Turtles are common passive mobs that move both on land and in water.
Spawning
Turtles spawn in the Overworld on warm beaches, occasionally in small groups of up to 5 individuals.
Drops
Turtles drop when they die:
- 0–2 pieces of seagrass
- 1–3 experience orbs if killed by a player or tamed wolf.
When a baby turtle grows up to an adult, it drops a scute.
Behavior
Turtles can both move around on land and swim in water. They move slowly on land, but they can swim at a fast speed in water. Like other passive mobs, they will move around aimlessly and will flee when attacked. When on land, they will generally attempt to move to the nearest water source. When on top of eggs, they levitate.[1]
Turtles will follow a player holding sea grass.
Turtles cannot be attached to leads.[2]
Being attacked
Baby turtles are attacked by the following mobs:
- Zombies, Zombie Villagers and Husks
- Drowned
- Skeletons and Strays
- Wither Skeletons
- Wild Ocelots and wild Wolves
- Players
Breeding
If two turtles are fed with seagrass, they will enter love mode. One of the turtles will then have an egg in its inventory, and will begin making its way back to its home beach. Once the egg-filled turtle returns to its home, it will find a nearby sand block to lay the eggs on. After several seconds of digging action on top of the sand, it will lay 1–4 turtle eggs. A turtle can lay no more than 4 eggs per sand block.
Turtle eggs will grow through 3 stages before hatching into baby turtles, each stage taking a random amount of time according to received random ticks. Turtle eggs will only hatch at night, and will only hatch on sand.
The growth of baby turtles can be slowly accelerated using seagrass. Each use takes 10% off the remaining time to grow up.
Home location
The beach where the turtle is spawned at is remembered by the turtle as its home beach. No matter how far away a turtle travels, it will always return to the home beach before it lays its eggs after breeding.
Baby turtles get their home location from the position of the turtle eggs that they hatched from. If the player were to pick up the eggs and move them elsewhere, the baby turtles will remember the spot where they hatched as their home beach.
Data values
Turtles have entity data associated with them that contain various properties of the mob. Their entity ID is turtle.
- Entity data
- Additional fields for mobs that can breed
- Tags common to all entities
- Tags common to all mobs
- HasEgg: 1 or 0 (true/false) - true if the turtle has an egg.
- HomePosX: The X coordinate the turtle travels toward to lay its eggs after breeding.
- HomePosY: The Y coordinate the turtle travels toward to lay its eggs after breeding.
- HomePosZ: The Z coordinate the turtle travels toward to lay its eggs after breeding.
- TravelPosX: Used for swimming to random points in water.
- TravelPosY: Used for swimming to random points in water.
- TravelPosZ: Used for swimming to random points in water.
History
| release | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 17, 2012 | On Reddit, Jeb was asked "I asked at pax about turtles, any work done about those?" and replied "No... I saw Mo' Creatures' turtles and got a bit demotivated to do my own ones. Maybe later..." | ||||
| September 19, 2012 | In a Reddit post anticipating the addition of another animal mob (which turned out to be the bat in 12w38a), Jeb replied to confirm that it would not be a turtle: "The truth is that I'll maybe end up adding turtles one day, it's just that Mo's turtles are difficult to top." | ||||
| December 26, 2017 | File:Turtle Revision 0.png Turtle mobs were announced at Minecraft.net. | ||||
| upcoming | |||||
| 1.13 | 18w07a | ||||
| 18w07b | Turtles are now bred using sea grass instead of raw cod. | ||||
| 18w11a | Added drowned, which will attack turtles. | ||||
| Upcoming Bedrock Edition | |||||
| 1.5 | beta 1.5.0.4 | Added turtles. | |||
Issues
Issues relating to "Turtle" are maintained on the bug tracker. Report issues there.
Trivia
- With a height of 0.12 blocks, baby turtles are the shortest mobs in the game.
Gallery
- Turtle and Baby Turtle.png
A baby turtle on top of the head of an adult.








