Slimeballs are very useful for in-game crafting, unfortunately they are quite hard to find if your world doesn't have the correct biomes. We'll tell you what you need to know about slimeballs in this guide!
How to Make Slimeballs
You cannot make a slime ball in Minecraft. There is no way to create one in game at the moment, you will need to use a mod to grant yourself this ability.
Why do I need Slimeballs?
The primary use of a slime ball is to make a pellet, magma cream, slime block, or sticky plunger. The for the last two is a bit rarer, but the first two can be quite useful! Leads are important for guiding animals, and magma cream is used in some important potion recipes.
How to Get Slimeballs
If you want to get slime balls in Minecraft, there are three different ways to do it! You can kill slimes in swamp biomes, get them by sneezing baby pandas, or buy them from a wandering merchant.
kill the slimes
Slimes are pretty much a rare spawn that can only be found in two different areas. You can find them spawning at night in swamp biomes. It's a fairly rare biome that has shallow waters, spooky plants, and witch huts. If you go to an area like this at night, you should hopefully encounter a Slime spawn. They are even more likely to spawn on full moon nights, so be sure to take advantage of that.
Slimes can also spawn in something called Slime Chunks. A chunk is a 16x16 section of a Minecraft map area, and it's how the world is generated in manageable chunks. They can only spawn below layer 40, and these slime chunks only spawn in 1/10 of all chunks.
If you're ready to start a new world, we have an article with a bunch of great seeds! Some of them have swamp biomes available, so be sure to check it out.
Sneezing baby pandas
Well, it's a weird way to get slimeballs, but it's an option for you! When a baby panda sneezes, it can rarely drop a ball of slime. Pandas only spawn in the Bamboo Jungle biomes, which are quite rare to find. The jungle biomes themselves can be a bit tricky to locate, and the bamboo jungle is a rare offshoot of one of them! So if you have a bamboo jungle biome in your world, you have a chance of finding pandas and hoping for a baby to sneeze out some slime. Unfortunately, to make this even harder, baby pandas have a fairly low spawn rate, so don't expect to see them very often!
Our 1.16 Minecraft Seeds post also has worlds containing bamboo jungle biomes for you to explore!
wandering merchant
Another way to get slimeballs is to use the wandering trader. It's a random spawn that sometimes happens in your game. You'll recognize it by the two merchant llamas it has on a leash and its blue robe. You can interact with him and he will have a set of five random items that he will sell to you. If you're lucky, he'll have slime balls on sale for 3 emeralds each!
If you're trying to get slimeballs for a leash, you can also use the Wandering Trader for that purpose. If you kill the Wandering Trader, he will drop two tracks for you to pick up. You can also separate him from his llamas and they should break, or you can just kill the llamas and they'll fall too!
