The lead in Minecraft is a great tool. Primarily used for moving around animals and keeping them tethered to a single spot, it solves the problem of wandering pets and it allows you to better organize your livestock. Making this item is simple, at least if you already know both the recipe and the ingredients that you need. Fortunately, this guide will help you to put together a lead in no time at all.
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Gathering Materials
The good news is that making a lead is actually pretty easy. You’ll only need two items, one of which is fairly easy to farm even at the beginning of the game. You will, however, have to do a little exploring to get the second.
The first thing you’ll need for your lead is four pieces of string. The string is a fairly common drop in chests, but you’ll have better luck getting it from cobwebs. Cobwebs drop off of spiders, so equip a weapon and hunt them down at your leisure. One cobweb can be crafted into one piece of string, so you should expect to kill around four spiders to get the materials you need.
The other material you’ll need for your lead is a slimeball. Unfortunately, slimeballs only come from one mob – slimes. To hunt slimes, you’ll need to find a swampland biome and hang around until nightfall. Unless you’re at a point where you can automate farming the slimeballs, you’re going to have to face down at least one large slime and kill its component parts until it drops the single slimeball that you need.
How to Make a Minecraft Lead
Now that you have your four pieces of string and your single slimeball, you can go ahead and craft your lead. Due to the size of the pattern, you’ll need to put together your lead at your crafting table.
As with most Minecraft recipes, the pattern is the important thing here. If you are looking at the 3×3 grid, you’ll want to place a piece of string in the top left, top middle, middle left, and bottom right slots. You’ll put your slimeball in the middle slot. Once you have them all in the correct places, you’ll be rewarded with a lead that you can move to your inventory.
How to Use the Lead in Minecraft
Now that you have your lead, you can figure out how to use the item. Fortunately, it’s a fairly intuitive process that shouldn’t require too much effort – though be warned, you can damage animals or even get into a fight if you fail to equip the item before starting!
Like most items, this one is used by right-clicking. Choose the lead on your hotbar, then right-click on the animal you want to leash. When you are successful, you’ll see one end around the animal’s neck and the other end on your player’s hand. From there, you can walk around and have the animal follow you virtually anywhere you choose to go.
When you’re ready to have the animal stop following you, you’ve got two choices. IF you want to let it go, you can click on the animal. This will cause you to drop the lead, so make sure to pick it back up. If you have a fence nearby, you can also choose to leash the animal to the fence – doing this is as simple as right-clicking on the fence post.
The lead is definitely a great item for later parts of the Minecraft survival game in which you’re moving around livestock or you want to keep a certain animal nearby. It’s not the most versatile item, but it’s still one that you’ll end up using from time to time. Make sure to memorize this recipe so you can make it on command.