If you’ve ever tried to move a herd of sheep across your Minecraft world to a new farm, or keep your pet wolf from wandering off while you explore a cave, you know how frustrating it can be to keep mobs where you want them. If you’re wondering how do you make a leash on Minecraft, you’re in the right place. This simple item is one of the most underrated utility tools in the game, and it only takes a handful of easy to find materials to craft. I’ve used leashes for everything from relocating an entire village of cats to moving llamas across a desert biome, and once you master crafting and using them, you’ll wonder how you ever played survival without them.
Materials You Need to Make a Leash on Minecraft
Crafting a leash doesn’t require any rare or hard-to-find items, which makes it accessible even in the early stages of a new survival world. You will need exactly 4 string and 1 slimeball to craft one batch of leashes, and each craft gives you 2 leashes total, so you don’t have to repeat the process constantly for small projects.
String is one of the easiest resources to gather early on. You can get it by killing spiders that spawn at night, breaking cobwebs in abandoned mineshafts or strongholds, fishing, or even looting basic dungeon chests. You can also trade string with novice level shepherd villagers for emeralds if you have extra, but it’s almost always faster to collect it yourself. Don’t kill village cats for string, by the way, they keep creepers away from your base and are worth keeping around.
Slimeballs are the only slightly trickier material to find, but there are multiple reliable sources. You can get them by killing slimes, which spawn in swamp biomes at night during full moons, or in slime chunks below Y level 40 anywhere in the overworld. Slime chunks are the most reliable source of slimeballs for long-term survival play, since you can build a slime farm there to get unlimited supplies. You can also get slimeballs when baby pandas sneeze, or trade for them with wandering traders if you get lucky.
Step-by-Step Crafting Process for a Minecraft Leash
Once you have your materials gathered, crafting the leash only takes a few seconds, but there’s one key rule you need to remember first. Leashes can only be crafted in a 3x3 crafting table grid, not your personal inventory crafting space, so make sure you have a crafting table placed down before you start.
To craft the leash, open your crafting table and arrange the materials in this exact pattern:
First row (top): Place one string in the first slot, one string in the second slot, leave the third slot empty. Second row (middle): Place one string in the first slot, one slimeball in the second slot, leave the third slot empty. Third row (bottom): Leave the first two slots empty, place one string in the third slot. Once you arrange the items correctly, you’ll see 2 leashes pop up in the result slot on the right. Drag them to your inventory and you’re ready to go.
If your craft isn’t working, double check the placement of your materials. It’s easy to mix up the string positions, especially if you’re used to crafting other items that use string. You don’t need any special tools or upgrades to craft leashes, so this recipe works the same way in every version of vanilla Minecraft, including Bedrock and Java editions.
Alternative Ways to Get a Leash Without Crafting
If you haven’t found any slimes yet, or you just need a leash right away and don’t have time to gather materials, there are a few easy ways to get leashes without crafting them at all. Wandering traders are the fastest way to get leashes early in the game if you haven’t found a slime chunk yet, and there are other low-effort options too:
- Kill wandering traders: They always carry 2 leashes attached to their trader llamas, and both leashes drop when you kill the trader, no need to kill the llamas too. If you’re playing on peaceful mode, you can also lead the llamas far enough away from the trader to make the leash break and drop, so you don’t have to hurt anyone.
- Loot chests: Leashes spawn in dungeon chests, woodland mansion chests, and ancient city chests at a rate of roughly 15% per chest, so you might stumble on them while exploring for other loot. They’re also occasionally found in village shepherd chests.
- Trade with master-level shepherd villagers: Some shepherds will sell a leash for 2 emeralds, which is a better deal than buying from wandering traders if you have a village near your base and you’ve already leveled up a shepherd villager.
None of these methods are as reliable as crafting your own once you have a slime farm set up, but they’re great shortcuts when you need a leash quickly. I once found 3 leashes in a dungeon chest when I was just starting a new world, and it saved me hours of hunting for slimes so I could move my first group of cows to my base.
Pro Tips for Using Your Minecraft Leash Effectively
Now that you have your leashes, there are a few tricks to using them that most new players don’t know about, that will make them way more useful. First, you can leash almost all passive and neutral mobs, including wolves, cats, sheep, cows, llamas, bees, foxes, and even hoglins from the nether. You can’t leash hostile overworld mobs like creepers or zombies, or villagers and other players in vanilla Minecraft.
You can attach a leash to a fence post to keep a mob tied in one place permanently, as long as no one breaks the fence or the leash. This is perfect for keeping pet mobs near your base, or holding livestock in place while you build a new pen for them. You can also tie multiple mobs to the same fence post, so you don’t have to place a new fence for every mob you want to keep contained.
A few common mistakes to avoid: Don’t pull a leashed mob across a gap larger than 5 blocks, because the leash will break and the mob will be left behind. If you go through a nether or end portal with a leashed mob, the mob will follow you through and the leash will stay attached, which is a great way to move livestock to the nether for specialized farms. You can lead up to 10 leashed mobs at the same time, but they’ll get stuck on blocks or terrain way easier if you lead more than 4 or 5 at once.
Also, leashed mobs won’t despawn, even if you wander far away from them, which makes leashes perfect for saving rare mobs like pink sheep or blue axolotls until you can build a permanent home for them. If you accidentally drop a leash, it will stay on the ground where you let go, so you can run back and pick it up as long as you don’t leave the area for too long.
Whether you’re building a new animal farm, moving a pet to your new base, or just keeping a random fox you found in the woods from running away, leashes are one of the handiest tools you can have in your inventory. Now that you know how do you make a leash on Minecraft, you can stock up on them before your next big exploration trip, so you never have to leave a beloved pet or useful mob behind again. Just remember to keep an eye out for slime chunks or wandering traders when you first start a new world, and you’ll have a steady supply of leashes in no time.