Wolf

Wolf is the companion mob: a wild pack animal that becomes a permanent ally once tamed, and one that fights for you unasked. Taming a wolf takes bones and patience, since each bone is roughly a one-in-three chance, not a guarantee, and the collar that appears can be dyed any color you like.

A tamed Wolf attacks whatever you hit and whatever hits you, with one blind spot in Java Edition: wolves refuse to touch creepers, so keep a cat for those. Skeletons are the opposite story — wolves hunt them on sight, and the pack will chase an archer across half a biome. Telling one to sit pins it where it stands and stops that. Wolves eat any meat, rotten flesh included, and meat is also how you heal an injured one — a lowered tail is the tell. Breeding two tamed wolves with meat gives a puppy that already belongs to you.

There are nine wolf variants, and which one you meet is decided by the biome it spawned in, not by luck: pale in taigas, woods in forests, snowy in groves, ashen in snowy taigas, a black wolf in old growth pine taiga, chestnut in old growth spruce taiga, rusty in sparse jungles, spotted on savanna plateaus and striped in wooded badlands. Puppies inherit a parent's coat, so collecting all the wolf variants means traveling to each biome rather than breeding toward them.

Wolf armor is what makes a pack survivable. It is made from armadillo scutes, fits only a tamed Wolf, and absorbs most damage until it breaks; more scutes repair it and shears take it off again. Wolf armor can also be dyed like leather and washed back to plain in a cauldron. Since an armadillo gives up scutes repeatedly to a brush, keeping a pack in armor is renewable rather than a one-time cost.