You're stuck in the middle of a massive plains biome. Your hunger bar is shaking, the sun is dipping below the horizon, and you've got a single pig staring at you with those weird, side-set eyes. You could kill it for a porkchop, sure. But maybe you want to go faster. Maybe you need to move a group of them across a river to your base. That’s where the carrot on a stick comes in. It’s one of those legacy items that feels like it’s been in the game forever—since the 12w06a snapshot of Java Edition, actually—but people still faff around trying to remember if the carrot goes above or below the fishing rod in the crafting grid.
Learning how to make a carrot on a stick Minecraft style isn’t just about memorizing a pattern. It’s about understanding the weird physics of pig-riding and why this item is the predecessor to the much more "metal" warped fungus on a stick.
Gathering the Gear: More Than Just a Garden Vegetable
Before you can even think about the crafting table, you need two specific things. You need a fishing rod. You need a carrot. Sounds simple? It’s usually not, unless you’ve already found a village.
Carrots are a pain. Unlike seeds, which you can get by punching grass until your knuckles bleed, carrots only come from three places: village farm plots, shipwreck supply chests, or as a rare drop from zombies. If you’re hunting zombies for veg, you’re looking at a roughly 0.83% chance of a drop. It’s a grind. Once you have that orange pixelated stick, don't eat it. Seriously.
Then there’s the fishing rod. You need three sticks and two pieces of string. You probably know this, but the placement matters for the rod itself—diagonal sticks with string hanging off the end. Most players keep a rod in their "junk chest" anyway because fishing is the best way to get enchanted books early on.
The Crafting Logic
To actually handle the task of how to make a carrot on a stick Minecraft requires, you open your crafting table. You can actually do this in your 2x2 player inventory grid too, which is a nice touch. Put the fishing rod in the middle-left slot and the carrot in the bottom-middle slot.
Wait.
Actually, the game is more flexible than that. As long as the carrot is diagonally down and to the right of the fishing rod, it works. It’s a 2x2 recipe disguised in a 3x3 world. When you combine them, the durability of the fishing rod carries over. If you use a half-broken rod, you get a half-broken carrot on a stick. It’s a "damaged in, damaged out" system that Mojang has kept consistent for years.
Why Does My Pig Stop Moving?
So you’ve got the item. You’ve found a saddle—which, let’s be honest, is the real bottleneck because you can’t craft those. You’ve slapped the leather on the pig and climbed on. You hold the stick. The pig moves.
But then it slows down.
There’s a mechanic most players ignore: the "boost." When you're holding the carrot on a stick while mounted, right-clicking (or using the "use" button) makes the pig bolt. It gets a significant speed increase, but this consumes durability from the item. Each boost takes 7 points of durability. Since a standard carrot on a stick has 25 durability points, you only get about three or four good sprints before the carrot disappears, leaving you with just a plain old fishing rod.
It’s a bit of a scam, honestly.
You’re basically feeding the pig the carrot one bite at a time. If you’re planning a long-distance trek, bring a stack of carrots. You can’t "repair" the item with a carrot in an anvil; you just have to craft a new one. It’s clunky. It’s old-school Minecraft.
Navigating the Terrain
Riding a pig is nothing like riding a horse. Horses have high jumps and controllable speeds. Pigs? Pigs are chaotic. A pig with a carrot on a stick will follow your crosshair. If you look left, the pig turns left. But they don't do stairs well, and they certainly don't jump fences.
If you’re trying to move pigs into a pit for a farm, the stick is your best friend. If you’re trying to cross a mountain range? Get a horse. Or better yet, an Elytra. But for the "When Pigs Fly" achievement (or "When Pigs Fly" trophy on PlayStation), you need this setup. You have to ride a pig off a cliff and make it take fall damage. It feels a bit cruel, but that’s completionism for you.
Durability and Enchantments
Can you enchant it? Yes. Should you? Probably not.
You can put Unbreaking or Mending on a carrot on a stick using an anvil and an enchanted book. Unbreaking III will make that carrot last significantly longer during boosts. Mending will repair the stick while you’re holding it and gaining XP. Imagine a world where you’re slaying blazes while riding a pig, and the pig's motivation literally heals itself from the souls of your enemies. It’s a niche flex, but it works.
The Strider Connection
It is worth noting that the carrot on a stick was the direct inspiration for the Warped Fungus on a Stick. When the Nether Update (1.16) dropped, Mojang realized that players needed a way to cross lava lakes. They took the "carrot" logic and applied it to Striders.
The mechanics are identical.
The recipe is identical (just swap the carrot for a blue mushroom).
The durability consumption is identical.
If you’ve mastered how to make a carrot on a stick Minecraft survival demands, you’ve already mastered Nether navigation. The only difference is that a Strider won’t walk on land without shivering and moving like a snail, whereas a pig is perfectly happy on grass but turns into a "cooked porkchop" item the second it touches lava.
👉 See also: Finding Your Way: The Dead Cells Map Guide for People Who Keep Getting Lost
Expert Tips for the Dedicated Rider
If you’re serious about using this as a transport method, keep these weird quirks in mind.
First, the pig's speed is actually decent when boosting—it can reach about 5.2 blocks per second. For comparison, walking is about 4.3 blocks per second. It’s not "fast," but it beats walking if you’re trying to save your own hunger bar. Since the pig is doing the work, your saturation doesn't drop.
Second, if you’re in a boat and you have a pig in the boat with you (don’t ask why, maybe you’re relocating it), holding the carrot on a stick doesn't do anything. The boat overrides the pig's AI.
Third, the "carrot" part of the stick can actually be used to breed other pigs while it's still attached to the rod. It's a weird interaction. If you have two pigs and a carrot on a stick, you can occasionally trigger love mode without "consuming" a loose carrot from your inventory, though this is sometimes inconsistent between Bedrock and Java editions.
Final Steps for Your Minecraft Journey
You now have the knowledge to craft, boost, and maintain the most iconic (and slightly ridiculous) animal control tool in the game. Don't just stand there with a rod in your hand.
- Go find a village or kill some zombies to secure your first carrot.
- Combine it with a fishing rod in your crafting grid.
- Hunt down a desert temple or dungeon to find a saddle, because without it, the carrot is just a decoration.
- Mount your pig, look toward the horizon, and right-click to boost your way across the biome.
Keep an eye on that durability bar. Nothing is more embarrassing than the carrot breaking while you're halfway across a ravine, leaving you stranded on a confused pig that no longer cares where you want to go. Reach your destination, set up your farm, and maybe consider upgrading to a horse once you have the resources. But for now, that pig is your noble steed.