If you’ve spent any time exploring the swamp biomes in recent Minecraft updates, you’ve probably stumbled across the bouncy, bug-eyed frogs hopping around lily pads and muddy banks. They’re one of the most charming passive mobs added in the last few years, with three distinct color variants and drops that are super useful for both survival and creative builds. But if you want to keep them around your base or breed them for rare drops, you first need to answer a super common question: what do frogs eat in Minecraft? I remember spending 20 minutes wandering around my first swamp base with stacks of berries, wheat, and even spider eyes trying to feed my first frog before I figured out the right food, so I put together this guide to save you the same headache.
What Do Frogs Eat in Minecraft: Full Diet Breakdown
Frogs have two primary food sources in the game, and they work a little differently than food for most other passive mobs. Unlike sheep eat wheat, cows eat wheat too, and pigs eat carrots or potatoes, but frogs hunt for their own prey most of the time. Small slimes are the most accessible food source for frogs in most survival worlds, and you can be found in swamp biomes at night or in slime chunks deep underground. When a frog spots a small slime within 6 blocks, it will lunge at it, swallow it whole, and drop 0 to 2 slimeballs as a drop.
The second food source for frogs is small magma cubes, which only spawn in the Nether, usually in basalt deltas or nether wastes biomes. When a frog eats a small magma cube, it will drop a froglight block, which is one of the most sought-after decorative and useful light sources in the game. The color of the froglight depends entirely on the variant of frog that eats the magma cube, so you can target specific colors by raising frogs to get the exact blocks you want for your builds.
To breed two frogs together, you don’t need to give them either of these prey items. All you need are slimeballs, which you can get from killing larger slimes, looting chests, or collecting from frogs that eat small slimes. If you hold a slimeball in your hand, nearby frogs will follow you around, just like other passive mobs follow their favorite food. There are a lot of common misconceptions about what frogs eat, so here’s a quick list of items you definitely don’t need to waste time collecting for your frogs:
- Raw or cooked meat of any kind (cow, chicken, pork, mutton, rabbit)
- Berries, vegetables, or other crop foods made for passive mobs like sheep or cows
- Spider eyes, fermented spider eyes, or other hostile mob drops
- Seeds, wheat, bread, or any other food that works for chickens, pigs, or horses
How to Feed Frogs and Breed Them for Your Base
Breeding frogs is a super simple process once you have a few slimeballs and two frogs close enough water nearby. First, track down two frogs in a swamp biome, or bring two you already have kept in an enclosure. Hold a slimeball in your main hand, and right-click each frog once to feed them. You’ll see hearts pop up over their heads just like when you breed other mobs, which means they’ve entered love mode.
After a few seconds, one of the frogs will become pregnant, and will start searching for a block of water with at least one block of air above it to lay its frogspawn. It will lay the frogspawn directly on the surface of the water, and the frogspawn will hatch into tadpoles after 10 minutes, give or take. Tadpoles take about 20 minutes to grow into full frogs, and you can speed up the process by feeding them slimeballs too. If you want specific frog variants, you need to grow tadpoles in different biomes before they mature. Tadpoles raised in warm biomes like deserts or jungles will grow into white frogs, temperate biomes like swamps or plains will grow into orange frogs, and cold biomes like tundras or snowy mountains will grow into green frogs.
So you want to move frogs to your base from a swamp, you can either lead them with a slimeball in your hand, or put them in a boat and sail them back. They can jump up to three blocks high, so make sure any enclosure you build for them has walls at least four blocks high to stop them from escaping. I once built a 3-block high wall for my first frog enclosure, and woke up the next morning to find all my frogs hopping around my yard instead of the pen, so trust me on that one.
What You Get When Frogs Eat Magma Cubes and Slimes
Feeding frogs isn’t just for fun, it also gives you access to some really useful items that can save you a ton of grinding in survival mode. When frogs eat small slimes, they drop slimeballs, which you can use to make leads, sticky pistons, slime blocks, and magma cream for potions. You don’t have to fight small slimes yourself if you have a frog farm set up near a slime chunk, which cuts down on a lot of boring grinding for slime for your builds or redstone projects. I have a small frog pen built right on top of a slime chunk under my base, and I get stacks of slimeballs every week without ever having to pick up a sword.
The real reward for feeding frogs comes when they eat small magma cubes, though, because they drop froglight blocks. There are three different froglight colors: ochre (yellow) from orange frogs, pearlescent (purple) from white frogs, and verdant (green) from green frogs. Froglights are one of the only light sources in Minecraft that give off a soft, flameless light level of 15, making them perfect for interior builds where you don’t want fire risk from torches or lanterns, or for builds where you want a unique, soft glow instead of the harsh light of glowstone or sea lanterns. They also don’t melt ice or snow, so you can use them in cold biome builds without worrying about ruining your snowy landscape.
Froglights are also non-flammable, so you can use them in Nether builds without worrying about them catching on fire, and they can be mined with any tool, so you don’t need a silk touch pickaxe to pick them up and move them around. A lot of players use froglights for ceiling lights in their bases, path lighting around their bases, or even as decorative blocks in custom trees or build details. I used over 300 froglights in my recent magical castle build, and it turned out way better than it would have if I’d used regular torches or glowstone.
Pro Tips for Building a Functional Frog Farm in Survival
If you want to farm froglights or slimeballs on a large scale, you can build a simple frog farm in just a few hours with basic materials. First, decide if you want to farm slimeballs or froglights, or both. For a slimeball farm, find a slime chunk (you can use chunk base mods or in-game methods to find one), and build a 3-block high enclosed pen above the slime chunk. Add a few frogs to the pen, and build a small water area for them to breed if you want to expand your frog population over time. Slimes will spawn in the slime chunk below, and frogs will jump down to eat them, dropping slimeballs that you can collect with a hopper system below the pen.
For a froglight farm, you’ll want to build a similar enclosed pen, but connect it to a Nether portal that leads to a magma cube spawn area in the Nether, or build a magma cube spawner farm in the Nether and bring small magma cubes through the portal to the frog pen. Make sure you only let the pen with the right variant of frog for the froglight color you want to farm, so you don’t end up with a bunch of froglight colors you don’t need. You can also build separate pens for each frog variant if you want to farm all three froglight colors at the same time.
A few quick tips to make your farm work better: Make sure the area around your frog pen is lit up, so other mobs don’t spawn and get in the way of slimes or magma cubes spawning. Add lily pads or blocks for frogs to sit on, so they don’t spend less time swimming and more time hunting prey. And make sure the pen is big enough for at least 10 frogs, so you don’t have them all crowded together and slowing down the farm rate. I built my first froglight farm a few months ago, and now I have stacks of all three froglight colors for all my build projects, and I don’t have to run around the Nether looking for glowstone anymore.
At the end of the day, frogs are one of the most low-maintenance passive mobs you can add to your Minecraft world, and knowing what do frogs eat in Minecraft is the first step to making the most of these cute, useful creatures. Whether you’re farming froglights for your next big build, or just want a few bouncy friends hanging out around your lily pad pond, the whole process is way simpler once you know you only need slimeballs and access to slimes or magma cubes to get started. If you’ve been putting off adding frogs to your base because you weren’t sure how to feed them, give it a try this weekend, you’ll be shocked how much use you get out of them.