To breed Turtles in Minecraft, you’ll need a specific food item. This is similar to how you would breed other animals, like Horses and Pandas. However, since Turtles lay eggs, their in-game reproduction cycle has more steps.
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What You Need to Breed Turtles
You’ll need Seagrass to breed Turtles. It’s the only food that will cause them to enter love mode, which results in a pair of Turtles mating. Simply use some Seagrass on a couple of Turtles that are close to each other and they will soon begin to nuzzle. After a few seconds of this behavior, they will separate and one will become slightly thicker. This thicker Turtle is the pregnant one, who will lay their eggs upon reaching their home beach. On a related note, Turtles spawn in regular Beach biomes, but not the ‘stony’ or ‘snowy’ varieties.
How to Get Seagrass
Appropriately, the best place to find Seagrass is on the seafloor of Ocean biomes. It can grow 1 or 2 blocks high, however, you can only harvest it with the correct tool. The only tool that will cause Seagrass to drop as an item when broken are Shears. You can make some with 2 Iron Ingots. Place the ingots diagonally on any crafting grid to get a shiny new pair of Shears.
Seagrass can grow on Dirt, Sand, and Gravel. Furthermore, you can accelerate its growth with Bone Meal, just like with many other plants. As such, you can potentially make your own underwater Seagrass farm with basic resources.
Turtle Reproduction Information
After a couple of Turtles mate, the pregnant one will swim back to their home beach. A Turtle’s home beach is the stretch of Sand blocks where their egg hatched. When a Turtle is about to lay their eggs, they will always try to return to that same home beach, regardless of where they are.
How Many Eggs a Turtle Can Lay at a Time
When a pregnant Turtle reaches their home beach, they will spin around vigorously on it to dig their nest. Following this display, somewhere between 1 to 4 Turtle Eggs will appear on this nest block. Afterward, the Turtle will return to the water.
For potential Turtle farmers, it’s worth knowing that Turtles have no reproductive delay. This means that immediately after laying their eggs, Turtles can enter love mode and mate again.
How Long Turtle Eggs Take to Hatch
It will take around 5 in-game days for the eggs to hatch. As the Turtle Eggs get closer to hatching, you will see more and more cracks appear on them. After 3 cracks, an egg will hatch into a baby Turtle. If there is more than 1 Turtle Egg on a block of Sand, all of them will hatch along with the first. You can collect Turtle Eggs with a tool enchanted with Silk Touch, however, this will reset its growth progress. Furthermore, although Turtle Eggs do not necessarily need to hatch on the home beach of their parent, they still need to be on Sand or Red Sand to hatch.
How to Raise Baby Turtles
You can help baby Turtles grow quicker by feeding them Seagrass; 10 Seagrass will cause a baby to become fully grown. When a baby Turtle grows into an adult, it will always drop 1 Scute. However, if the baby Turtle dies, they will not drop a Scute. If you’re farming Turtles for their Scutes, you will need to make sure your babies grow up safely!
But that’s easier said than done. Baby Turtles are the smallest mob in the game—even smaller than Silverfish ad Endermites. As such, they’re easy prey for a lot of other mobs in the game that will attack them on sight. Here’s a list of overworld mobs that will attack baby Turtles:
- Zombies
- Zombie Villagers
- Husks
- Drowned
- Skeletons
- Strays
- Goats
- Wild Ocelots
- Wild Wolves
- Stray cats
- Foxes
