Minecraft: How-to Breed Turtles – Babies, Scutes, and Hatching Eggs!

Learn how-to breed turtles in Minecraft with our guide! We'll run you through the step-by-step process of breeding little baby turtles from luring in the adult turtles, creating eggs, and finally hatching out the babies! Turtles drop the valuable scute ingredient that can be used to craft a Turtle Helmet.

How-to Find Turtles

Turtles will spawn in the Overworld on beaches, but not in cold weather or stone shores. You can find groups of them at times, and even ones with babies already along with the other turtles.

Breeding Turtles in Minecraft

First, you are going to need two turtles to make this happen. Then you are going to need to have the turtles on sand. Once you have the turtles close together and on sand, feed them seagrass. You will see hearts over their head, and they will make there way close to each other. Once they do the turtle dance, if they've successfully mated you will see an experience bubble pop out. Not too long after this, one of them will start digging around in the sand. After a bit of digging, a turtle egg will show up!

There's a big caveat to all of this and that's the fact that turtles will only lay eggs on their "home beach." This is the beach they were born on or are near when you find them. If you want to have turtles near your home, then you'll have to pick up the eggs that are laid. To do this, you will need a pickaxe with the Silk Touch enchantment on it.

You'll have to wait a bit longer to breed them again, around five minutes.

Hatching the Turtle Eggs

The eggs actually take quite a while to hatch so don't be deterred! They will also only hatch at night. The biggest issue with the eggs is that they attract those evil Zombies. Be sure to either fence them in, or double stack some blocks around them so Zombies can't stomp them.

Baby Turtles

Now that you've got some babies, you can accelerate their growth by feeding them seagrass. 10 seagrass fed to a turtle will give you an adult! When the baby makes the transition into adulthood it will drop 1 scute. Get five of these scutes and you can craft a turtle shell helmet. If you wear the helmet you'll get 10 extra seconds of breath underwater.