How to lure cows back over water?

[Antmf]

I can't for the life of me find any cows near my base. The only ones I have found are across the water. Is it possible to get them back to your base if you need to travel over water?

 

[Exadi]

If you can get a ghast tear, use a safari net.

 

[hotblack desiato]

mystcraft portals + gravi gun.

pick up a cow, drop it into the portal, and the portal links to your island.

 

[Abdiel]

Animals will follow you if you hold their favorite food (wheat for cows), even when they have to swim.

As an alternative, you can lead them through a Mystcraft portal or a nether portal to shorten the distance you need to travel.

 

[Ako_the_Builder]

or a twilight forest portal, other otions are using a portal gun to grab the animal and (not sure on this one) minium stone might be able to make animals into different animals

 

[SteveTech]

Animals will follow you if you hold their favorite food (wheat for cows), even when they have to swim.

As an alternative, you can lead them through a Mystcraft portal or a nether portal to shorten the distance you need to travel.

I couldn't tell you how many time I would start to lure an animal, then when I'm about half way home the animal stops and either stands still or wanders off. Even when I am right next to the dumb thing.

 

[Affex]

Portal gun...

 

[Abdiel]

I couldn't tell you how many time I would start to lure an animal, then when I'm about half way home the animal stops and either stands still or wanders off. Even when I am right next to the dumb thing.

That's a vanilla thing. An animal will only follow you for some time, then it resets and you have to wait for a while to attract it again.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

You could build a bridge over troubled water and lead them over it and through the woods...

 

[whythisname]

I've never had animals stray when I was close, it's so easy to get way ahead of them though -.- They get stuck on everything and even normal walking speed is way too fast if they don't get stuck on anything.

That said, in my last vanilla survival game I managed to get a mob of every type + several villagers to my survival island (hundreds of blocks from the nearest land) without using portals (you couldn't transport anything through portals when I did that). The villagers were the only hard ones to get to my island (I had to dig a long tunnel and transport them in minecarts, destroying and relaying track over thousands of blocks), the animals were easy, they just took a long time (nowhere near what the villagers took though).

 

[Matthew83]

Without a portal gun moving animals is a pain in the butt. For me I found that keep looking at the animals while holding wheat seems to work a little better, but not much.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

You could also make a cow farm on-site, then hook it up to your base network later with Linking Books and Item Tesseracts

 

[PhilHibbs]

Gravity Gun is an early alternative to portal gun.

 

[Exadi]

Gravity Gun is an early alternative to portal gun.

Still not as cheap as a Safari Net though, as long as you are able to kill a ghast without resorting to high tech stuff like jetpacks.

Also in the version of MFR in Ultimate 1.0.2 there are single use safari nets that don't require going to the nether at all.