Sometimes, you stumble upon a cow in Minecraft and want to bring it with you to your base. You may want to build a trading hall in every one of the villager biomes or create a massive zoo with every passive mob, every hostile mob, or perhaps every single mob in the game. To make this task possible, you can use a minecart or boat for mob transportation. However, in some cases, it’s needed to just nudge a mob in a specific spot, like sheep into a wool farm. The easiest way to move mobs is to make and use a good old trusty lead in Minecraft.
Lead is a useful item that you can craft with only a couple of ingredients and make your life much easier. You can right-click a mob with it and then be able to lure them in the direction you’re moving. It’s also possible to strap a lead to a fence post to keep a mob stationary in a particular area. Not only that, but you can easily have multiple mobs on a leash at once.
What You Need to Make a Lead
Using the resources listed below, the crafting recipe for a lead always gives two items at once. The resources are:
- 4 strings
- 1 slimeball
- Crafting table
String is a drop from the spider mob in Minecraft. These arachnids can drop 0-2 strings after they are defeated. Slimeballs are mob drops as well, which you can get by killing slimes. Only the smallest slimes drop slimeballs and the quantity is the same as string from spiders. You also need a crafting table, a block used to perform complex crafting actions.
How to Craft Lead in Minecraft
After you get your slimeball and string, follow the steps below to make a lead in the game.
- Place the crafting table or crafter in your world. Right-click the block to open its crafting grid UI.
- Start the recipe by placing two strings in the first two slots of the topmost row.
- After that, you need to place a piece of string in the first slot of the middle row.
- Next, place the fourth string in the bottom right corner of the grid in the last row.
- Finally, you need to place the slimeball in the center slot of the crafting table.
- Voila! You will see the lead item in the result slot on the right. Click on the lead and drag it to your inventory.
With the upcoming Minecraft 1.21 update, you will be able to automate the process using the new crafter block. It’s similar to a crafting table, but it supports only automated crafting using a redstone signal. You can use a button, lever, redstone block, or redstone clock.
Other Ways to Get Lead in Minecraft
Apart from crafting, you can obtain a lead in a couple of different ways. The first of them is by looting chests in the following locations:
- Ancient City (16.1%)
- Woodland Mansion (28.3% in Java and 27.9% in Bedrock)
- Buried Treasure in Bedrock Edition Only (34.3%)
Furthermore, there is about a 2.2% chance that you will unearth a lead item while brushing the suspicious gravel blocks in the trail ruins structures. Unexpectedly, however, the most common way to get leads is by buying them from the wandering trader. This special merchant spawns with two llamas near your location now and then.
The llamas will always be on a lead and guided by the trader. You can take the lead by killing the llamas or the trader. Another easy and much calmer way to “steal” leads is to put the llamas in a boat or a minecart. This will instantly break the leads dropping them as items.
Using a Lead to Leash and Move Mobs
The only use of a lead is to leash mobs in Minecraft. You can do this by having the lead selected on your hotbar and then right-clicking a mob. Not every mob can be leashed though. So, we have prepared a whole list of the mobs you can leash right here:
- Allay
- Axolotl
- Bee
- Camel
- Cat
- Chicken
- Cow
- Dolphin
- Donkey
- Fox
- Frog
- Glow Squid
- Goat
- Hoglin
- Horse
- Iron Golem
- Llama
- Mooshroom
- Mule
- Ocelot
- Parrot
- Pig
- Polar Bear
- Rabbit
- Sheep
- Skeleton Horse
- Sniffer
- Snow Golem
- Squid
- Strider
- Trader Llama
- Wolf
- Zoglin
- Zombie Horse
It’s also possible to put a lead on a boat in Bedrock edition, even though it seems strange. When the mob is leashed, they will follow the player closely in the direction of the movement. To take the lead off of a mob, you can right-click the mob again. Also, if you get far away from the leashed mob (more than 10 blocks), the lead will break and be dropped near that mob.
Amazing fact about the lead is that you can have multiple mobs on leads at once. However, every mob requires its own lead item. This will allow you to easily transport many mobs across a short distance. When you reach your destination, it’s possible to strap a lead to any type of a fence post, to keep the mob(s) in a certain area. To do this, you can right-click the fence block. Moreover, you can also tie the lead to a wall in the Bedrock edition, which is not possible on the Java version.
You may lead a mob both horizontally and vertically using a lead. If the mob is seven or more blocks away from the player holding the lead, it will get suspended in the air. However, this can go wrong quickly, as the mob in the air can gather momentum over time when they are bobbing up and down. This means even if they drop from a one-block-tall height, the damage may be equal to a 100-block fall. This can also work in reverse, depending on whether the mob is accelerating or not. But, it’s better not to take this risk with a rare mob.
To sum it up, leads are useful little items that can make some time-consuming and frustrating tasks a lot more manageable. Their crafting recipe is not overly expensive either, but you may just take them from the wandering trader for free. So, what do you think of leads? How often do you use them in your world? Tell us in the comment section below!
