Rotten flesh is an item that no Minecraft player likes. If you have a zombie XP farm or a gold farm, you know how fast it can fill your entire inventory, and it’s even worse if you’re using a Looting enchanted sword.
Sometimes, it gets so bad that you must find creative ways to get rid of it. Stack upon stack of rotten flesh is thrown on a cactus, into lava, or through any other item disposal system.
Thankfully, there are some things you can do with it, and at times, it can even be quite useful. So today, I’ll show you precisely what you can do with rotten flesh in Minecraft.
How Can You Get Rotten Flesh in Minecraft?
You can find rotten flesh in several places in your Minecraft world. It’s a common drop from zombies and zombified mobs. You can get it from fishing, as a gift from a tamed cat, and even in a few loot chests.
Mob Drops
Several mobs drop rotten flesh upon death. It doesn’t matter if they were killed by the player, a tamed wolf, or by other means (such as burning in the sun or by entity cramming).
Killing a mob with a Looting enchanted sword adds one rotten flesh to the maximum drops per level of looting.
Zombie and Zombie Variants
Zombies and zombie variants drop 0-2 rotten flesh upon death, or 0-5 with Looting III.
Zombified Piglins
Upon death, each zombified piglin drops 0-1 rotten flesh, up to 0-4 with Looting III.
Even though each Zombified Piglin drops the least amount of rotten flesh, they are usually the biggest source of it because they spawn very commonly and very fast in the nether. For that reason, they are also used in gold farms.
Zoglins
Zoglins drop 1-3 rotten flesh upon dying (1-6 with Looting III).
Fishing
You have a 1% chance of getting rotten flesh from fishing. The rate decreases by 0.2% from each level of Luck of The Sea to a 0.4% chance with a fishing rod enchanted with Luck of The Sea III.
This, because it counts as an unwanted drop, or ‘junk’.
Gift from a Tamed Cat
Every night the player sleeps, one tamed cat nearby has about an 11.3% chance to bring the player one rotten flesh. This turns into about once every nine nights.
Loot Chests
Rotten flesh is found in different amounts in loot chests in different structures in the overworld. This includes Desert temples, mob spawner rooms (dungeons), Igloos, Jungle Temples, Ocean Ruins, Village Temples, and Woodland mansions.
What to do With Rotten Flesh in Minecraft?
1. Food Source
Although not the best food source in Minecraft, rotten flesh recovers 4 hunger points (2 meat sticks or hunger bars). Every time the player eats rotten flesh, there’s an 80% chance to get the hunger effect for 30 seconds. During that time, between half and one hunger bar is consumed (1-2 hunger points).
The hunger effect does not stack. If a player receives it more than once, the timer resets to 30 seconds rather than going above 30 seconds.
2. Feed and Heal Tamed Wolves
Even though it can’t be used to tame a wolf, once it is tamed, you can feed it rotten flesh to heal and breed it if you feed two nearby tamed wolves. Holding rotten flesh will make tamed wolves tilt their head, and is used to grow tamed baby wolves faster.
3. Trading With Cleric Villagers
A novice Cleric Villager (or above) will buy 32 rotten flesh for one emerald. This trade improves if the villager offers discounts after making multiple trades, getting the hero of the village effect, or curing him.
Finishing Thoughts
Today we learned how to obtain rotten flesh and about several ways of using it. Rotten flesh can be very useful in acquiring large amounts of emeralds very cheaply, to heal and breed wolves, and even as an emergency food source.