The Essential Guide to Crafting and Using Leads in Minecraft (2024)

Leads are crucial to making your dreams of becoming a Minecraft breeder come true. They help you capture animals and keep them in one spot, safely away from danger. Leads are also the perfect way to transport animals or keep your horses in check—you can even use them to move multiple animals at once.

Here’s everything you need to know about making and using leads in Minecraft.

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How to Craft a Lead

You can either craft or find your lead. First up, you’ll learn how to craft it.

Gathering Materials

First, before you can make a lead, you need to gather the required materials.

You’ll need four slimeballs, one fishing rod, and one string. You can find these items in several places throughout the game world.

How to Find Strings

String can be found by killing spiders, cave spiders, or cave spider jockeys. You’ll have the best luck finding it close to dungeons—but be careful—these mobs can be deadly.

How to Find Slimeballs

Slimeballs drop from killing slimes, found in swamps and underground near bedrock. The larger the slime, the more slimeballs you’ll get from it.

How to Find a Fishing Rod

Fishing rods must be crafted using three sticks and two strings. You can also find them in chest loot in shipwrecks, villages, and ocean monuments.

Crafting the Lead

Once you have the required items, you’re ready to craft the lead. First, find a crafting table and search for the recipe or craft it manually.

To craft the lead manually, you’ll need to combine the four slimeballs, the fishing rod, and the string in the 3x3 crafting grid. The pattern is one slimeball in the bottom left, then another in the middle, followed by one in the upper right, and another in the lower right.

Once you’ve arranged the items, the option to craft a lead will appear.

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How to Find a Lead

Next, you’ll learn to find leads naturally within your Minecraft world.

Finding Leads as a Loot Chest

You can find leads as loot in chests in different structures throughout the world. Some of these include shipwrecks, villages, desert temples, mansions, and strongholds.

You can also find leads in ocean monuments, but these structures are tough to find and loot without being killed by their guardians.

Taking Leads from Wandering Traders

Wandering traders can also offer leads, who appear randomly throughout the world. However, they’ll only offer one lead at a time and want something in return.

It’s much easier to take it from them in one of two ways:

1. Separate a llama. If you move one of the trader’s llamas more than two blocks away, the llama will drop the lead in front of them.
2. Kill the trader. If you kill the trader, they’ll drop the lead upon disappearing. You will have to fight their llamas, however.

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How to Use Leads

On the surface, leads seem only moderately useful. But once you understand their full range of applications, you'll realize how useful they can be.

Leashing Animals

Leashes are primarily used to leash animals so that you can move them around or keep them safely in one spot. To leash an animal, right-click it with the lead in your hand.

You can also use leads with multiple animals at once. For example, if you want multiple horses to move in the same direction, you can attach a lead to the first horse and then attach the other horses to the lead.

Horse Taming

You can also use leads to tame horses, donkeys, and mules. To do this, you must right-click the horse with the lead in your hand and then lead it away from the rest of its herd.

You can then repeat the process until the horse is tamed and will follow you, even when the lead isn’t attached.

Transporting Animals

Leads are also helpful in transporting animals. You can attach a lead to an animal and then mount it, bringing it with you wherever you go.

Be warned, however, that animals tend to be slower when you carry them with a lead, so don’t expect to travel too far or fast.

Tying Animals to Fences

Finally, you can use leads to tie animals to fences. This can be an excellent way to let them graze while keeping them safe at the same time.

To tie animals to fences, use the same process of right-clicking with the lead. Make sure the animal stands close enough to the fence, or it won’t work.

Other Things to Know About Leads:

• You can only attach one lead per animal. If you attach a second lead, the first one will break.
• Leads have a limited range and will break if you move too far away from the animal.
• Leads also have durability and will break over time.

Minecraft Leads FAQs

Q: Are leads only good for moving animals?

A: No! Leads have a variety of other uses, including leash-taming horses and tying animals to fences.

Q: Can I attach multiple Leads to the same animal?

A: No, you can only attach one lead to an animal at a time. If you attach a second lead, the first one will break

Q: What's the easiest way to find leads?

A: Stealing from wandering traders is the easiest way to find a lead. You can either move their llama(s) away from them or kill them outright.

Wrapping Up

Leads are versatile tools essential for any Minecraft homesteader. And now that you’ve finished this guide, you’re ready to craft or find a lead, and use it to transport, leash or tie your animals to fences.

Happy Leading!

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