Minecraft is an open-world survival game where you can mine, build, and fight your way to the End.
On your travels through the Overworld, you will come across a diverse array of creatures that can be your friends or your foes.
One of the animals you may meet is the polar bear.
What Do Polar Bears Eat In Minecraft?
Polar bears eat raw fish, such as raw cod and raw salmon.
You cannot tame polar bears the same way you can tame a horse or wolf.
Feeding a polar bear will only lead to them breeding if you have two adults.
When polar bears breed and produce a cub, they will become more hostile towards the player.
Polar bears, both in the game and in real life, are extremely protective of their young.
Polar bears are passive as long as they are unprovoked, and the player stays away from their cubs.
While it is possible to find fish floating above the water or by defeating a drowned zombie, the simplest way to find fish is to craft a fishing rod.
All you need for a fishing rod is three sticks and two strings.
If you are looking to harvest large amounts of fish and other materials, take a few axolotls to the nearest coral reef or sea temple.
Axolotls will hunt fish, squid, glowing squid, guardians, and even elder guardians.
You may also find raw fish in chests around villages of every type, even abandoned towns.
If you don’t feel like searching hard for your fish, you can always fish for a while.
If you kill a polar bear, it has the chance of dropping a couple of pieces of raw cod or raw salmon.
The fish will always drop raw, even if the polar bear is burned alive.
While this tactic will cook beef that is dropped by cows instantly, it does not work on polar bears.
Players who are trying to find polar bears will only find them in the freezing biomes.
The freezing biomes include the Snowy Tundra, the Ice Spikes, the Snow Taiga, the Snow Taiga Mountains, the Frozen River, and the Snowy Beach.
When Were Polar Bears Added To Minecraft?
Polar bears had been hinted at by lead creative designer Jens Bergensten, better known to the Minecraft community as Jeb, a few months before their actual release.
The bears were added on May 18th, 2016, as part of the 1.10 Java update.
There are two versions of Minecraft: Java and Bedrock.
Java is the original version of Minecraft, which is only playable on PC.
Bedrock is the version of Minecraft that runs on all gaming consoles and mobile.
It was common for the Java edition of Minecraft to get new content before the Bedrock edition in the earlier years of Minecraft.
These days, the two versions will update at similar times or even the same time.
The pocket edition also used to be its own version of the game, but it is now a part of Bedrock.
Pocket edition players didn’t get polar bears until December 19th, 2016.
They were part of the 1.0.0 Pocket Edition update.
It wasn’t until two years later that polar bears were programmed to spawn on ice, opening up the possible places you could find a polar bear.
By this point, polar bears had gained a sound and the ability to jump in the water when on fire like other animals in the same situation.
In updates that followed, the polar bears were more fleshed out.
They were given prey other than just the player.
There was a point where polar bears would even attack the player in peaceful mode.
Luckily, you can’t die if your game mode is set to peaceful.
In the early years of polar bears, they could be difficult to find due to some earlier oversights in their programming.
Polar bears would often die from freezing and models were prone to becoming bugged until March 31st, 2021.
Can You Have A Polar Bear Follow You?
There are two ways to make a polar bear follow you.
Like any other animal, you can lead polar bears around with their favorite food, raw fish.
They will only follow you for a short distance, so this mode of moving a polar bear takes a lot of time and isn’t very efficient.
The easier way to get a polar bear to follow you around in Minecraft is to use a lead.
While leads may be difficult to craft, they are vastly less hard to find.
You can find leads in chests in the Desert Temple or Underground Mines.
The easiest way to gather leads is by killing the traveling merchant that may spawn near you with his two llamas.
When you attack the merchant, the llamas will begin spitting at you and the merchant will use a potion of invisibility.
You will want to defeat the merchant quickly in order to keep an eye on where he is located.
The traveling merchant has the chance to drop one or two leads when you defeat him.
If you don’t see the leads on the ground after the merchant is slain, then you may have to take out his llamas.
Once the lead is in your hand, click the polar bear in the same way you’d put a lead around any of the other characters.
It will be more difficult to get a polar bear with a cub to follow you peacefully.
By holding raw fish while you travel with the lead, you will pacify the polar bear.
Although there is no practical purpose to having a polar bear, they make great additions to any lawn.
If you have foxes on your property as well, you will need to build a wall or a sturdy fence between the two species.
Surviving The Freezing Biomes
While polar bears may be comfortable calling this biome home, players may find that it is more difficult to survive in.
Other biomes have plenty of vegetation and animals to keep your player alive and fed.
In the tundra, it is simply just you and the snow.
Before moving into the tundra, you will want to make sure you have plenty of seeds for a garden.
You will also need plenty of wood and saplings.
The tundra is a wide-open space that is perfect for growing all the wood you could ever need.
You may want to consider placing your farm indoors and near plenty of torches.
Water that is placed in freezing biomes will freeze, making it difficult to farm.
By placing your farm indoors and surrounding it with torches, you are keeping your food safe and water from freezing.
Farming with constant light sources helps crops grow faster than they would with just the sun.
The growing time for your crops depends on if the soil is moist enough and the amount of time that the crop spends in light.
If you are a player who doesn’t like to farm, you can always keep a fishing rod on you.
Fish may not be able to heal you the best, but they’re easy to get in large quantities.
You just have to be willing to put in all the time to fish.
The freezing biomes share many of the same challenges as the desert biomes.
They can both be difficult to find lumber in, which is used in almost every recipe you have to craft.
With the proper preparation, living in the tundra can be just as easy as living in the forest.
You just need to be comfortable with farming or fishing.
The Benefits Of Farming
In Minecraft, there are many ways to gain experience points.
Experience points are important for players who want to enchant or repair items such as tools, weapons, or armor.
There are many different ways to earn experience points.
While slaying mobs and mining are the most common ways of earning experience points, you also earn a lot of experience points from farming.
Just about every aspect of farming will earn you all the experience points you need.
When most players think of farming in Minecraft, they only consider the bare minimum like planting wheat.
By planting a variety of crops, you will earn more experience points than by just planting wheat.
The best foods for experience boosting are beetroots, pumpkins, and watermelons.
The other half of farming is raising livestock.
Every time you breed an animal, you will gain experience points.
Every time you slay an animal, you will earn more experience points.
Animals that are easy to breed such as chickens, cows, pigs, and sheep will earn you copious amounts of experience points.
Livestock also provides hardy food that quickly fills your player’s health and hunger bars.
From sheep, you get additional wool, which can be used to decorate your house.
You can create leather armor with all the leather that is dropped from cows and llamas.
Chickens will drop feathers, which are crucial for making arrows.
Farming doesn’t just keep your character fed, but it also helps make your character stronger and provides all the resources you need to survive anywhere on the map.
Farming can help give your home base the boost in usefulness that it needs in order to help you stay alive.
By giving yourself a steady and constant food supply, you are giving yourself more time to mine, explore, and build.
The Benefits Of Fishing
Farming isn’t the only option for food security and collecting experience points.
You can always try your hand at fishing.
You will only need to craft one or two fishing rods because, as you fish, you will most likely fish out another fishing rod.
You can get all sorts of weapons and other rare items while fishing.
The waters are filled with enchanted weapons, tools, and armor.
There are even plenty of enchanting books that you can find in the water.
By crafting a fish rod with three sticks and two strings, you are unlocking the potential to find items that are extremely difficult to create on your own.
You can find saddles, nametags, and tripwire hooks.
With each successful catch, your chance of getting rare items increases.
The amount of time it takes for a new catch to begin tugging on your line shortens with each successful catch as well.
The most effective and efficient way of fishing is to do as much as you can in one sitting.
A normal, freshly made fishing rod has 64 uses before it will break.
Each successful catch will earn you experience points.
You can increase the number of uses a rod has before it breaks by either adding the Unbreaking or Mending enchantment.
You will not earn any of the experience points that you earn with your fishing rod if it has the Mending enchantment.
Instead, the experience points will go towards repairing the item.
While this will ensure that you have an infinite rod for fishing, it will cause you to earn little to no experience points while fishing.
Fishing gives you plenty of raw fish, which you can use to breed polar bears.
You can also use raw cod and salmon to tame cats and ocelots.
Minecraft’s Tundra Can Be A Ton Of Fun
Although the freezing biomes may be difficult to survive in at first, the beautiful landscape is enough to make players want to live there.
The addition of polar bears made the freezing biomes worth exploring.
The key to surviving in the homeland of the polar bear is preparation.
While fully befriending a polar bear may not be possible, these neutral mobs make for adorable neighbors and great additions to any player’s yard.
You can coexist with your local polar bears by respecting their personal space and enjoying them from a distance.
With Minecraft’s new spyglass, it has become even easier to view mobs that are normally too hostile to approach.
Minecraft is an open world filled with possibilities.
Minecraft allows the player to do whatever they want to and still manages to keep the player entertained for countless hours.
Players could bring up the polar bear population all by themselves if they are determined enough.
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