Frogspawn takes approximately 10 minutes of real-time to hatch into tadpoles in Minecraft, making it a short and straightforward wait once you’ve successfully bred two frogs. This 10-minute timer is consistent across all biomes and versions, so you can plan your tadpole-raising around a single in-game activity without worrying about random delays.
How to get frogspawn in Minecraft
To get frogspawn, you first need to find two adult frogs in a swamp or mangrove swamp biome. Frogs are passive mobs that spawn naturally in these areas, and they’re easy to spot thanks to their green or orange coloring. Once you have two frogs, you’ll need to feed each one a slimeball, these drop from small slimes, which you can find in swamp biomes at night or in slime chunks underground.
After both frogs consume their slimeballs, one of them will become pregnant. The pregnant frog will then search for a water source block with air above it to lay frogspawn. This means you need to have a suitable water block nearby, a simple 1x1 pool of water works perfectly. The frog will attach the frogspawn to the underside of the water’s surface, and it will appear as a dark, translucent block with small black dots inside. You can collect frogspawn with a silk-touch tool, but you don’t need to move it unless you want to relocate the tadpoles to a different area.
How to keep tadpoles alive after hatching
Once the 10-minute hatch timer finishes, the frogspawn block will break and release between 2 and 5 tadpoles into the water. Tadpoles are tiny, dark-colored creatures that swim around the water block, and they require water to survive. If a tadpole ends up on land, it will die within 10 seconds, so you must ensure the water source remains intact and isn’t blocked by solid blocks or ice.
To keep tadpoles safe, you should also watch out for axolotls, which are natural predators of tadpoles and will actively hunt them. If you’re raising tadpoles in a pond or river, consider building a small enclosed pool or using a water bucket to transport them to a secure location. You can safely move tadpoles by scooping them up with a water bucket, which creates a “Bucket of Tadpole.” This lets you carry them to a new water source without harming them, making it easy to create a dedicated tadpole nursery away from predators.
How long does it take for a tadpole to grow into a frog?
After hatching, a tadpole takes about one in-game day, roughly 20 minutes of real-time, to grow into an adult frog. This growth timer is independent of the hatching time, so you’ll need to wait another 20 minutes after the tadpoles emerge before you see them transform. You can speed up this process by feeding tadpoles slimeballs, with each slimeball accelerating growth by 10%. This means feeding a tadpole 10 slimeballs will instantly grow it into a frog, though you’ll need to have a steady supply of slimeballs to do so.
The biome where the tadpole matures determines which frog variant it becomes, not the biome where it hatched or the type of its parents. Tadpoles that grow in a temperate biome (like a forest or plains) become temperate frogs, which are orange. Tadpoles that grow in a warm biome (like a desert or savanna) become warm frogs, which are white. Tadpoles that grow in a cold biome (like a taiga or snowy plains) become cold frogs, which are green. This means you can control the frog variant you get by moving tadpoles to a specific biome before they finish growing, so plan your nursery location based on the frog color you want.
