#minecraft turtles

My babies have been born 🫶🫶

Jack, if ye perchance happen upon this post, I can tell ya a bit about turtles that may aid you in making a more humane home for them. And of course, this information may also be useful to any other fellow crafters. 

First off turtles can be bred with sea grass. Unlike every other breedable mob, breeding turtles does not immediately result in a baby turtle. Instead, one of the turtles becomes pregnant with up to 4 eggs, which can actually be seen in the pregnant turtle becoming slightly larger. This turtle will then swim back to the beach they spawned/hatched on to lay the egg(s),also called the turtle’s home beach. There it will dig in the sand a bit and chose a block of sand upon which to lay it’s eggs. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: IN ORDER TO LAY EGGS, THE TURTLE MUST RETURN TO IT’S HOME BEACH! 

Once the turtle has laid it’s eggs, you can collect them with a silk touch pickaxe and take them anywhere in the world you like to hatch them, as long as you place the eggs on regular sand. Wherever they hatch will be their home beach. Turtle always remember and return to their home beach, making it so that if you hatch some turtle on Ireland’s shores, though they may swim off for some time, they’ll always come back, so you need not keep them trapped. 

If you want to contain them, just to keep them from getting to far away, just make sure you give them some space in an aquatic biome to swim in or they will just bunch together in corners trying to get out and that just ends up looking depressing. Be aware that the game code does not recognize every little patch of water as an aquatic biome. If your F3 doesn’t say ocean, the turtle doesn’t “see” an ocean and thought it will prefer swimming in something over nothing, it’ll still try to get to the nearest ocean.

Turtle eggs go through 3 growing stages before hatching, which can be seen by cracks appearing on the egg. These cracks are a good sign, not a bad one, so no need to fear for your babbies.

Be very careful around turtle eggs because dropping items, allowing gravity affected blocks to fall, or big enough mobs (yourself included) walking on them will, over time, shatter the eggs. Many hostiles will seek out turtle eggs to trample them. 

After typically several day/night cycles, the eggs will hatch and a baby turtle will appear. At this time, your work as a mama is still not complete. Most hostile mobs, as well as wolves, foxes, and stray cats will all attack and kill baby turtles. They will need your protection until they grow up (as with all other mobs, takes 20 minutes and feeding them deducts 10% of the remaining grow time).