Mob Menagerie: Wolf

Wolves spawn naturally in a whole collection of biomes – forests, groves, most kinds of taiga, savanna plateau, wooded badlands, and sparse jungle. Depending on the biome, you’ll get a different species, and different species live in differently-sized packs. Those found in Badlands tend to be family creatures, living in groups of up to eight. But those found in mountain groves, where food is scarce, tend to be loners.

Despite their fearsome reputation, wolves will mostly just ignore players – hunting down smaller creatures like rabbits, sheep, and foxes instead. If attacked, they’ll get angry and fight back, which is not recommended. But if you feed one bones, you’ll be able to tame it and bring it home. Tame two, and you’ll be able to breed them with meat to produce a pup, whose growth can be accelerated with more meat.

A tamed wolf will also fight for you – they’ll attack any creatures that you attack, tearing at them with their fearsome teeth. If they take damage in the process, their tail will lower and they’ll need to be fed meat to heal. You can reduce the damage that they take, allowing them to fight for longer, by giving them a set of wolf armor made from armadillo scutes. If you don’t want a wolf to follow you, then point at it and hit the “use” key and it’ll sit on its butt until you return.

Wolves in the real world are even more remarkable than those in Minecraft! They’re a highly social, expressive carnivore that hunts in packs and has a long and fascinating history with humans.

In some societies, particularly those that raise livestock, wolves are feared, hated, and sometimes hunted to stop them killing sheep, goats, or cattle. But in others, they’re respected and even worshiped – the creation myths of ancient Rome, China, Pawnee indigenous people, and Norse peoples all feature wolves in different ways. 

Humans are not natural prey for wolves – they’re far more likely to avoid people than attack them. The vast majority of recorded attacks on humans have been from wolves suffering from a disease called rabies, which causes them to behave more aggressively. Real wolves are definitely not the villains they’re made out to be in kids’ stories.

In fact, wolves were the first species that humans managed to domesticate – in the time of hunter-gatherers, at least 30,000 years ago. Interestingly, the creatures that we now call dogs descend from a type of wolves that are not the same as the modern wolf population. It’s thought that the process of turning those wild wolves into modern dogs may have taken tens of thousands of years of slow trust-building on both sides. 

Luckily it doesn’t take so long in Minecraft! A few bones, some belly rubs, and you’ll have yourself a furry friend before you can say “sit!”