How to Tame a Cat in Minecraft with Raw Cod or Salmon

To tame a cat, find a stray in a village, hold raw cod or raw salmon, and wait for it to walk up to you. Feed it the fish while it’s close. Each fish has a one in three chance of working; when it does, hearts appear and the cat gets a red collar.

What you need to tame a cat

• Raw cod or raw salmon. Cooked fish doesn’t work. Five or six is plenty. Fishing is the easiest way to get them, and you can also kill fish in rivers and oceans.
• A stray cat. Villages with enough beds spawn them, and every swamp hut has a black one.

Taming a cat step by step

1. Find a cat. Walk around a village at any time of day. Stray cats explore, so check gardens and alleys, not just the center.
2. Hold the fish in your main hand. A stray within ten blocks will slowly start to approach you.
3. Stop moving. Stray cats run from anyone within seven blocks and avoid players within 16. If you walk toward it or turn sharply, it flees and won’t come back for a few seconds.
4. Let it come close. Stand still, look at it, and wait until it’s right next to you.
5. Feed it. Use the fish on the cat. Smoke particles mean it didn’t work; keep feeding.
6. Hearts and a collar mean it’s tamed.

The most common mistake is chasing the cat. Let it do the walking.

After taming

• Sit and stand. Use the cat with an empty hand to make it sit. Use it again to stand. Sitting cats stay put and don’t teleport after you.
• Following. Standing cats follow you and teleport to you if you get more than 12 blocks away.
• Collar color. Use any dye on your cat to change the collar color.
• Healing. Feed it raw cod or salmon to restore 2 health.
• Keeping it home. Put it in a pen made with a fence, or just order it to sit inside your house.

Tamed cats lie on your bed when you sleep and often leave a morning gift. They also keep creepers and phantoms away, which is reason enough to have two or three. The cat mob page covers gifts, variants and behavior in detail.

Breeding kittens

Feed raw fish to two tamed cats and they breed. The kitten takes one parent’s coat and belongs to that parent’s owner, and its collar color mixes the parents’ collars if the dyes can be combined. Kittens grow up in 20 minutes, and fish speeds it up.

Two sitting cats can’t breed, so stand at least one of them up first. If you’re tight on fish, remember that each feeding for love mode costs one.

Edition note

In Bedrock, a tamed cat’s health doubles to 20. In Java it stays at 10. Everything else about taming works the same.