How to Breed Pandas in Minecraft

Image: Mojang via HGG / Nathan Hart

Human Made

Penned by Nathan Hart

I'm a stand-up comic by night and write for HGG by day. Most of my gaming happens at an improvised desk at the Days Inn right outside whatever small town I'm in for the night.

Reviewed by Benjamin Barr

Panda bears are one of the most interesting neutral mobs in Minecraft because of their wide variety of personalities, appearances, and activities. Minecraft likes to reflect real life in ways that feel informative — in regards to pandas, it shows us how hard it is to get the animals to breed in captivity, and how difficult the life of a panda is. We’ll break down how to breed more pandas in Minecraft and what you can do with them.

Let’s get started!

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Finding a Panda

Minecraft pandas are found in the jungle biomes, being especially common in the bamboo jungle. Seeking a jungle biome with enough bamboo is a tough task on its own. They’re the rarest biome in the game. Some seeds will outright spawn without one for thousands of blocks from your starting location!

Luckily, jungle biomes are also very recognizable from a distance. You can identify them by their huge trees covered in vines and bamboo stalks growing high into the sky. Jungles often spawn alongside regular forests, in areas with extremely high humidity values. A bamboo jungle will be contained within a larger jungle, so you may need to cut your way through to the bamboo you’ll need.

You’ll most likely to find pandas around the bamboo stalks, but they’re a pretty rare spawn themselves. You might need to wait around the area for a while for two of them to appear. There isn’t much you can do to force them to spawn other than wait it out. If there is any podzol soil around you, replace it with grass. Pandas can spawn on grass, but never on podzol. Once the 1.20 update is released, you’ll be able to craft some of the nearby bamboo into blocks and build a little hut to await the pandas’ arrival!

Breeding Pandas in Minecraft

Pandas are one of the toughest passive animal mobs you can try to breed in Minecraft, both because of how hard they are to find and the relatively strict conditions of their taming. They’re also strong enough to really you if you make them mad, which is enough to give most Minecraft explorers pause.

The toughest thing about breeding pandas is having enough bamboo around to keep them satisfied. Pandas will follow you around from up to 16 blocks away if you have a piece of bamboo in your hand. They will accept bamboo from you and will sit down and eat it as pictured below.

You need to have at least eight bamboo blocks within five blocks of a panda for it to enter “Love Mode.” If you try to breed two pandas without those extra eight blocks around you, they will both become momentarily hostile and attack you! You can grow more bamboo by chopping off the tall stalks of it and replanting it in the ground nearby.

Pandas come in seven varieties, all of which have their own particular quirks about them. Of the most important to pay attention to are “Aggressive” pandas, which have angry looks on their faces. These pandas will actually attack any player or mob that hurts a nearby panda. If you had enough of them around at once, you could try to hide behind them and see if you can get them to take on monsters for you!

Baby pandas will inherit genes from their parents — “Weak” and “Brown” pandas in Minecraft are particularly unlikely to occur, as these genes are recessive compared to all the others. You can help a baby panda grow up quicker by feeding them lots of bamboo.

Join the High Ground!

That’s it for our guide on how to breed pandas in Minecraft — thanks for reading! If you have any other tips or would like to suggest a new guide, let us know in the comments. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more content like this!

Happy gaming!