Butterfly

Butterflies are flying passive mobs that can be found flying around in forest biomes. Similar to bees, they also pollinate flowers and crops, but do not create any byproducts like honeycomb.

Spawning

Butterflies spawn in groups of 1-3 above grass blocks at a light level of 9 or more in forests, plains and swamp biomes.

Butterflies spawn in a total of 5 random variants; Monarchs, Swallowtails, Clouded Yellows, Cabbage Whites and Blue Morphos.

Drops

Upon death, butterflies drop 1-3 orbs when killed by a player or tamed wolf. They do not drop any items.

Upon breeding successfully, 1-7 is dropped.

Like other baby animals, killing a caterpillar yields no experience.

Item drops can be added with a data pack via adding loot_tables/entities/butterfly.json to Naturalist’s data files.

Behavior

Butterflies are considered arthropods and take increased damage from the Bane of Arthropods enchantment.

Pollination

Butterfly pollination is identical to bee pollination, except they do not return to a hive to produce honeycomb like a bee would.

Breeding

Butterflies follow players holding flowers, flowering azalea, flowering azalea leaves and mangrove propagule.

If butterflies are given a flower, they breed and produce a caterpillar. After being born, caterpillars will look for a nearby log at least 1 block above ground and climb to it before forming a chrysalis. They will hatch into a random butterfly variant.

Chrysalises can be picked up with Shears — if Shears are not used, they will be destroyed.

Butterflies can be caught with a Bug Net.