Mooshroom in Minecraft: Free Stew and Brown Mooshrooms
Milk a mooshroom with a bowl for unlimited mushroom stew. Where mooshrooms live, how lightning turns red into brown, and getting suspicious stew.
A mooshroom is a cow covered in mushrooms, found only in the mushroom fields biome. Milk one with a bowl and you get mushroom stew, as many times as you like. It’s the closest thing Minecraft has to free food.
| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Health | 10 HP (5 hearts) |
| Spawns | Mushroom fields only, herds of 4-8 on mycelium |
| Food | Wheat |
| Drops | 1-3 raw beef, 0-2 leather |
| XP | 1-3 on kill, 1-7 from breeding |
Finding mooshrooms
Mushroom fields are rare, usually on islands far out in the ocean, so you’ll often need a boat and some luck. A locate command helps in creative worlds; in survival, an ocean monument map won’t point you there, so it’s a matter of sailing. Once you’re on the island, mooshrooms are everywhere, and hostile mobs don’t spawn on the surface, so it makes a calm base.
Getting them home is the hard part. Lead two across the water with a lead while you sit in a boat, or carry one in a boat with you, then breed a herd with wheat at your base.
What you get from one
- Bowl: mushroom stew. Unlimited, no cooldown.
- Bucket: milk, the same as a cow.
- Shears: five mushrooms, and the mooshroom becomes an ordinary cow. You can’t reverse this, so shear only if you want a cow.
- Killing: 1-3 raw beef (steak if it was on fire) and 0-2 leather, the same as a normal cow.
For food, a pen of mooshrooms beats a cow farm because you never have to kill anything. The catch is that stew doesn’t stack, so it’s best eaten on the spot.
Red and brown
All naturally spawned mooshrooms are red. When lightning strikes within about four blocks, a mooshroom swaps color (red to brown or back) without being hurt. During a thunderstorm, trident with Channeling makes this reliable; otherwise you’re waiting for a natural strike.
Breeding a red and a brown gives either color at even odds. Two reds have a 1 in 1024 chance of producing a brown calf.
Suspicious stew
Brown mooshrooms have one extra trick. Feed one a small flower and the next bowl you milk from it is suspicious stew with that flower’s effect. A cornflower gives Jump Boost, an oxeye daisy gives Regeneration, a dandelion gives Saturation, and so on. Red mooshrooms ignore flowers. Blindness stew lasts 11 seconds on Java and 7 on Bedrock, one of several small timing differences.
Edition notes
- Looting adds a little more leather on Java at high levels.
- Baby zombies, husks and drowned can ride mooshrooms as jockeys on Bedrock only.
Other farm animals are listed on the mobs hub.
Common questions
How do you get a brown mooshroom?
Have lightning strike within a few blocks of a red mooshroom, which flips its color. Two red mooshrooms breeding also have a 1 in 1024 chance of a brown calf.
What happens if you shear a mooshroom?
It drops five mushrooms of its color and turns into a normal cow permanently. The mushrooms never grow back.
Can mooshrooms breed with cows?
No. Mooshrooms only breed with other mooshrooms, using wheat.
Sources & verification
Facts on this page are checked against these references and in-game behavior for the stated edition(s). how we verify.
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