Pigs are one of the oldest mobs in Minecraft, and their role is just as important. These passive little farm animals are a friendly and plentiful source of cooked porkchops – a valuable food source.
But if you want more porkchops, you'll need to keep your pigs fed and healthy. This allows you to breed more pigs, while also being able to ride them as mounts!
Here's everything you need to know about Minecraft pigs and how to feed them.
Fun fact: While originally working on pigs, the developers accidentally distorted the character model. It looked so strange that they decided to keep the broken model, reworking it into what's now known as the Creeper.
Feeding Pigs with Carrots, Potatoes, and Beetroots
Unlike most farm mobs, who eat wheat or seeds, pigs can only be fed root vegetables. This includes carrots, potatoes, and beetroots. Holding any of the three food items will cause all pigs nearby to follow you around, while "using" the crop on a pig will feed it to them.
Important: Be careful not to accidentally eat the veggies yourself! Quickly tapping the use button instead of holding down can avoid this.
Here are the quickest ways to find each root veggie for yourself.
- Carrots and potatoes can be found in villages, sometimes dropped by zombies or as loot in pillager outposts and shipwrecks.
- Beetroots can be found in villages (with an increased chance in desert villages), and from chests found in naturally generated structures like mineshafts and monster rooms.
A Quick Note On Pig Breeding
The main reason to feed a pig is for breeding. When two pigs are fed near each other, they will pair off and create a baby. Since you need to kill pigs to get porkchops, having lots of pigs available for breeding is important.
If you breed two pigs from different biomes together, the baby will be the same as one of the two parents, chosen at random. Since these are purely cosmetic differences, you don't really need to worry about any of this if you don’t want to.
How To Ride Pigs Using a Carrot on a Stick
Pigs in Minecraft present an unconventional travel method as you can outfit them with a saddle. But even while riding the pig, you still can't control it. To make it move how you want, you instead have to craft and equip a carrot on a stick.
How to Craft a Carrot on a Stick
You can craft a carrot on a stick by combining a fishing rod with a carrot in a crafting menu. The specific placement isn't important, so long as the carrot is one box down and to the right of the fishing rod.
While you're holding the carrot on a stick, the pig will walk in whatever direction you are facing. What's more, you can activate the item to give the pig a temporary speed boost. This will use up a few durability points from the carrot on a stick, while making the pig move at double the speed for a short while.
The only other mob to be steered this way are striders, who can be ridden across lava using a warped fungus on a stick.
Minecraft Mods That Make Pigs More Useful
Being present in the game for such a long time, pigs are unsurprisingly one of the easiest animals to find mods for. That's great since the vanilla game pig doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond being used as food. These mods give pigs some much deserved diversity and utility not present in the standard game version.
Pam’s Pig Skin
From the creators of Pam’s Harvestcraft, Pam’s Pig Skin is a more minimalist mod that makes pigs extra purposeful. With it installed, pigs will drop a new item upon death called pig skin.
Pig skin can be crafted into leather, making it another reliable source of an otherwise uncommon material. To spice things up, you can also make it into a football that can be then thrown around for a bit of “innocent” fun.
Critter Armory
Who doesn’t want to keep their prized pigs safe? Critter Armory takes the horse armor concept and expands it to apply across several additional animals, pigs included!
It also adds in two new food items, balanced feed and vitality feed, which heal and raise the max HP of the animal you feed it to.
Pig Manure - Poopin’ Pigs!
Emulating a common real-world purpose of breeding pigs, this mod adds in a new manure item to the game. Pigs will drop it regularly, which can then be picked up and used in various crafting recipes.
The manure can be also used to dye things like you would with brown dye, as a fertilizer for crops, or even baked in a furnace to make bricks. In short, getting the Pig Manure - Poopin’ Pigs! mod will instantly make pigs one of the more valuable farm animals in the game.
How to Install Minecraft Mods
You can install the above mods automatically using the CurseForge app or manually by placing the mod files within your game’s mods folder. Both methods allow you to easily add custom features and enhancements into your vanilla Minecraft experience.If you want to learn more, you can read our detailed guide on how to install Minecraft mods.
Common Issues and Quick Fixes
The pig won't follow me
Ensure that the pig you want to lure is within 6 blocks of you and has not recently been used for breeding. Double-check that you are also holding the right food in your main hand.
If, for whatever reason, that still doesn't work, you can forcefully pull a pig along using a lead. Leads can be crafted using five pieces of string.
I can't plant beetroots
While potatoes and carrots can be replanted directly in farmland to grow more of them, beetroots need to grow from seeds. You cannot craft seeds from the beetroot itself, and will need to instead rely on more seeds spawning on harvest.
Fortunately, all beetroots will drop at least one (and as many as four) seeds whenever harvested. So once you have at least one, you'll naturally get more over time.
My saddle is stuck on a pig
Don't worry, you don't need to kill the pig to get the saddle back. Instead, use shears on the pig to drop the saddle safely.
This method applies to all animals that are capable of being saddled.