How to Make a Lead in Minecraft

Sometimes, you stumble upon a cow in Minecraft and want to bring it back to your base. You want to build a trading hall in every one of the villager biomes or make a massive zoo with every passive, hostile, or perhaps every single mob in the game. To make this task possible, you can use a minecart or a boat. However, in some cases, players need to nudge a mob in a specific spot, like a sheep into a wool farm. The easiest way to move mobs is to make and use a lead in Minecraft.

What You Need to Make a Lead

The crafting recipe for a lead always gives two items at once. Thankfully, with the Chase the Skies update, you only need 5 strings to make a lead in Minecraft.

String is a drop from the spider mob in Minecraft. These arachnids can drop 0-2 strings after they are defeated. You also need a crafting table, a block used to perform complex crafting actions.

How to Craft Lead in Minecraft

After you get strings, 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.
• Place two strings in the first two slots of the topmost and middle rows.
• Place the fifth string in the bottom right corner of the grid in the last row.

And voila! You will see the lead item in the result slot on the right. Click on the lead and drag it to your inventory.

You can automate this process using the crafter block. It’s similar to a crafting table but supports only automated crafting using a redstone signal. You can use a button, lever, redstone block, and redstone clock.

Other Ways to Get Lead in Minecraft

Apart from crafting, you can obtain a lead in several other ways. The first is by looting chests in the following locations:

• Ancient City (16.1%)
• Woodland Mansion (28.3% in Java, 27.9% in Bedrock)
• Buried Treasure in Bedrock Edition Only (34.3%)

Furthermore, there is a 2.2% chance that you will unearth a lead item while brushing suspicious gravel blocks in the Trail ruins structures. Unexpectedly, the most common way to get the lead is by buying it 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.

All Use of Lead in Minecraft

1. Taking Lead off a Mob

To take the lead off a mob, you can either right-click the mob or use a pair of shears in Minecraft. Moreover, if you get far away from the leashed mob (more than 12 blocks), the lead will break and be dropped near that mob.

2. Leash Multiple Mobs Together

An amazing fact about the lead is that you can have multiple mobs on leads at once. You can even create a caravan of mobs, one after another, using a single lead. This will enable you to transport many mobs across a short distance easily.

3. Tie Mobs to a Fence

When you reach your destination, you can strap a lead to any fence post to keep the mob(s) in a particular 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 impossible on the Java version.

4. Transporting Mobs in Minecraft

You may use a lead to direct Minecraft mobs horizontally and vertically. If the mob is seven or more blocks away from the player holding the lead, it will be suspended in the air.

Finally, if you’re thinking of taking them to the sky, simply attach one end of the lead to a happy ghast and the other to any mob or a boat to transport them over larger distances.

List of All Mobs Tied Using a Lead

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 and now in Java with the Minecraft Summer Drop 2025, even though it seems strange. When the mob is leashed, they will follow the player closely in the direction of the movement.

To sum it up, leads are useful items that make time-consuming and frustrating tasks much 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.