Breeding

Breeding is a game mechanic that allows mobs of the same species to breed with each other to produce offspring.

Mechanics
Each animal that can be bred has a food item used to lead and breed it (there are a few special cases, described below). Once an animal notices a player holding its food, it follows the player until either the player is out of range, the player stops holding the item, or it begins the breeding process, or when attacked. This includes baby animals. Note that animals are uninterested in food lying on the ground. One item per parent is needed to breed a single baby.

Love mode
When an animal is fed its food, it enters "love mode," preparing to breed with another animal of the same species that is also in love mode. Animals that are in love mode emit heart particles constantly. When both animals are fed, they path-find toward each other, up to eight blocks away. The two animals "kiss" for about two and a half seconds, and then a baby animal of the same species spawns either in between the parents or on the same blocks as the parent that was spawned first, which ends love mode for the parents. Once the parents breed they also drop. They cannot enter love mode again for 5 minutes, and they may breed only once per item given. However, they can still be herded with the appropriate material, as can the baby. An animal exits love mode if it does not breed 30 seconds after being fed; however, it can enter love mode again immediately.

After the baby animal has spawned, it follows its parents for 20 minutes before growing to full size. However, if the baby animal cannot find its parents, it randomly chooses another nearby adult animal to follow. The growth of baby animals can be slowly accelerated using the animal's breeding item. Each use takes 10% off the remaining time to grow up, except for horses and llamas where different breeding items speed up the growth by different amounts.

The growth from a young animal to a fully grown animal can be significantly accelerated if the young animal is given the food necessary for breeding. Then the same green sparkling particles appear around the young animal that are also seen when using bone meal in agriculture. A single feeding reduces the time a young animal still needs to grow out by 10%. If you feed a newly born young animal once, it will be fully grown in 18 minutes instead of 20 minutes. If you feed it a second time, 10% of the remaining time will be deducted, the young animal will then be grown up in 16 minutes and 12 seconds. The less time is left, the less and less time is shortened. This makes it inefficient to feed a young animal until it is fully grown. You should only feed it a few times and just wait the rest of the time. If you want to feed a young animal, it should be fed exactly eight times. From the ninth time onwards, the time saved by one feed unit is less than a minute.

Villagers


Villagers do not breed automatically when given food. Villager breeding depends on both the number of valid beds in the area (see the village page for full details), as well as whether the villagers are "willing." A villager may become willing if they have 3 bread, 12 carrots, 12 potatoes, or 12 beetroots in their inventory. They may also become willing as a result of trading with a player. When they breed, they produce a smaller villager. Unlike many baby animals, baby villagers do not have big heads $$. Baby villagers run around the village, and can "play" tag. A baby villager killed by a zombie may produce a baby zombie villager, depending on difficulty.

Breeding formula
A player may want to know the number of mobs required in a farm to reach a certain goal, for example: to make a full-powered enchanting table with bookshelves (46 leather needed) or for full leather armor (24 leather), in case the player has a cow farm. There is a formula to calculate how many mobs needed to have in a farm, by the starting number and if the player waits until all the mobs become mature (this does not apply to villagers):

where Xn is the number of mobs at generation n.

When using larger values of n, it may be easier to approximate the number of mobs using an exponential function to avoid doing too many recursive calculations:

where the input is the n-th generation and the output is the approximate number of mobs after breeding. Note that the constant  is Euler's number.

Alternatively, if the player starts with  mobs and want to reach a population of at least N, it can be achieved in   generations.

Baby mobs


Baby animals are smaller variations of their parents, having small bodies, relatively big heads, higher-pitched sounds, and faster walking speeds. Lambs cannot be sheared for their wool, chicks do not lay eggs, calves and mooshroom calves cannot be milked, and horses, mules, donkey foals, and piglets cannot be ridden. Baby animals follow one of their parents (within 8 blocks) until they grow up (if the parent dies or there is none, they pick a nearby adult of their kind). Tame puppies and kittens follow their owner if the parent is absent or sitting, and puppies attack aggressive mobs just as a mature dog would. They do not drop loot or experience if killed (excluding baby zombies and baby zombified piglins).

When lambs are born, they usually inherit the color of one of their parents, chosen at random. However, if the parents have "compatible" colors (meaning that their corresponding dye items could be combined into a third dye), the lamb inherits a mix of the parents' colors (see Dye). This holds even if one or both of the parents have just been sheared before breeding and have not yet grown their coats back. $$, however, lambs do not inherit the combined colors of their parents.

Baby animals can be manually spawned by spawn eggs on a grown animal. This also works on zombies or variants.

Baby animals may also be spawned using the command with a negative   tag; for example, using  spawns a baby sheep at the player's position, that matures in 100 ticks. For zombies and piglins, the  tag is used instead.

Trivia

 * Any two adult animals of the same species can breed with each other, even if one animal is the parent of the other.
 * Baby squid and baby dolphins exist in Bedrock Edition, even though they cannot be bred by the player.