If you happen to need a Turtle Shell (very useful for its Water Breathing effect or to brew the Potion of the Turtle Master), or you just want to start a turtle farm, knowing how to find and hatch Turtle Eggs in Minecraft will be crucial.
You will also want to know how long it takes for them to hatch, which is quite a bit and sometimes looks like it can take forever. We will cover every possible aspect about them, so let’s not waste any time and get into it.
How to get them
To obtain Turtle Eggs you will need to feed Seagrass (that you can get using Shears) to two adult Turtles. You can find groups of adult Turtles in Beach biomes.
Keep in mind that Turtles always remember where their home beach is (the Sand block where they originally spawned) and, if they happen to be in a different place, they will try to go back there to lay their eggs.
Eggs blocks can have from 1 up to 4 eggs:
If you want to get Turtle Eggs with commands, you’ll need to type: /give @p minecraft:turtle_egg 1
How to move them
If you want to move the eggs to a different location, the only way you will be able to do it is with a Silk Touch enchanted tool.
If you break the eggs in any other way (or try to move them with pistons), they will not drop anything and the eggs will be lost.
Remember that breaking them with Silk Touch will reset their growth stage (more info on the growth stage later, at the Hatching section).
Also keep in mind that eggs can be placed everywhere, but they will hatch only on a Sand block or a Red Sand block.
How they can break or disappear
As stated before, if you break Turtle Eggs without a Silk Touch tool they will not drop anything. They are a very “fragile” block, in fact
they can break in other ways:
– if moved with a piston
– if trampled
Eggs are trampled when players or mobs (all mobs but Turtles and bats) fall or stand on them. If there is a block with multiple eggs, one egg at a time will be trampled, until there are no more.
When a player or a mob falls on eggs, there is a 1/3 chance of trampling. The chance goes down to 1/100 in case of standing on the eggs instead of falling on them.
Be careful because Zombies (every kind of Zombies) will try to find and trample Turte Eggs. This is the number one reason why many players wake up in the morning and their Turtle Eggs are gone!
Trampling doesn’t happen if a player moves slowly on them (while pressing the SHIFT button).
Hatching
First and foremost: the player needs to be 128 blocks close in order for them to grow.
As we said before, Turtle Eggs go through 3 different growth stages. They will basically crack over time, with every growth stage being more cracked than the previous one. At the third crack they will hatch:
If we have a block with more than one egg (like in the example above), they will grow and hatch at the same time.
Growth Speed
Eggs grow more quickly at night time and they will very likely hatch at night. Most of the eggs will take up to 7 nights to hatch.
Very few of them will take longer, so don’t lose hope if you don’t see anything happening, it will just mean that you are being unlucky (and remember that you need to be 128 blocks close to them).
The hatching process can be sped up using the commands to change the random tick speed from 3 (the default random tick speed) to a higher value.
For example, for setting the speed to 1000, we’ll type: /gamerule randomTickSpeed 1000.
This method can be used for everything that uses random ticks, like growing crops or dripping Lava from Dripstones. You can also set the Random Tick Speed to 0 to make everything stop from growing. It is one of the 4 ways to freeze time in Minecraft.
Since also Baby Turtles will take a very long time to grow into adult Turtles, it can be helpful to know that they will grow faster by feeding them with Seagrass. Each time you feed them, the process will be sped up by the 10% of the remaining duration.
Miscellaneous
- its Namespaced ID is turtle_egg
- in the Java Edition its translational key is block.minecraft.turtle_egg
- In the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft Turtle Eggs Numeric ID is 414 and its translational key is tile.turtle_egg.name
- they are in all the Minecraft platforms (Java Edition, Pocket Edition, Ps4, Xbox 360, you name it)
- Baby Turtles always hatch facing South
- They were introduced in 2018, version 1.13.
