Mob Menagerie: Cow

You’ll find cows all over the Overworld, in mostly grassy biomes – with the exception of mangrove swamps, meadows, snowy plains, and wooded badlands. Their spawn rates differ a little from biome to biome, but it’s rare that you’ll have to walk very far to find a cow unless you’re extremely unlucky.

If you’re off hunting cows, bring wheat and a bucket. The bucket will allow you to milk the cow, giving you a bucket of milk that can be used to clear any status effect immediately – very handy if you’re going up against a wither. The wheat will let you breed two cows together, creating a baby cow and some experience orbs you can pick up. The baby cow takes about 20 minutes to grow up into an adult.

We don’t recommend killing cows, but if you went a bit wild with the breeding and you’re forced to cull the population then you’ll find that these creatures drop leather and raw beef. The more Looting enchantment you have on your sword, the more they’ll drop. Be aware that baby cows don’t drop experience or items when killed.

Have you ever wondered how many cows there are on planet Earth? The answer in 2018 was about 1.5 BILLION – and the number has likely risen since! In fact, if you added all the cows on the planet together, they’d weigh about 400 million metric tons – making them the heaviest species on our planet. Second place goes to the Antarctic krill, which are much smaller but more numerous – they weigh about 379 million metric tons in total.

We’re here to talk about cows, though – not krill. Cows, often known as "cattle", are raised all over the world for meat, milk, or hides – as well as for riding, pulling carts and plows, and for their dung, which is used to create manure or fuel. In a few places, they’re also kept as pets, or for religious reasons. They’re smarter than you might think, too. They are able to tell humans apart from each other from their faces and have a good long-term memory – being able to memorize food locations for more than 50 days. They only need about four hours of sleep a day.

Unfortunately, Earth can’t really support the number of cows that are living on it. Cows are responsible for about 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and cattle farming is also a big cause of deforestation in tropical countries. If we want to stop climate change, we’re going to need to consume a lot less beef, milk, and leather.

Luckily, Minecraft’s Overworld can support as many cows as you want – at least until your computer memory runs out! So fill your inventory with wheat and feel free to go on a mass cow-breeding spree. Let’s create a bovine utopia filled with millions of happy, mooing cows!