How to Make a Lead in Minecraft

Sometimes, you stumble upon a cow in Minecraft and want to bring it 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, hostile mob, or perhaps every single mob in the game. To make this task possible, you can use a minecart or a boat for mob transportation. However, in some cases, it’s needed to 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. Created using just a single item, it makes your life so much easier. So, if you want one right now, keep reading as we show you how to make a lead in Minecraft.

What You Need to Make a Lead

The crafting recipe for a lead always gives two items at once. Thankfully, 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 your 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.
• Start the recipe by placing two strings in the first two slots of the topmost and middle rows.
• Next, place the fifth string in the bottom right corner of the grid in the last row.

• 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, or redstone clock.

Other Ways to Get Lead in Minecraft

Apart from crafting, you can obtain a lead in several 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 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.

All Lead Uses in Minecraft

1. Taking Lead off a Mob

To take the lead off of a mob, you can either right-click the mob again or use a pair of Minecraft shears in Minecraft. Also, 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

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 allow 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 upcoming 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 little items that can 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!