Wolf Armour and Every Pet in Minecraft

Six armadillo scutes and a brush turn a wolf from a liability into a pet that survives an actual fight. Everything below is current Java behaviour: where scutes come from, how wolf armour wears down and gets repaired, the nine wolf coats added in the Armoured Paws drop, and what cats, parrots and horses genuinely earn their keep doing.

Armadillos and where scutes come from

Armadillos spawn in the savanna family — savanna, savanna plateau and windswept savanna — and across the badlands, including wooded badlands and eroded badlands. They are passive, slow and completely harmless. There are two ways to get scutes off one, and neither involves killing it:

• Brushing. Craft a brush from a feather, a copper ingot and a stick stacked vertically in the grid, then use it on an armadillo. It drops one armadillo scute on the spot, then needs a short cooldown before it will give another. Each use costs the brush 16 durability, so one brush covers a lot of scutes but not an unlimited number — keep a spare feather and copper ingot around.
• Waiting. Left alone, an armadillo sheds a scute on its own every five to ten minutes, the same way a chicken lays eggs. Pen a few in and sweep the floor whenever you pass.

Killing an armadillo drops no scutes at all — just a little experience — so there is no reason ever to hit one.

The common failure here is sprinting. Armadillos roll into a ball when they take damage, when an undead mob gets close, or when a player sprints or rides at them, and a balled-up armadillo is not going to hand over anything. Walk the last few blocks, stay off the sprint key, and give it a moment to unroll before you brush.

To breed them, feed two adults a spider eye each. That is the only breeding item, which makes a spider source worth having — any general-purpose mob grinder that catches spiders will bury you in eyes. Babies follow a player holding spider eyes, so you can walk a whole family home rather than boating them one at a time. The usual rules from taming and breeding apply: leads work, boats work, and a fenced pen with a gate beats chasing them across a plateau.

Crafting and fitting wolf armour

Wolf armour costs six armadillo scutes. In the 3x3 grid: one scute in the top centre, all three slots across the middle row, and one in each bottom corner. The shape looks like a little saddle, which is roughly what it is.

To fit it, hold the armour and use it on an adult tamed wolf. It appears immediately as a body covering over the wolf's coat. From then on the armour absorbs damage that would otherwise have gone into the wolf, and it takes the durability hit instead — one durability point per point of damage absorbed, out of a maximum of 64. A wolf in armour survives skeleton volleys, zombie swings and drops that would flatten a bare one, and it even soaks damage types that normally ignore armour, including fall damage, dragon's breath and the Warden's sonic boom.

Two things it does not do. It does not make the wolf immortal: drowning, suffocation, freezing, magic damage, the wither effect and the void all bypass the armour completely and go straight to the wolf. And absorbing damage is not the same as being immune to it — lava is absorbed, but at four damage a tick it eats all 64 points in a few seconds and then the wolf is bare and on fire. Armour buys you time, not immunity.

Repairing, dyeing and removing it

• Repair. Use an armadillo scute directly on an armoured wolf. Each scute restores 8 of the armour's 64 durability points, so a stack of scutes is effectively an infinite supply. An anvil repair squeezes more out of each scute, but the in-the-field method is what you will actually use.
• Watch the cracks. The armour texture visibly cracks as it wears down. That is your cue to top it up. Do not wait until you are mid-fight to notice.
• Remove. Use shears on the wolf. The armour pops off as an item with its current damage intact and the wolf takes no harm. This is how you move armour between wolves or reclaim it before a risky trip.
• Dye. Craft wolf armour together with any dye to colour it, exactly like leather armour. Using the dyed armour on a cauldron of plain water washes the colour back out. Colour-coding a pack is genuinely useful when you are running six wolves and need to know which one you left sitting at the mine entrance.

The nine wolf variants

Since the Armoured Paws drop, wolves come in nine coats, and each spawns in a specific biome. The variant is purely cosmetic — stats are identical — but collecting them is a decent excuse to travel:

• Pale — taiga. The classic grey wolf everybody knows.
• Woods — forest.
• Ashen — snowy taiga.
• Black — old growth pine taiga.
• Chestnut — old growth spruce taiga.
• Rusty — sparse jungle.
• Snowy — grove.
• Spotted — savanna plateau.
• Striped — wooded badlands.

Tame any of them with bones. Each bone has roughly a one-in-three chance of working, so expect to spend several per wolf; hearts confirm the tame. Breed two tamed wolves by feeding them meat while both are at full health, and the pup has an even chance of taking either parent's coat. Cross-breed a snowy and a rusty and you get one or the other, not a blend.

Wolves eat any meat — raw or cooked beef, pork, chicken, mutton and rabbit — and since Armoured Paws they will also take fish and rabbit stew. Rotten flesh works too and does them no harm at all. Rotten flesh is the correct pack food: you have hundreds of it and it heals them fine. The only catch is that it is still meat, so feeding it to a pair that are already at full health will breed them.

Keeping a wolf alive

Wolf armour fixes the damage problem. It does not fix the wolf's judgement. The real failure modes:

• Creepers. Tamed wolves will not attack creepers or ghasts, even when you do — but that is not the protection it sounds like, because the pack still crowds around you, and you are the thing the creeper is walking towards. Kill creepers with a bow, or make it a habit to order wolves to sit before engaging. The same lighting and mob-proofing that keeps creepers out of your base keeps them away from your pack.
• Sitting is a leash. A sitting wolf never teleports and never moves. A standing wolf teleports to you once you get more than about 12 blocks away — but only if there is a safe spot to land. Leave a wolf sitting in a cave and you will find it there weeks later.
• Portals. That teleport does not cross dimensions. A wolf can walk into a nether portal and come through like any other mob, but it will never snap to you across the portal, so any wolf that does not physically step in is left behind for good. Leash them and walk them in, one at a time, and count heads on the other side.
• Skeletons. Standing wolves attack skeletons and their variants on sight, unprompted — it is the one fight they pick without you. Near a skeleton spawner, a standing pack will scatter and start it on its own.
• Accidental puppies. Feeding meat to a wolf that is already at full health breeds it. A pack of twenty is a lag machine that will body-block you off a ledge. Feed to heal only when the tail is visibly low — tail height is the wolf's health bar.

Two armoured wolves flanking you cover the gap your shield leaves open. If you are still relying on them to do your fighting, tighten up your own blocking and crits first; wolves are support, not a strategy.

Cats: the creeper deterrent

Cats are tamed with raw cod or raw salmon — raw only, never cooked — with about a one-in-three chance per fish. Find strays wandering villages, or the black ones that spawn alongside the witch in a swamp hut. They bolt if you approach normally, so sneak in, hold the fish still, and let the cat close the distance to you. Feed until hearts appear.

What a cat is actually for:

• Creepers and phantoms avoid them. Creepers keep about six blocks away from a cat and phantoms about sixteen, even mid-chase. Keep one near your front door and one in your bedroom and you will lose far fewer doorframes.
• Morning gifts. Sleep through the night with a tamed cat nearby and there is a good chance it leaves a present on the floor when you wake — string, a feather, raw chicken, rotten flesh, rabbit hide or a rabbit's foot, with a much rarer phantom membrane. The rabbit's foot is the prize: it is the ingredient for Leaping potions and is otherwise annoying to farm, so a cat is a slow, free feeder for your brewing stand.

The catch: a cat sitting on a chest stops you opening it, and cats love chests, beds and furnaces. Resist the obvious fix, though — a cat that has been ordered to sit cannot give you a gift at all, because it needs to be free to move to your bed while you sleep. Leave it standing and give it its own bed well away from your storage wall instead.

Ocelots, incidentally, cannot be tamed at all any more — you can only win their trust with raw fish so they stop fleeing, and breed them.

Parrots: a cave alarm on your shoulder

Parrots live in jungles, sparse jungles and bamboo jungles, and are tamed with any seed — wheat, melon, pumpkin, beetroot, torchflower seeds or pitcher pods. Each one has only about a one-in-ten chance of working, so bring a stack and keep feeding until hearts appear. Walk into a tamed parrot and it hops onto your shoulder.

Never feed a parrot a cookie. It kills the bird instantly. There is no warning and no undo.

Their real function is audio. A parrot imitates the idle sounds of hostile mobs within about twenty blocks, pitched up, so a shoulder bird in a cave tells you a creeper is close before you see it. They also dance to a jukebox, come in red, blue, green, cyan and grey, and cannot be bred at all — every parrot you own has to be tamed in the wild. They are extremely fragile, so leash them at home rather than taking them into a fight.

Horses, donkeys, mules, llamas and camels

Horses are tamed by mounting them repeatedly with an empty hand until hearts appear. Feeding the horse first raises its temper and cuts the number of attempts needed: sugar, wheat and an apple each add a little, a golden carrot adds more, and a golden apple adds the most by a wide margin and will often tame a horse in one or two mounts. Golden carrots and golden apples are also the only two items that trigger breeding, which is where the confusion usually comes from.

Once tamed you still need a saddle. As of 1.21.6 a saddle is craftable from three leather and one iron ingot in any arrangement — the recipe only unlocks once you have picked up leather. If you would rather not kill four cows, saddles are still all over chest loot in dungeons, temples, nether fortresses and bastions, come up as fishing treasure, are sold by master-level leatherworkers, and drop from every ravager you kill.

Horse stats are rolled at spawn and never change. Health lands between 15 and 30 points. Jump height runs from barely over a single block on a bad horse to somewhere north of five on a good one, and top speed from under 5 blocks per second up to around 14.5. You cannot enchant or improve a horse — you can only breed a better one. A foal's stats are drawn from both parents plus a fresh random roll, so breeding your two best horses with golden carrots trends upward over generations without ever guaranteeing an improvement. Full detail on the breeding maths and testing jump height is in the horse guide.

Horse armour comes in leather, iron, gold and diamond. Only the leather version is craftable, and only leather can be dyed; the metal sets are chest loot.

• Donkeys and mules take a chest for 15 extra inventory slots. A donkey is a mobile shulker box you own on day three.
• Llamas carry cargo based on their strength stat, spit at anything that annoys them, and form caravans — leash one and the rest follow in a line. Ideal for hauling a base move overland.
• Camels seat two players and stand tall enough that most ground melee mobs — zombies, vindicators, hoglins — simply cannot reach you. They cannot jump at all; instead they dash on demand, launching around twelve blocks forward and one block up. Breed them with cactus.
• Skeleton horses only appear from lightning traps during thunderstorms, and are more trophy than transport.

Which pet is worth the effort

• Armoured wolves — the only pet that meaningfully fights for you. Two armoured wolves and a stack of scutes is a genuine combat upgrade.
• Cats — passive creeper and phantom defence at your base, plus a trickle of rabbit's feet.
• Parrots — early warning for hostile mobs while you mine. Fragile, cosmetic otherwise.
• Horses — overland speed, plus jump height that turns broken terrain into a non-issue.
• Camels — no jump, but two seats, a twelve-block dash and a saddle height that most melee mobs cannot reach.
• Donkeys and llamas — storage on legs for long-haul mining trips and base relocations.
• Armadillos — not a pet so much as a renewable resource. Pen them, brush them, and forget them.