Tutorials/Wolves

This guide will inform you on how to find, tame, and live with wolves.

Preparation for obtaining a wolf
In order to tame a wolf, you first need bones. It may be necessary to collect a large number, as the number of bones required to tame a wolf is randomized to an extent.

The simplest way to collect bones would be to find and kill a skeleton, but a more cautious or efficient method is to use a mob trap/farm. Click here for a tutorial on how to build a mob farm.

Keep in mind that you should be adequately prepared before setting out to collect bones. You should not start looking for a wolf until about mid-game. Preparing to get bones can be a very dangerous process. Earlier in the game, you can find bones simply by wandering over open ground after sunrise; the light from the rising sun kills skeletons, and their bones can be found littering the ground.

Finding and taming a wolf
Once you have acquired bones to tame a Wolf you can set out to find one. Wolves spawn in light, so searching during the daytime may help. You should explore areas that you have not explored before, as animals spawn in new chunks much more likely than in chunks you explored before. Wolves are also more likely to spawn in Taiga biomes.

Once you have located a wolf, right click on the wolf while holding bones in your hand, and once the required number of bones have been used, heart particles will float around the Wolf and its skin will change to an alternate version with a red collar.

Each bone has a 1/3 chance of taming the wolf, thus you need 12 bones to be more than 99% confident of taming any given wolf.

You can have more than one wolf.

Interaction with tamed wolves
Now that you have a tamed wolf you can command it. Right-clicking on it without a food item in hand will cause it to switch stance between sitting and following. While sitting it will remain stationary and won't despawn, whereas when following, it will accompany you and teleport to you if you get distanced from it. Sitting wolves will still defend you if you are attacked. Attacking or being attacked by a mob or player will cause your tamed wolf to attack it, with the exception of creepers (to prevent the tamed wolf dying to creeper explosions). When following you, the wolf travels to your general direction. It will attempt to pathfind around hazards (lava, cacti, ravines, caves, etc.) but this is not foolproof (although it is unlikely that your wolf will be harmed from these hazards), so if there is a crevasse or a lava pit between you and the following wolf, it is possible, but unlikely that it will fall into the crevasse or burn to death in the lava. To stop this from happening, you can slowly guide the wolf around it. If you get too far away, the wolf can teleport to you; be careful on ice, as the teleporting wolf may teleport beneath it and drown.

The wolf can take damage and the amount of health it has remaining is indicated by the angle of its tail from vertically down, with 100 degrees (i.e. tail held high) being 100% health and decreasing downwards as its health decreases further. To heal your Wolf you can feed it cooked or raw porkchops. However, since Beta 1.8 any form of meat will do. This includes rotten flesh which appears to have no adverse effects on wolves. It is important to note that cooking food does not provide extra benefits so raw meat works just as well as cooked. Feeding your wolf will also put it into "love mode", and if there is another wolf nearby that is also in "love mode", it will attempt to pathfind to it and will breed a baby wolf.

As an important note, remember to prevent your wolf from entering a minecart as it will not teleport to you, and thus despawn.

Breeding
As of snapshot 12w03a, wolves can now be bred much the same as passive mobs, except they use meat instead of wheat. This applies to already tame wolves, and there is currently no known way to use this to give someone else a wolf in SMP. Baby wolves behave similarly to the adults.

Techniques
Make a wolf sit on a trapdoor above water and wire the trapdoor to a button or a set of buttons. You can scatter these buttons around your world wiring them all to the same trapdoor. When the button is pressed, the trapdoor will open, the wolf will drop into the water, stand and teleport to you, thus making an "emergency" wolf spawn button.