Pig mob in Minecraft

What pigs eat and how to breed them

Pigs breed with carrots, potatoes or beetroot, three crops you often find growing in village farms. Wheat does nothing for them. Hold one of these crops and pigs follow you; feed two adults and a piglet appears. Feeding the piglet the same crops makes it grow faster.

Carrots and potatoes replant themselves from the harvest, so a small field next to the pen keeps the farm going forever. Kill the adults for raw porkchop; with Fire Aspect they drop already cooked.

How to ride and steer a pig

Put a saddle on a pig, crafted from three leather and an iron ingot, then right-click to get on. On its own, a saddled pig wanders wherever it wants. To steer it, hold a carrot on a stick: the pig walks where you look. Using the stick gives a short burst of speed and wears it down; when it breaks, you get the fishing rod back.

Pigs throw their rider off when they go underwater, so avoid deep water on a long ride. A saddled pig drops its saddle when it dies.

Lightning turns pigs into zombified piglins

When lightning strikes near a pig, the pig becomes a zombified piglin. Those are neutral until hit, but a whole pen of them next to your house is an unpleasant surprise. A lightning rod above the pen draws nearby strikes away from the animals.

Cold and warm pigs

Like cows and chickens, pigs pick one of three looks from the biome they spawn in: a cold variant in snowy and cold biomes, a warm one in savannas, jungles and badlands, and the classic pink pig elsewhere. The variant changes nothing else: same food, same drops, same saddle.

✓ Checked in Java Edition 26.3 · updated 1 November 2026