make it wrap itself around the goat’s neck. Then, it will function like a leash, which you can use to pull the goat wherever you go. But unless you have Elytra, this plan might take some time to get the goat anywhere.
So, alternatively, you can also try to get the goat inside a boat. To do so, you just have to craft a boat in Minecraft and place it next to the goat. Then, after a few seconds and sometimes immediately, the goat will enter the boat, and you can row it to your base. But if you want to get the goat out of the boat, you will have to break the boat. Try not to accidentally hit the goat while doing so.
Goat Barn or Goat Pen
Once you take the goats to the location where you want to keep them, you need to build them a house. The simplest way to do it is by using a lead to bind goats with fences in Minecraft. But if you want to take it a step further, you can also create a small pen for goats.
To do so, make a solid boundary at least 2 blocks high around the goat. Then, add a roof to the structure to avoid goats from jumping over the boundary. Once they are trapped, you don’t have to tie goats to anything to keep them in your structure.
How to Breed Goats in Minecraft?
Similar to other mobs, goats enter breeding mode when given their favorite food. So, if you get two goats together and feed them wheat, they will breed. Then, a baby goat will spawn within seconds, and it can grow into an adult goat and breed further. After breeding once, the parent goats need to wait for a few minutes before they can breed again. Similarly, it takes a while for the baby goat to turn into an adult goat. However, you can feed wheat to the baby goats to increase their growth rate by up to 10% each turn.
Make a Goat Farm
Once you get the hang of taming and breeding goats, you can create a whole dedicated farm for them. It can be used to practically collect an endless number of goats in the game. Then, you can use them to get buckets of milk, goat horn, and experience orbs. You can use our guide to learn how to make a goat farm in Minecraft and dive deeper into the process.
How to Get a Goat Horn in Minecraft?
Thanks to the Minecraft 1.19 The Wild update, we now have goat horns in the game. These are musical instruments that a goat drops when they accidentally ram their head into a few specific blocks. To make them do so, you have to lure the goats to ram into you and move out of the way at the last moment. You can use our guide on how to get a goat horn in Minecraft to learn the process in detail.
The game has 8 types of goat horns differentiated by their sound:
PonderSingSeekFeelAdmireCallYearnDream
*Only dropped by a screaming goat Some goat horns are rarer than others. But with enough time, you can collect all types of goat horns and possibly even create a band on the best Minecraft servers.
Tame and Breed Minecraft Goats with Ease
Just like that, you have learned everything about the goats in Minecraft. Whether you want to breed the goats, find them, or just keep them around, our guide is there to help you. But even with so much to do with goats, you can’t keep them as pets. If you want a new wild pet, you should try to tame foxes in Minecraft. They are as unpredictable as the goats but much cuter. Though, when it comes to practical purposes, you can get much better value if you know how to tame a horse in Minecraft. With horses around, you won’t have to worry about traveling long distances. Coming back to goats, make sure you know how to grow crops in Minecraft to keep your farm’s food supply running. Once you get a hang of this, you can create an automatic farm with Allay to take care of your food. Having said that, which is your favorite wild mob in Minecraft? Tell us in the comments below!