Breeding food: 16 of 29 mobs accept exactly one item, and bees accept 29
Minecraft defines breeding food as tags. Over half the mobs take a single item, horses take eight, wolves eighteen, and the frog has a food tag pointing at other mobs.
Breeding food is not hardcoded per mob — it is a tag per mob, which is why a datapack can change it and why the lists are so uneven. Counted from Mojang's shipped tag files for 26.3.
29 mobs, and most take one thing
There are 31 item tags of the form <mob>_food. Two are not breeding foods — parrot_poisonous_food (the cookie that kills a parrot) and nautilus_bucket_food — which leaves 29 mobs, and the distribution is lopsided:
| mob | accepted foods |
|---|---|
| bee | 29 |
| wolf | 18 |
| nautilus | 10 |
| horse | 8 |
| chicken | 6 |
| parrot | 6 |
| pig, rabbit | 3 |
| cat, fox, llama, ocelot, piglin | 2 |
| 16 others | 1 |
More than half the mobs in the game accept exactly one item. Cows take wheat, sheep take wheat, goats take wheat, turtles take seagrass, striders take warped fungus — one item, no alternatives. The mobs people remember as fussy are actually the normal case; the flexible ones are the exception.
Bees are the outlier by a wide margin
29 accepted items, and they are flowers — dandelion, poppy, blue orchid, allium, the tulips, sunflowers and rose bushes — plus blossoming leaves, spore blossoms and a chorus flower. No other mob comes close, because "bee food" is really "anything that flowers", which is a much larger set than any other mob's diet.
If a bee farm is not breeding, the flower is almost certainly in the tag; check the placement instead.
Horses take eight, wolves eighteen
Horses take 8; wolves take 18 — every meat, plus fish and rabbit stew. That is worth knowing because both are also the mobs where the wrong food does something different rather than nothing — feeding heals or tames instead of breeding — so a long list does not mean any of them will start a pair.
The frog has a food tag that is not food
There are two tags named frog_food, in different registries:
- item →
slime_ball, which is what breeds frogs. - entity_type →
slime,magma_cube, which is what frogs eat — and only a magma cube yields a froglight.
The frog is the only mob in the game with a food tag pointing at other mobs, and mixing the two up is the usual reason a froglight farm produces nothing: slime balls breed frogs, live magma cubes make lights.
Crops are eight blocks, seeds are six items
cropsholds 8: beetroots, carrots, potatoes, wheat, melon stem, pumpkin stem, torchflower crop, pitcher crop.villager_plantable_seedsholds 6: wheat seeds, potato, carrot, beetroot seeds, torchflower seeds, pitcher pod.
The gap between the two lists is the useful part: melon and pumpkin stems are crops but are not plantable seeds for a farmer villager, which is exactly why a villager will never replant them and a melon farm cannot be villager-automated the way a wheat farm can.
For datapacks
Every list above is a tag, so adding a food is adding an entry — not patching mob code. For farmers, the tag that matters is villager_plantable_seeds: it decides what they plant, while the crops tag is not what they read — they harvest any fully grown crop block.