Mob Menagerie: Mooshroom

Nonetheless Mooshrooms have been wandering around these rare mycelial islands since the first full release of Minecraft, version 1.0.0, all the way back in November 2011. Originally they could interbreed with cows, but that’s no longer the case. Today, if you want to breed them, then you’ll need to start with at least two mooshrooms and feed them both wheat. Wheat can also be used to lead mooshrooms around, as can leashes.

Just like a cow, Mooshrooms can be milked. Use a bucket and you’ll get a bucket of slightly mushroomy-tasting milk. Use a bowl, though, and you’ll get something much more delicious – a warm, tasty mushroom stew that’ll restore three hunger icons, and give you a bunch of saturation. Once eaten, you get the bowl back and you can use it on the poor mooshroom again until you’re sated.

But wait, there’s more! A red mooshroom that’s struck by lightning will change color and become brown. Or, very occasionally, two red mooshrooms bred together will have a brown offspring. These brown variants seem to have a different digestive system – they can be fed flowers, and will then produce suspicious stew when milked with a bowl. For example, feed one an oxeye daisy and you’ll get a stew with a regeneration effect. Try different flowers and see what effects you get.

If you’re too creeped out by Mooshrooms then there are two ways you can get rid of them. One is kind, the other is not. The kind way is to use shears to cut the mushrooms off its back – it’ll turn into a regular cow, and the mushrooms won’t grow back. The unkind way is to kill it – it’ll drop some beef and maybe some leather, again with a faint mushroomy scent. Quick reminder that killing baby animals yields no items or experience, and makes you a monster.

This is the point where I would usually bring in some sort of real-world comparison to the mooshroom, but I’m sorry to inform you that there are no animals on Earth that can be milked to get delicious stew. If there were, then the poor things would inevitably be hooked up in their millions to milking machines in giant factories. Kind of like cows are.

So it’s probably for the best that Mooshrooms can only be found in Minecraft. Let’s allow them to live on their weird, mushroomy islands in peace.