Leather is an important material in Minecraft.
Aside from making Leather armor, it’s used to make Books which is needed to craft Bookshelves for your Enchanting area.
It’s also the key ingredient to craft item frames if you want to make an organized storage area.
This Article will provide convenient ways to get stacks of Leather long-term, rather than going through the effort to find a herd of cows spawned somewhere if you run out of leather.
5. Making Datapacks to add in custom Minecraft recipes:
Since it is modifying how the game works, depending on you, you’d probably not want to do this due to it ruining the “immersion” of your survival because it’s not an “official thing”.
But if you’re alright with a casual gameplay setting and you don’t mind modifying things in the game, adding in a custom recipe to make Leather like using a useless common item, 4 Rotten Fleshes would make 1 Leather is an okay recipe concept because it doesn’t change anything drastically but make Rotten Flesh useful for that need.
It’s a pretty cool feature, and no knowledge of coding for making simple Datapacks like this is needed as you can follow a 10-minute tutorial on Youtube for a custom recipe: Custom Recipes
4. Building a Rabbit Farm:
Making a Rabbit farm is another nice alternative or an additional way in gathering Leather.
By killing Rabbits, we can acquire Rabbit Hide which is used to craft Leather, 4 Rabbit Hides make up 1 Leather.
It’s a nice addition to your animal farms in your survival world if wanted.
Let’s say if you are still waiting for the newly born baby Cows to grow up, you can have a Rabbit farm on stand-by and kill Rabbits for that extra Leather.
The maximum amount of Rabbit hide that can drop is 1.
Making a Rabbit farm needs a bit more thought put into because Rabbits are a bit tricky to keep confined in an area even if you fence them in.
So, making something like in this Youtube video: Rabbit Farm would be an effective way to do a Rabbit farm without Rabbits escaping the premises.
3. Building a Basic small Cow / Mooshroom Farm:
As we all know Cows are the main source of Leather, thankfully Cows are a common mob spawned throughout the world, if you come across a group of cows, you can get at least 2 cows either with Lead or Wheat and bring them over into your squared fenced area and start breeding them in massive amounts.
This is the best possible way in acquiring a sustainable and sufficient supply of leather with little to no effort, as you are constantly breeding newer cows and not needing to venture out into far lengths of your world to find more cows to kill.
Keep in mind to breed not more than what your PC can handle, due to a severe number of Cows that can cause a decrease in game performance when around them.
Mooshrooms are just the same as Cows, just harder to find as you would need to find a Mushroom Biome, and transport the Mooshrooms over to your Home Base to breed, which also makes them a great constant source of Mushrooms if you ever feel interested.
2. “Automated cow farm”
If you want to get a bit more technical with your Cow farm, you can follow this Youtube video: Cow Farm.
This machinery kills 1 adult Cow automatically if the Cow mob limit reaches over 24 Cows, the items that drop go into the hopper and transfers into the chest for you to pick up whenever.
To clarify on this, Minecraft has a game rule called “maxEntityCramming” when it comes to breeding, it only allows 24 mob entities in a 1 block space, any Cow or mob in that 1 block space above 24 is killed.
If you have 24 cows in a 1 block space, for every baby cow that is spawned in that 1 block, an adult cow dies and still drops the items.
It’s a great way to do the slaughtering work for you and the hopper would be the one to collect the dropped items for you.
1. Using Looting on a Sword:
Using the Looting enchantment on a sword will increase the drop rate of Leather upon the Mobs death by 1.
For example, the usual Leather drop rate of any Mob that drops Leather when killed is 0-2 Leathers, by using a Looting enchantment specifically a Looting 3 sword can increase the Leather drop rate to 0-5.
It is great to keep this in mind as it will just make Leather easier to grind for with the increased drop rate.
Things that you should know:
Before you leave, here are some other information about acquiring Leather:
- There is not a lot of best ways to get Leather, breeding Cows in a small confined space and slaughtering them with a Looting 3 Sword are probably the only effective and easy solutions to your shortage of Leather even for the “automated-cow farm”, you’d still need to manually breed the cows, killing is the automated part.
Other mobs aside from Cows, Mooshrooms & Rabbits that do drop Leather are Horses, Mules, Donkeys, and Llamas would drop Leather (the same amount as Cows) though just not as “easy” like creating & breeding cows.
- You can get one piece of Leather by fishing it out in the sea, though not very common, it is not rare either, making it possible to get it in reasonable amounts if you have built an AFK-fishing area for you to leave the game open when gone to do your real life duties for a long time, so coming back to the game, you might have a decent amount of leather.
- 1-3 Leather can be found in a Village chest if lucky. In the Legacy Console Edition of Minecraft (e.g., Xbox 360, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch) you can trade Emeralds for 10+ Leather with the Leatherworker.
