River Fishing — Wiki

River Fishing turns fishing into a process instead of a click on the water. You assemble a rod from a blank, a reel, a line and a rig; you match bait, hook size, groundbait and leader to the fish you actually want; you read the water, the season, the hour and the barometer; and then you fight what takes.

Nothing bites by luck. A data-driven bite engine weighs your whole setup against every one of 107 species under the current conditions, and decides both what takes and how long you wait. Mismatched gear catches nothing, a line that is too visible spooks small wary fish, big fish demand a near-perfect kit, and every water in the world holds its own species community fixed by the world seed.

• Version 0.9.0, on four Minecraft versions:

- 1.20.1 — Fabric & Forge - 1.21.1 — Fabric & NeoForge - 26.1.2 — Fabric & NeoForge - 26.2 — Fabric & NeoForge

• Required: Architectury API; on Fabric also Fabric API
• Recommended: Serene Seasons (unlocks the seasonal bite), Biomes O' Plenty (richer habitat model)
• Also integrates with: Farmer's Delight, Jade, JEI
• Exact tested versions of all of the above: Compatibility
• Discord: discord.gg/Kk2nKvsuRh — questions, bug reports, catches
• This wiki also in: русском · українською
• Online, all three languages in one page: qwazar14.github.io/riverfishing

Start here

Gear

Playing

Reference

The short version

1. Assemble a rod. Blank + (reel) + line + rig. Sneak + right-click a rod to open it. On reeled blanks the reel goes in before the line.
2. Load the rig. Hook and bait, or a leader and a lure. Predators only take artificial lures; peaceful fish only take natural bait.
3. Match the fish, not the water. Every species has ideal rods, rigs, hook sizes, line and baits. The bigger the fish, the more of that list has to be right.
4. Cast on the bar. Hold to charge, release at the peak.
5. Watch, don't listen. There is no bite sound and no bite text — the float plunges.
6. Fight with the drag. Crank when it's calm, ease off when it runs, crouch to open the drag when it jumps or dives.
7. Release your trophies. Stocking is how a water stays rich.

Three flows, three games

Operator commands

Both require permission level 2. See Progression.

Reading this offline

These pages are plain Markdown — GitHub and any editor render them as they are, and the species table carries its sprites inline.

There is also a single-page build with everything in one file: a sidebar, a filter box, and every crafting recipe drawn as a real 3×3 grid rather than written out as a pattern string. Build it from the repo root:

python tools/gen_wiki_bundle.py --out build/wiki.html
python tools/gen_wiki_bundle.py --out build/wiki.html --mc-jar <a Minecraft client jar>

The grids are generated from the recipe JSON, so they cannot drift from what the game loads. Passing --mc-jar makes vanilla ingredients show their real icons, read out of that jar at build time; without it they render as labelled colour tiles and everything still works. Nothing from the jar is stored in this repository — Mojang's art is not ours to redistribute — which is why the built page is not committed to a source branch. The published copy lives on the generated gh-pages branch, put there by tools/publish_pages.py.

For pack makers

Every species is one JSON file at data/riverfishing/fish_profiles/<species>.json, and all of it is datapack-overridable — where a fish lives, what it eats, how it fights, how rare it is, what level it needs. The bite engine, the journal pages, the JEI entries and the villager gating all read the same file, so your changes stay consistent everywhere.

The annotated schema lives in docs/FISH_PROFILES.md.

Getting started

From an empty inventory to your first fish in about five minutes. Vanilla fishing rods do nothing here — everything below is River Fishing gear.

1. Dig up some bait

Take a shovel to dirt, a grass block, coarse dirt, podzol, rooted dirt, farmland, a dirt path or mud. Each block you break has a 10 % chance to pop a Worm.

Worm is the single most widely liked bait in the game — 43 of the 91 species rate it, 24 of them at 0.9 or better. Six or seven will get you started.

Other easy sources: Maggots from zombies (33 %), Bloodworms from drowned (33 %), Chicken Liver from chickens (25 %).

2. Craft the starter kit

Three items. None of them costs more than one iron nugget.

Stick Rod — three sticks on the diagonal:

A hook. One Iron Nugget gives you two Hook No.16. Add a nugget to a No.16 to get a No.14, again for a No.12, and so on. Bigger number = smaller hook, so No.16 and No.14 are the small-fish hooks you want now.

A line. A ring of 8 String (empty centre) makes two Mono Line 0.10. That works, but most starter fish want 0.14 — put a 0.10 line in the centre of another string ring to thicken it one step.

→

Nice to have: a Fishing Journal (Book + Hook No.12 + Leather) — it holds a bestiary, a how-to page per species, your quests and the written guides.

3. Assemble the rod

Hold the Stick Rod and sneak + right-click.

The Stick Rod is reel-less, so there is no reel slot — drop the line straight in. Its built-in Primitive Rig is shown inline with two slots: a Hook and a Bait. Put your No.14 hook in one and a Worm in the other.

The rod's tooltip turns green: Rod assembled.

On rods that do take a reel, the reel goes in first — the line spools onto the reel. The screen tells you if you get it wrong.

4. Find water

Any pond or river will do. Small water is species-poor, so a river or a lake gives you more to catch, but a pond is fine.

Nineteen species live in every water in the world, so nowhere is ever dead: Bream, Crucian Carp, Roach, Rudd, White Bream, Perch, Gudgeon, Ruffe, Bleak, Bluegill, Mackerel, Herring, Rotan, Nase, Smelt, Round goby, Bitterling, Sunbleak and Mayan cichlid.

Bear in mind the Stick Rod cannot cast past 6 blocks — it is a fixed length of line on a tip. Fish the margins.

5. Cast

Hold right-click to charge, release to throw. There is no click-cast.

The power bar appears at the bottom of your screen. It is a triangle wave: power climbs to full over one second, then falls back over the next second, and repeats. Release at the peak for the longest throw — overcharging weakens it. Tick marks sit at 50 % and 85 %.

If the bar has a dim red band with a hard cut-off at its far end, your rig is too light for the blank and it physically cannot throw that far. See the test window.

The action bar confirms: "Cast out. Wait for a bite…"

6. Watch the float

There is no "Bite!" message and no sound. The bobber plunges on your screen and that is the entire cue — spotting it is the game. A float rod gives you 3.6 seconds from the plunge to react.

If nothing is going to bite here at all, the cast tells you up front: "Nothing is biting here right now". And if the water is dour, "The fish are wary of this setup — it could be a very long wait" — change bait, move, or feed the spot.

7. Strike

Right-click when the float goes down.

On a reel-less rod (Stick, Bamboo, Pole) this is a plain click — no timing bar. The one timing challenge comes next.

8. The pull-out

Immediately after the strike a timing bar appears low on your screen with a moving yellow marker:

• Green zone — a certain landing.
• Orange flanks — a 25 % chance.
• Outside both — the fish throws the hook.

Click when the marker is in the green. That is your fish. The bigger the fish, the faster the sweep and the narrower the zone, and a bare Stick Rod is the least forgiving blank there is — which is exactly why a real Pole Rod is worth building.

Landed: "Caught: Roach — 180 g, 18 cm". The item carries that species, weight and length forever, and no two catches stack.

Reading the HUD

Your first fight (on a reeled rod)

The Stick Rod skips this, but the moment you build anything with a reel, the fight becomes the game. Three positions and a direction:

The rules that matter:

1. When it runs, stop cranking. Cranking into a run spikes tension and gains almost nothing.
2. When it jumps, crouch. Reeling through a jump rips the hook out 35 % of the time — but the first four ticks of the jump are grace, so a crank already on its way when the fish leaves the water costs you nothing.
3. You only gain standing up. Crouching forever is safe but goes nowhere.
4. At 85 % the fish rolls for one last dash at the bank — 35 % for an ordinary fish, 85 % for a trophy on a hard pattern. Ease off through it; if it does not come, that is a quiet landing, not a trick.

Over-tension does not snap instantly — every tick past the limit rolls a chance that grows the longer you hold it. Brief spikes are survivable; cranking through a whole run is not. When it does break, the message names the load in kilograms, which tells you exactly what tackle you needed.

Full detail: the fight.

What to do next

Common early messages

See also

• Rods · Reels and lines · Rigs and baits
• Fishing mechanics · Water and conditions
• Progression · Species

Rods

Every rod is a bare blank; the reel, line and rig live inside it. The blank you pick decides how far you can cast, which reels fit, how heavy a rig it will throw, and which of the three fishing flows you play.

The thirteen blanks

Notes on the columns:

• Reel seat — the reel-size band the blank accepts. A reel outside the band cannot be socketed at all. Reel-less blanks have no reel slot; their line ties straight to the tip. There is no 9000 reel item, so the sea spinning rod's practical top reel is the 8000.
• Cast-weight window ("test") — the rigged weight the blank is built to throw, shown on the rod tooltip as Test: N–M g. See Loading the blank below.
• Max cast reach — the farthest the rig can land at full power bar, before the cast-weight penalty. Reel-less blanks are hard-capped at 6 blocks (a fixed length of line on a tip); a longer throw is refused with "A pole cannot reach past 6 blocks".
• Built-in rig — float and lure blanks carry one permanent rig; the assembly screen shows that rig's own slots inline and there is no swappable rig column. Bottom blanks keep the swappable rig column. A freshly crafted or trade-bought rod installs its built-in rig automatically the first time you open it or cast it.
• Durability — each hook-set (strike) costs 1 point. At zero the blank breaks for good. Repair on an anvil with the listed material. The ladder rises with the tier, and the saltwater blanks sit above the freshwater top: the trolling rod takes 512 strikes to the carp rod's 320.

The three flows

The blank's flow is fixed and decides the whole cast-to-fight loop.

Only Bottom-flow rods can be docked on a rod pod.

Reel-less float blanks (Stick, Bamboo, Pole) do not run the strike-timing bar — they save their single timing challenge for the pull-out at the end of the fight instead. See the pull-out.

Loading the blank: the test window

The rig's weight in grams is compared against the blank's window. There is a hidden ±15 % tolerance on the printed numbers.

Under-loaded (below the window):

range factor = 0.85 × √(weight / windowMin)      (floored at 0.30 of full reach)

An under-loaded blank cannot load properly and cannot throw far. Below 85 % of the window minimum you also get the warning "The rig is too light for this blank — short throw" and a silent 25 % longer wait for a bite. The cast power bar draws the unreachable far end as a red dead band.

In the window:

range factor = 0.85 + 0.15 × (weight − windowMin) / (windowMax − windowMin)

So anything inside the window flies well — 85 % of full reach at the bottom of the window rising to 100 % at the top.

Over-loaded (above the window × 1.15):

overload penalty = 1 − (ratio − 1) × 0.5      (clamped to 0.4 … 1.0)

The warning "Rig too heavy for this blank — risk of breakage" appears and the penalty multiplies straight into your line's break tolerance during the fight — an overloaded blank snaps line much sooner.

Wildly over-loaded (more than 2.5× the window maximum × 1.15) — the cast is refused, the blank cracks and loses a third of its durability (+1): "The blank cracked under the weight — lost a third of its durability!"

The weight compared here is the rig's bench weight if it was tied at a Tackle Station, otherwise the rig type's fixed mass, plus the bench weight of any tied lure sitting in it.

Rod-specific behaviour

• Spinning Rod — deliberately shorter reach (16 blocks) than the other long-range blanks, and its retrieve is about twice as long as the ultralight's (castDistance × 20, capped at 340 ticks vs. × 10, capped at 220). It gets a bite bonus that grows with fish size (×min(1.2, 0.85 + meanKg × 0.15)).
• Ultralight Rod — the finesse niche: a bite bonus that fades as fish get bigger (×clamp(1.6 − meanKg × 0.6, 0.4, 1.6)), crossing over with the spinning rod around 1 kg. Its fights are the hardest of the lure rods (see ultralight fights).
• Winter Rod — fishes only through a drilled ice hole. Casting into open water is refused: "The winter rod only fishes a hole — right-click drilled ice". See Ice fishing.
• Trolling rod and Sea spinning rod — the only two blanks that can troll behind a moving boat.
• Long-range blanks (Spinning, Feeder, Bottom, Carp, Surf, Sea spinning) — on water narrower than 12 blocks you get "Water too narrow for a long cast" and every fish's environment score is cut to ×0.4. Boat and Trolling rods are not flagged long-range, so narrow water does not penalise them.
• Active-flow rods burn hunger — one whole food point every 4 casts.

Recipes

All rod recipes keep a diagonal, rod-like silhouette. Every reeled blank needs string for its guide wraps.

The saltwater four differ only in their tip: shard → two shards → crystals → nautilus shell. Freshwater blanks never need a diamond except the carp rod, so the first diamond you spend on tackle is normally the step into the sea. See Crafting for exact grid layouts.

The village fisherman also sells rods — but only as fully assembled, ready-to-cast setups with reel, line and a loaded rig fitted.

Assembling a rod

Hold the rod and sneak + right-click to open the assembly screen.

Order matters on reeled blanks: the reel goes in first, because the line spools onto the reel. The screen refuses impossible combinations and tells you why:

A rod can fish as soon as it has a line and a rig. An empty hook slot doesn't block the cast — it just kills your bite chance. The tooltip names the first missing part.

With a line already out, sneak + right-click is fight input (the open drag), not the GUI — reel in first if you want to re-rig.

See also

• Reels and lines
• Rigs and baits
• Fishing mechanics
• Sea fishing · Ice fishing

Reels, lines and leaders

The reel decides how much drag you have and how thick a line you can spool; the line decides how much weight you can pull before it snaps and how badly it spooks fish.

Reels

Eleven sizes, in the usual angling numbering: bigger number = bigger reel.

There is no 9000 reel item, even though the sea spinning rod's band reaches 9000.

The drag curve

The freshwater ladder is linear; the saltwater sizes climb steeper, because ocean fish are an order of magnitude heavier and a linear drag simply cannot stop them:

size ≤ 7000 :  drag = size / 1000
size > 7000 :  drag = 7.0 + (size − 7000) / 1000 × 2.5

So 1000 → 1 kg up to 7000 → 7 kg, then 8000 → 9.5 kg, 10000 → 14.5 kg, 12000 → 19.5 kg, 14000 → 24.5 kg. The tooltip and the fight read the same figure.

Before 0.6.0 they did not: the fight computed a plain size / 1000 of its own, so a 14000 advertised 24.5 kg and delivered 14.0, and the whole saltwater bonus existed only in the tooltip. Freshwater was unaffected — the two formulas agree at and below 7000.

What the drag actually does in the fight:

• Adds 0.5 × drag on top of your line's breaking strain when working out the break tolerance.
• Gives line faster when you ease off: relaxTick = 0.010 + clamp(drag/10, 0, 0.5) × 0.02. A big reel bleeds tension 1.67 times as fast as a 1000; the clamp tops out at 5 kg of drag, so every reel from 5000 up bleeds alike.
• Reel feel: small reels are twitchy, big ones are coarse but absorbing. sensitivity = clamp(1 + (4000 − size)/4000 × 0.5, 0.6, 1.5). A 1000 sits at 1.375, a 4000 at 1.0, a 14000 at the 0.6 floor. A reel-less rod is a hard-coded 1.3 — twitchy, but just short of the 1000.
• Slightly speeds up landing: landPulse carries a 0.9 + size/14000 term.

The spool-diameter rule

A spool only holds line up to a maximum diameter. This is a hard rule in the assembly screen — a too-thick line cannot be socketed.

maxLineDiameter(mm) = 0.15 + reelSize / 1000 × 0.05

1000 → 0.20 mm, then +0.05 mm per 1000: 7000 → 0.50 mm, 14000 → 0.85 mm.

The minimum figure on the tooltip is display-only — a thinner line still fits, it just under-fills the spool:

minLineDiameter(mm) = max(0.06, maxLineDiameter − 0.14)

The journal also shows the smallest reel that can take a given line, but that lookup only scans sizes 1000–7000, so it reports nothing for lines of 0.55 mm and up.

Reel recipes

All shapeless. The freshwater ladder is a strictly growing pile of plain metal; the saltwater step needs ocean loot.

No freshwater reel needs a diamond.

Lines

Three materials. Breaking strain scales with the square of the diameter:

breaking strain (kg) = 100 × diameter² × materialFactor

Fluorocarbon also wears 40 % slower than the other two.

Every line

All 23 of them, by the name they carry in game. Smallest reel is the smallest reel item whose spool ceiling reaches that diameter, by the spool-diameter rule above.

Mono — 10 diameters

Braid — 7 diameters

Fluorocarbon — 6 diameters

Thick fluorocarbon does not exist in the mod (impractical in reality). Braid stops at 0.60 mm, mono runs all the way to 0.80 mm. At any shared diameter braid is exactly 3× mono and fluorocarbon 1.1× mono — that is the whole of the material factor.

There is no 9000 reel item, so 0.60 mm needs a 10000: the 8000's spool tops out at 0.55 mm.

Line visibility

A thick, opaque line slows the bite — and small wary fish mind it far more than big ones do.

visibility = materialVisibility × (diameter / 0.20)
if visibility > 1:
    sensitivity = clamp(1.5 − meanWeightKg × 0.5, 0.1, 1.5)
    bite weight ×= max(0.4, 1 − 0.25 × (visibility − 1) × sensitivity)

0.20 mm mono is the reference point (visibility exactly 1, no penalty). 0.30 mm braid sits at 2.18 — a real handicap on a roach swim, barely noticed by a catfish. Fluorocarbon of any sensible diameter stays under 1 and is never penalised.

Separately, matching the species' preferred material is worth 1.0 in the tackle-match score vs. 0.6 for a mismatch, and the diameter is scored on a falloff around the species' ideal.

Line wear

Line carries a wear value from 0 % to 100 %, shown on its tooltip, and it travels with the line stack.

breaking strain multiplier = 1 − 0.55 × (wear / 100)

At 100 % wear the line keeps only 45 % of its strain and the tooltip turns red: "Line worn out — may snap at any moment!"

Where wear comes from (on the default realism preset):

There is no way to repair a line — a worn line gets replaced.

Line recipes

The base of every chain is a ring of 8 String in the crafting grid.

The upgrade chains, one step per craft:

• Mono: 0.10 → 0.14 → 0.18 → 0.25 → 0.30 → 0.40 → 0.50 → 0.60 → 0.70 → 0.80
• Braid: 0.16 → 0.20 → 0.25 → 0.30 → 0.40 → 0.50 → 0.60
• Fluorocarbon: 0.14 → 0.16 → 0.20 → 0.25 → 0.30 → 0.40

The fisherman also sells 0.14 and 0.18 mono at low tiers, braid 0.16 / fluoro 0.20 at journeyman, fluoro 0.30 at expert, and the whole heavy tier at master.

Leaders

A leader is a separate item that goes into the leader slot of a Predator or Catfish rig. Fifteen species are toothy enough to bite straight through a bare line — pike, zander, conger eel, wahoo, barracuda, mako shark, taimen, arapaima, beluga sturgeon, bluefish, bull shark, frilled shark, golden dorado, goliath grouper and piraiba.

Protection is checked once, the moment the fish is hooked, only for species that require a leader:

bite-off chance = 0.75 × (1 − protection)        (0.75 is the realism preset)

So no leader at all against a pike is a 75 % chance the line is bitten through and you lose the fish and the rig; a fluorocarbon leader drops that to 11 %; steel and titanium make it impossible.

Stealth works on the bite chance for every species while a leader is fitted:

bite weight ×= 0.85 + stealth × 0.30

Leaderless bottom and float fishing is never penalised by this — the multiplier only applies when a leader is actually on the rig. Separately, a species that requires a leader takes a flat ×0.15 bite penalty if you fish it without one.

See also

• Rods · Rigs and baits
• Fishing mechanics — how strain, drag and tension interact in the fight
• Crafting

Rigs, hooks and baits

The rig is the terminal tackle at the end of your line. It carries its own small inventory — hooks, bait, groundbait, float, leader, lure — and the bite engine reads your whole setup out of it.

Rigs

Eleven rig types. Five are built into a rod blank and never exist as loose items (they are hidden from the creative tab); six are swappable bottom rigs you craft or tie.

The mass column is the fallback weight used for casting. A rig tied at a Tackle Station carries its own chosen weight instead, and any tied lure in it adds its weight on top.

Open a loose rig with sneak + right-click. A rig socketed in a rod is edited from the rod's assembly screen.

What each slot accepts

Loading several baits or hooks is worthwhile: the bite engine takes the best-scoring one for each fish it considers. So a Float Rig with a worm on one hook and a maggot on the other fishes for both audiences at once.

The 3-Hook Feeder Rig

Its three hooks give a small chance of a multiple catch when you land a fish:

• 2 % — two fish
• 0.1 % — three fish

The extras are near-copies of the main fish (90–110 % of its weight).

Rig recipes

Crafted rigs come empty. Rigs tied at the Tackle Station come with their hooks already slotted.

Hooks

Angling numbering: a bigger number means a smaller hook.

All nine sizes are in the riverfishing:hooks tag, so any hook can serve as the hook ingredient in a lure recipe. (Before 0.6.0 the tag stopped at #4, which locked the two biggest hooks — the ones only the master fisherman sells — out of every lure craft.)

Hook size is a hard gate. Each species has an ideal hook size and a tolerance; the score falls off linearly and if it drops below 0.34 the fish will simply not take. In practice you must be within roughly ±2.6 × the species' tolerance of its ideal. Put a No.1 on a bleak swim and nothing bites at all. But hook size does not pick the fish's weight. The hook decides which SPECIES can take; the individual's grams are then rolled inside that species' own range. A No.4 will not keep 20 g gobies off your worm — only a live baitfish (its weight floors the catch) or a heavy lure does that.

A Predator or Winter rig with no separate hook scores a flat 0.85 — the lure's treble and the mormyshka carry their own hooks.

Blunt hooks

Hooks accumulate bluntness 0–100 %, shown on the tooltip. Each hook-set dulls your sharpest hook by 1 (default preset).

chance the strike fails = (bluntness / 100) × 0.5

At full bluntness half your strikes come back empty: "Empty strike — the hook was blunt". Fix it with a Whetstone: hold the whetstone, put the hook in the other hand and right-click. Pull the hook out of the rig's screen to sharpen it, then put it back.

The float

Whenever a float is loaded in the rig, the rod's assembly screen shows a vertical depth slider ("Depth") with three stops — near surface / mid-water / near bottom. The setting is stored on the rod.

bait presented at the species' preferred depth : bite weight ×1.3
wrong horizon                                  : bite weight ×0.55

Every species has a depth_pref. Across the 91 species: 40 are bottom, 39 mid, 12 surface.

Natural baits

Twelve natural baits, plus the Ice Jig which lives in bait slots.

Natural bait is eaten on the strike — one piece per hooked fish. The bait the fish actually preferred is the one consumed, not simply the first slot. Lures and the Ice Jig are never consumed.

The Frugal skill gives a +5 % chance per rank (up to 25 %) that the bait survives the bite.

Live Bait carries a weight

A live baitfish keeps the weight of the fish it was made from, shown on its tooltip as "Livebait: N — calls predators from 6 × N up". During the catch roll it floors the size of the fish you get:

minimum fish weight ≈ 6 × baitfish weight

capped at 60 % of the species' weight range so the roll is still a roll, and only for species that actually rate live bait at 0.5 or better. A big baitfish therefore filters out the tiddlers and calls a genuinely large predator.

Live Bait goes into a Bait slot on a bottom rig, or into the Lure slot of a Predator rig.

Artificial lures

Ten lures. All are predator-only — a peaceful fish will not take an artificial bait, and the LURE slot only exists on the Predator rig.

The hook ingredient is the riverfishing:hooks tag (No.16 through No.1).

Working the lure

Each right-click is one crank. The gap between clicks is the lure's action:

A good crank pulls the bite 10 ticks closer; a sloppy one only 2. Holding right-click auto-repeats about every 4 ticks — line comes in, but no fish takes that "action". A lure left dead in the water for more than 30 ticks (80 for a popper) pushes the take back out.

Dyeing lures

Put an artificial lure plus one or more dyes in the crafting grid — exactly like leather armour. The mixed colour is classified into three effective classes and matched against the light and clarity of the water:

bite weight ×= 0.75 + 0.60 × closeness      (so ×0.75 on a total miss up to ×1.35 on a match)
closeness = 1 − min(1, |conditionLight − idealLight| × 2)

The condition-light value blends time of day (day +0.28, dawn/dusk −0.08, night −0.32), weather (clear +0.10, rain −0.14, thunder −0.20), depth, swamp murk (−0.12), river flow (+0.04) and season, starting from 0.5.

An undyed lure skips the colour check entirely.

Groundbait

One groundbait, and it is a base. Right-click water while holding it to feed a spot; mix your own by putting the base in a crafting grid with up to 8 other things. The full system is on its own page: Groundbait.

The fed spot

A fed spot is a 3×3 column zone:

• Each feed adds 0.6 freshness, up to a ceiling set by the mix — 0.48 for plain base, 0.90

for the base plus four rich things. Feeding more reaches the ceiling faster; it never raises it.

• Freshness halves every 1800-5400 ticks and the zone is spent after 3 to 12 minutes, both

depending on the fraction. Dust washes out; whole grain lies where it landed.

• The centre column counts at full strength; the outer ring at 60 %.
• A coloured particle cloud marks the zone, in the mix's own colour.

You cannot overfeed. There is no fullness and no penalty for feeding — the ceiling above is the only limit, and it is a property of the mix, not of how much of it went in.

The same recipe adds up; a different one takes the swim over. The old bed does not blend into the new one.

What it does:

menu     = how much of the mix this fish actually eats   (its own bait list)
fraction = 1 - |mix fraction - the species' fraction|    -> 0.45 .. 1.00
nutrition= 1 - |mix nutrition - the species' nutrition|  -> 0.60 .. 1.00
variety  = 0.90 .. 1.00 by how many different components
groundbait score = menu x fraction x nutrition x variety, capped at 1.0
unfed spot       = 0.4

bite weight  x= clamp(1 + freshness, 1, 2)
time-to-bite x= 1 - 0.40 x freshness
size roll    flattens with a coarse mix — a better chance at a good fish, never a promise

So a freshly fed spot with a mix built for the fish roughly doubles its attractiveness and cuts up to 40 % off the wait.

A feeder cage (the Groundbait slot on a feeder / flat feeder / 3-hook / carp rig) empties one on every cast at the bobber, through the same call hand-feeding makes. There is no separate "cage freshness" any more: the cage and your hand build one fed spot between them.

See also

• Tackle Station — tie rigs and lures to a chosen weight
• Rods · Reels and lines
• Species — every fish's preferred baits
• Fishing mechanics

Groundbait

There is one groundbait — Base Groundbait — and it is exactly what the name says: the thing you build on. Wheat Seeds + Bread makes two of it, and the village fisherman sells it.

You can feed a spot with the base on its own and it works. It is simply not very effective: it sits dead centre, neutral grind and neutral richness, with nothing it is especially for. Everything after that is what you add to it.

You cannot overfeed a spot. Throw as much as you like: more feed is more fish, and no swim ever gets worse for being fed. What groundbait cannot do is out-fish its own contents — how strong a spot can get is capped by what went into the mix, never by how much of it you threw. The decision is not how much. It is what of.

The two-minute version

1. Craft Wheat Seeds + Bread → 2 × Base Groundbait.
2. Put the base in a crafting grid together with up to 8 other things. One slot = one item.
3. Right-click water with the result. You have fed a 3×3 spot.
4. Catching nothing but tiddlers? Feed coarser — corn, boilies, pearl barley.
5. Nothing biting at all? It is not the amount. It is the grind, the richness, or the menu.

If you would rather copy than think, skip to the cookbook — every recipe there was found by searching the pantry and checked against the fish it names.

Making a mix

Put Base Groundbait in a crafting grid together with anything else, up to 8 items. One SLOT is one item — a stack of 64 in a slot still counts as one, because one per slot is what the craft takes.

The base is required. Corn and boilies on their own are not groundbait; they are what you add to groundbait. That is the whole shape of the system: one thing you make, and a pantry of things you put in it.

How much comes out: one groundbait for every edible item that went in. Ballast pays nothing — soil and clay are what you dilute a mix with, not what it is made of. Base ×1, corn ×3 and soil ×4 comes out as four, and each of the four is a lean, bulky mix. That is the trade: ballast buys you leanness, not volume.

A mix you made yourself is finished groundbait, not an ingredient. It will not go back into the grid. Plain base will — that is what makes it the base.

The pantry

Counts as is the bait this component reads as when the engine asks whether the fish eats it. A dash means it makes no claim either way — it still changes the numbers, the colour and the variety.

Ballast is the important one. Soil and clay bring bulk, cloud and colour and no calories at all, so they are how you make a mix leaner and bulkier without making it worse.

Vanilla is a real shelf, not a courtesy. Wheat, bread, a potato and a beetroot are hour-one items, and over the base they mix into something that genuinely fishes. You do not have to wait on a corn farm to start feeding.

What the numbers do

Nutrition and fraction are the average over everything in the mix, weighted by how many of each and with ballast included. That is how ballast dilutes: it averages in zeros.

Four things then decide how well that bed of feed fishes for a given species:

menu      how much of the mix this fish actually eats     (its own bait list)
fraction  1 - |mix fraction - the species' fraction|      -> 0.45 .. 1.00
nutrition 1 - |mix nutrition - the species' nutrition|    -> 0.60 .. 1.00
variety   0.90 .. 1.00, by how many different things are in it

groundbait score = menu x fraction x nutrition x variety, capped at 1.0
an unfed swim    = 0.40

★ Fraction — a big fraction calls big fish

Dust clouds and calls up bleak and roach. Whole grain and boilies lie on the bottom and are what a bream or a carp is looking for. Every species has a grind it answers to, and it mostly follows from its own size — a 20 g bleak wants 0.14, a 4 kg carp wants 0.73.

This is also the honest answer to "why do I only catch small stuff" — it is a choice, not a bug. Feed coarser.

Coarse feed does one more thing: over a coarse bed the size roll flattens, so the fish that do come are more often good ones. Half the mix or finer changes nothing; an all-boilie bed is the full effect. It is a better chance, never a promise.

Nutrition — how much food, and how much it wants

More food gathers more fish. But each species has an appetite it is looking for: a carp wants a table laid (0.85), a bleak wants a cloud (0.46), and a spread put down for the carp is not what the bleak came for.

This is why "just use boilies" does not work. Boilies are the richest and coarsest thing in the pantry, which makes them perfect for a carp and useless for a roach — and the roach swim is where most people fish.

The menu — what is actually in it

If a fish eats worm, chopped worm in the feed works. The engine asks the species' own bait list, so the answer is already on its journal page: whatever it takes on the hook, it wants in the feed.

The base and the ballast say nothing either way, which is why plain base is neither the right food nor the wrong food. That is a deliberate difference from "there is nothing here a bream wants" — the first fishes like plain base, the second fishes worse than it.

Variety, and the difference between score and ceiling

Two numbers decide a swim, and they are not the same number.

• Score — the four terms above. Who comes. A perfectly matched mix scores 1.00 for its fish and

0.25 for the wrong one.

• Ceiling — how strong the spot can ever build, from nutrition and variety. How many come.

ceiling = 0.25 + 0.45 x nutrition + 0.30 x (things in it - 1) / 4      (capped at 1.0)

Feeding more gets you to that ceiling faster. It never raises it.

A three-part mix can score 1.00 and still be beaten in practice by a five-part mix scoring 0.90, because the five-part swim holds more fish. Aim for the base plus three or four things, and let the ballast be one of them when you need it lean.

Worked example

Base ×1, Maggot ×3, Worm ×1, Wheat Seeds ×2 — seven items in the grid.

nutrition = (0.50x1 + 0.65x3 + 0.70x1 + 0.30x2) / 7 = 0.54
fraction  = (0.50x1 + 0.55x3 + 0.65x1 + 0.15x2) / 7 = 0.44
variety   = 4 different things
output    = 7   (everything here has calories)
ceiling   = 0.25 + 0.45x0.54 + 0.30x0.75 = 0.72

Against a bream (wants 0.56 / 0.68, and its bait list has maggot 1.0 and worm 0.9):

menu      = 0.45 + 0.75 x (1.0x3 + 0.9x1) / 4 = 1.18
fraction  = 0.45 + 0.55 x (1 - |0.44 - 0.56|) = 0.93
nutrition = 0.60 + 0.40 x (1 - |0.54 - 0.68|) = 0.94
variety   = 0.90 + 0.10 x 0.75                = 0.98
score     = 1.18 x 0.93 x 0.94 x 0.98 = 1.01  -> capped at 1.00

Against a carp (wants 0.73 / 0.85, and its bait list names neither maggot nor worm) the same mix comes out at 0.32 — worse than not feeding at all. One mix, two verdicts. That is the whole feature.

Feeding a spot

Right-click water to feed a 3×3 spot. A fed spot bites up to twice as fast and cuts up to 40% off the wait. The centre column counts at full strength, the outer ring at 60%.

The same recipe adds up. A different one takes the swim over. The old bed does not blend into the new one — it is simply gone, and you are told so at the moment it happens. Decide the blend in the grid, not by throwing four different mixes in one after another. (A dye does not make a mix different: a pink one and a plain one of the same recipe are the same food.)

A feeder, flat feeder, carp or 3-hook cage empties one per cast at the bobber — the landing spot, not the water in front of your boots. It is the same fed spot a right-click makes, so a cage and a hand build one swim between them. Empty the cage by hand first if you want to fish a swim you already built with something else.

How long it lasts

Between 3 and 12 minutes, depending on the fraction. Freshness halves every 90 seconds for pure dust and every 4½ minutes for whole grain.

Dust clouds and washes out; whole grain lies on the bottom and keeps working. That difference is what carries a long bottom session — a fine mix on a feeder rod is spent before the first bite window closes.

Colour

Every component stains the mix, and the fed spot's cloud in the water comes out that colour. A dye in the grid moves it most of the way to the dye's own colour without changing what the mix feeds or how it fishes.

The tooltip names that colour, and the pale speckles on the icon are drawn in it, so two mixes in a hotbar are told apart at a glance and a fed spot is recognisably yours.

Colour does not affect the bite. Unlike a lure's, it is read nowhere in the bite engine.

The cookbook

Ready recipes are a floor, not a ceiling — every one of these was found by searching the pantry, and every one is beatable by somebody who tunes it for the water in front of them. Numbers are how many of each go in the grid; every recipe starts with the base, because that is the rule. Score is against the fish named; ceil is how strong the swim can build.

Two things to notice. The bream mix scores a perfect 1.00 on five different species — because their grind, their appetite and their bait lists agree, and one blend covers a whole bream swim. The sterlet mix scores 1.00 too, but its ceiling is only 0.63: only three things in it, one of them clay, make a precise and thin swim. Add a fourth edible one if you want a crowd rather than a sniper.

What each species wants

<!-- SPECIES-GB -->

Sorted finest first, which is also smallest first — that is what the star means.

How much groundbait actually decides

Worth knowing the price of the question, so you do not feed a swim that needed a different bait.

A bite is a weighted sum, and the feed is one seventh of it:

bait           30%
groundbait     15%
rig            13%
rod            12%
line           12%
hook           10%
reel            8%

An unfed swim is not zero, it is 0.40 — fishing without groundbait is fine, just not ideal. A perfect mix scores 1.00. So the whole distance between "did not feed" and "fed flawlessly" is 0.15 × 0.60 = 0.09 of the bite weight, about nine per cent. Feed will not rescue a session with the wrong bait on the hook: bait weighs twice as much and costs less.

What feed really buys is the second lever — time. A fresh swim speeds bites up by as much as double (the multiplier is 1 + freshness, capped at 2.0). That is why feeding feels like far more than nine per cent: the fish do not so much bite more often as arrive sooner.

And the third — size. A coarse table flattens the size curve: the roll's exponent is divided by 1 + 0.55 × coarseness × freshness, where coarseness is the fraction above 0.5 stretched to one. In practice: half fraction and finer changes nothing, and whole grain on a fresh swim visibly lifts the average fish.

Predators: the ones there is nothing to feed

A mix is judged against the species' own bait list — against what the fish actually eats. Which leads to something no tooltip says: pike, zander and asp eat nothing in the pantry. Not a grain, not a worm, not liver.

In numbers, for pike (its pair is fraction 0.66, nutrition 0.50):

Read that as: a sweet carp mix on a pike swim works against you — it is worse than not feeding at all. Plain base helps, because it claims to be no particular food: the engine scores it "neither the right food nor the wrong food" (0.75 on menu) and then only looks at fraction and nutrition.

Some predators do feed, though. Catfish, eel, perch and trout all have pantry items in their diet, and for them groundbait works at full strength:

The rule is simple: if you catch it on a spinning rod, there is nothing to feed it. If it takes natural bait off the bottom, feed it — and feed it the very thing you are fishing with.

Tactics: how much to throw, and when to top up

One throw puts down 0.60 of freshness, but every mix has its own ceiling:

ceiling = 0.25 + 0.45 × nutrition + 0.30 × variety

where variety counts components: one gives 0, five or more gives 1. Which means:

More than two throws in a row is pointless — the swim hits its ceiling and further jars do nothing. You cannot spoil it either: there is no overfeeding in this mod, by design.

When to top up. Freshness halves every half-life: 90 seconds for pure dust, up to four and a half minutes for whole grain. A swim lives between three and twelve minutes, again by fraction. In practice:

• a fine mix on the feeder — top up every 2–3 minutes, or by the third cast you are fishing a bare

patch of river;

• grain and boilies — they carry a session; top up every 8–10 minutes;
• top up with the same mix: an identical recipe adds towards the ceiling, a different one

displaces the swim outright and resets it to a single throw's worth.

Geometry. A throw covers 3×3 blocks. The centre column counts at full strength, the eight neighbours at 0.6. So casting accuracy is worth about forty per cent of what your feed does — landing in the middle is meaningfully better than "somewhere near it".

What feed does not fix. It does not restore a depleted population: if a spot has been fished out (or you left a bait trap in it), feed will gather what is left but adds no fish. Recovery runs on its own clock, and groundbait does not touch it.

Common mistakes

"I fed a lot and it got worse." It did not — you cannot overfeed. What happened is that the last throw had a different recipe and replaced the swim you had built. Watch the message when you throw.

"Boilies are the best, so I use boilies." Boilies are the richest and coarsest thing there is, which makes them wrong for everything under a kilo. Most of what swims past you is under a kilo. They are also not groundbait on their own — nothing is, without the base.

"Nothing but small fish." Feed coarser. Every step of fraction pushes the shoal upward, and over a coarse bed even the fish that do come roll bigger.

"My mix scores 1.00 but the swim is quiet." Score is who comes; the ceiling is how many. Three things with ballast among them can be perfectly matched and still hold almost nothing. Add food and add variety.

"I fed the water in front of me and cast out to the drop-off." The fed spot is 3×3 around where the groundbait landed, and the bobber has to land in it. Feed where you are going to cast — or load the cage and let the cast do it for you.

In short

• Catching nothing but tiddlers: feed coarser.
• After a carp or a bream: coarse and rich.
• After roach, bleak or a winter swim: fine and lean — ballast is how you get there.
• Get the fish's own food into the mix. Its journal page lists what it eats.
• The base plus three or four different things beats more of one thing — score is who comes, the

ceiling is how many.

• Fish over the spot and nothing takes? It is never the amount. It is the grind, the richness, or the

menu.

The Tackle Station

Right-click a Fishing Stall with an empty hand and it becomes a tackle bench: pick a form, pick a weight, pick a hook size, feed it iron and string, and take the finished tackle out. The block that gives the village its fisherman is the same block you tie your own rigs and lures on.

The bench and the profession share one block. Its recipe is Barrel + 2 × String + Iron Ingot (shapeless).

How it works

The flow is stonecutter-style:

1. Choose a tab — Peaceful (bottom rigs) or Predator (artificial lures).
2. Click a form in the four-column grid — two rows of them on the peaceful tab, three on the predator one.
3. Step the weight with the < Weight: N g > control. The weight is the real decision.
4. Step the hook in the first well — it works like the weight stepper above it: click its left half for a smaller hook, its right half for a bigger one, No.16 down to No.1. You never need to own that hook; the bench ties it on and bills the size in iron.
5. Fill the three material wells: Iron, String, Dye. Ghost icons and a live ×N count under each well show what the current selection needs, in red when you are short.
6. The result slot previews the tackle. Taking it consumes the materials.

Materials stay in the bench when you close it, so you can walk up and tie another one. They drop if the block is broken.

Costs

iron    = max(1, round(grams / 30))          + 1 for the two feeder cages
        + ceil(hook nuggets / 3)             the hook the bench ties on
string  = 1 for lures, 2 for rigs, 3 for the 3-hook rig
dye     = optional, lures only, 1 dye

A hook is worth 1 nugget at size 16 and one more for every size up, to 9 at size 1 — the same ladder you would climb crafting them by hand. The bench bills that at three nuggets to the ingot: it has no nugget slot, and it is tying the hook on for you. On a single-hook rig that is 1 / 2 / 3 extra ingots for size 16 / 10 / 4; on the 3-hook rig, 1 / 4 / 7.

Rigs come out of the bench with their hooks already slotted — ready to bait, and you never had to craft that hook at all. Every piece the bench ties carries the maker's name in its tooltip ("Tied by …"), and a Tackle weight: N g line that the casting system reads.

Peaceful forms

The float, predator and winter rigs are not on the list — they live permanently inside their rod blanks and are never tied separately.

Predator forms

All ten lures take an optional dye.

The heavy steps at the top of the spoon, wobbler, jig and castmaster ladders are the sea sizes — they exist so the sea spinning (20–120 g), boat (100–400 g) and trolling (150–600 g) rods finally have tackle inside their test windows.

The Wobbler and Soft Plastic have no crafting recipe at all, so the bench (or the fisherman) is the only way to make them.

Why weight matters

The grams you choose are read by three separate systems.

1. The rod's test window

The tackle's weight must sit inside the blank's cast-weight window. Too light and the blank cannot load — a short cast and a silent 25 % longer wait. Too heavy and your line's break tolerance drops; 2.5× over and the blank cracks on the cast.

A rig's weight for this purpose is its bench weight plus the bench weight of any tied lure sitting in one of its slots. Unstamped tackle contributes its rig-type fallback mass, and an unstamped lure contributes 0 g — so a hand-crafted spinner adds nothing to the cast.

Tackle bought from the fisherman is bench tackle: anything the bench can tie leaves the stall carrying the same weight stamp, whether it is a lure sold loose or a rig socketed inside an assembled rod. Only hand-crafted lures are unstamped. (Before 0.6.0 shop lures were unstamped too, so a bought spinner cast like an empty hook while a bench-tied one of the same name had real mass.)

2. The lure-size filter (lures only)

A lure's mass is its size, and size decides which fish will commit to it:

optimum fish weight (kg) = 0.5 × √(lure grams)
ratio  = max(0.05, meanWeightKg / optimum)
bite weight ×= max(0.05, 2 / (ratio + 1/ratio))

Off-size fish don't vanish, they just bite far less — the floor is 5 %. So a heavy pilker genuinely silences the tiddlers, and because the total tackle weight also drives the wait, big lures mean slower, rarer, bigger takes.

The same weight also floors the individual fish's size roll at roughly 8 × lure grams (capped at 60 % of the species' range). A 200 g jig will not produce a 700 g zander.

3. Cast distance

Heavier flies farther, within the blank's limits. The bench shows a cast ~N blocks hint computed as round(4 × √grams) — 20 g reads ~18 blocks, 160 g reads ~51. This is a feel indicator only. Your actual reach is set by the rod (6 to 32 blocks) scaled by how well the weight fits its window; nothing casts 51 blocks.

The "advanced" drawer

Click the ► advanced row to open it. What it holds depends on the form:

• Rigs — a draggable hook link slider, 5 to 100 cm. Each rig style resets to its own sensible default when you select it (flat feeder 10 cm, 3-hook 15 cm, carp 20 cm, ledger 40 cm, catfish 50 cm, feeder 60 cm).
• Lures — three balance buttons: nose / center / tail. Default is center.
• Spinner and Spoon only — a blade size is derived automatically from the mass (min(5, 1 + grams/15)) and written on the lure. Every spinner comes out at blade 1; spoons run 1 / 2 / 3 / 5 / 5 across their five weights.

These three knobs currently have no gameplay effect. Hook link, balance and blade size are written into the tackle's NBT and displayed on its tooltip, and nothing else in the mod reads them. They are groundwork for a later pass — treat them as cosmetic for now. The weight and the dye are the two choices at this bench that actually change how fish behave.

Dyeing at the bench

Drop a dye in the fourth well and the lure comes out coloured — the same result as the lure-dye crafting recipe, and the colour does affect the bite. The dye well is ignored for rigs.

See also

• Rigs and baits · Rods
• Villager — the same block is the fisherman's job site
• Fishing mechanics

Crafting reference

Every recipe the mod adds. Shaped recipes show their grid pattern as row / row / row, with · for an empty cell.

Items marked trade only or quest only have no recipe at all — see Villager and Progression.

Rods

All shaped. Every reeled blank needs string for its guide wraps.

The saltwater four differ only in the tip. Anvil repair materials are listed in Rods.

Reels

All shapeless.

There is no Reel 9000 item.

Lines

All shaped around a ring of 8 String (SSS / S?S / SSS).

Upgrade chains, one craft per step:

Hooks

All shapeless. A bigger number is a smaller hook.

All nine hook sizes make up the riverfishing:hooks tag used by the lure recipes. Note that #2 and #1 have no recipe of their own — the master fisherman sells them, and the Tackle Station ties any size on for you, billed in iron.

Rigs

These are the basic recipes. A hand-tied rig comes out at its rig type's fallback mass — you get no say in it. For a rig at a weight you choose, tie it at the Tackle Station instead. Strongly recommended: the weight is what has to fit your blank's test window, and bench rigs arrive with their hooks already slotted.

Only the six swappable bottom rigs are craftable. The Primitive, Light Float, Float, Winter and Predator rigs are built into their rod blanks and cannot be made or held.

All six can also be tied at the Tackle Station to a chosen weight, and come with their hooks pre-slotted.

Leaders and float

All shapeless.

Lures

These are the basic recipes, and they cost you the lure's mass. A hand-crafted lure carries no weight stamp, which the game reads as 0 g — it adds nothing to your cast and does not drive the lure-size filter, so it never picks its fish. Tie lures at the Tackle Station instead — pick the grams, get a real size. The two heaviest classes (sea sizes) exist only there.

The h ingredient is the riverfishing:hooks tag (No.16–No.4).

Dyeing a lure

A special recipe: any one artificial lure plus one or more dyes in the grid, anywhere, gives the lure back with a mixed colour — exactly like leather armour. See lure colour.

Baits

Worm, Maggot, Bloodworm and Chicken Liver come from digging and mob drops; Corn, Pea and Pearl Barley come from the bait crops. See Tools.

Groundbait

Blocks

Tools

Item	Type	Ingredients
Fishing Journal	shapeless	Book + Hook No.12 + Leather
Fish Finder	shaped iri / iqi / iii	i = Iron Ingot, r = Redstone, q = Quartz
Filleting Knife
Whetstone	shapeless	2 × Smooth Stone + Stick
Ice Auger
Bite Alarm (Bell)
Digital Bite Alarm
Ichthyologist's Tablet	—	no recipe (operator tool)

Cooking

Raw fillets come from the Filleting Knife — one per 200 g of fish, at most a stack from any one specimen. The same item is the universal saltwater bait and a groundbait component.

Nothing has a recipe for…

A short list of everything in the mod you cannot craft:

See also

• Rods · Reels and lines · Rigs and baits
• Tackle Station · Villager · Blocks · Tools

Recipe grids

Generated straight from the recipe files, so these cannot drift from what the game loads. Hover any cell for its full id.

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Tools and processing

The items that aren't tackle: how you read the water, keep your gear sharp, and turn a catch into dinner.

Fishing Journal

Right-click to read. Eight tabs — Fish, Bait & feed, Lures, Gear, Quests, Skills, Records and Guides — covered in Progression.

The Fish tab is a live bestiary: every species you have caught, with its count, your personal best, and a "how to catch" page listing its water bodies, depth, width, biomes, best season and time, baits and tackle — all read from the same profile the bite engine uses, so the advice can never drift from the balance.

The Guides shelf holds twenty-four written pages, in the order the shelf itself runs: the wait on float and bottom, how the fish notice you before they notice the bait, tackle stress, the drag; groundbait in four pages — the base, the numbers, feeding, the recipes — and the keepnet; working the lure, topwater, live bait; the tackle bench and where the tackle lives; every water is its own, the market and the daily order, fishing together; ice fishing; trolling, sea giants, legendary fish; and last the electrofisher, Discord and the thanks.

Your records survive death.

Fish Finder

Right-click while aiming at water — or at the bank or bottom beside it; the tool traces 24 blocks along your view and finds the water either way. It always tells you something, and puts a half-second cooldown on itself.

What it reports:

Fish finder — biting here right now:
Bream, Roach, Perch, Pike, Rudd, Gudgeon, Bleak, Tench
Known for: Tench
Stock: Bream 180%, Mako shark 45% (temp)
Pressure: 1004 hPa ↓  —  bite: frenzy

The Fish Finder is sold by a journeyman fisherman for 14 emeralds, and is the reward-shaped item you want before committing to a long bottom session.

Ichthyologist's Tablet

The operator version. Uncraftable — creative or /give only.

It prints the full diagnostic dump to chat:

• Water body type, width, depth and the biome group set
• Season, time, weather and whether a frenzy is running
• Pressure in hPa, its trend and the exact bite factor
• Per species: its environment score E, its level gate, its stock or TEMP percentage, and its favourite bait
• A diagnosis grouping every absent species by the first gate that blocks it — blocked[water], blocked[depth(3)], blocked[width], blocked[biome], blocked[season], blocked[time], blocked[weather]

Right-clicking a Fishing Stall with the tablet instead reports that block's point-of-interest record — a villager job-site diagnostic that tells you whether the stall is properly registered, and to break and re-place it if not.

Filleting Knife

Hold the knife, put a caught fish in your other hand, and right-click.

fillets = max(1, fishWeightGrams / 200)

The fish is consumed, the knife loses 1 durability (of 128), and you get that many Raw Fish Fillets — stackable food, unlike the unique catch.

The knife is in the forge:tools/knives tag, so it works as a knife for other mods that look for one.

Filleting a koi works, announces your name in server chat with "you seriously filleted it?", and earns the Heartless Cook advancement.

Fillets

Cook raw fillets three ways:

One fish is at most one stack of fillets, however big it was: a legendary catfish is 64, not 500.

Whetstone

Hold the whetstone, put a hook in your other hand, right-click. The hook's bluntness resets to 0 % and the whetstone loses 1 of its 128 durability.

Hooks live inside rigs, so the workflow is: open the rig, pull the hook out, sharpen it, put it back.

Ice Auger

Right-click Ice, Packed Ice, Blue Ice or Frosted Ice that sits directly on water to drill a Drilled Ice Hole.

• 64 durability, 1 per hole, with a 15-tick cooldown between drills.
• Over anything but water: "No water under the ice", and the ice is left alone.

A pickaxe just breaks the ice — only the auger makes a hole you can fish. Sold by an expert fisherman for 9 emeralds.

Bite alarms

Alarms mount on a Rod Pod, not on a rod. Full behaviour is on the Blocks page.

Live Bait, by hand

Two ways to turn a small catch into bait, both limited to fish of 150 g or less:

1. Crafting — put the fish alone in the grid.
2. By hand — hold the fish in your main hand, a hook in your off hand, then sneak + right-click. This consumes both and gives one Live Bait.

Either way the bait keeps the fish's weight, which culls the small takers.

You can also gather Live Bait passively from a Bait Trap.

Where bait comes from

All of these are loot-table injections, so they behave identically on both loaders. Bait can also be farmed (Worm Farm, Maggot Farm, bait crops) or bought from the fisherman.

Pack integration

See also

• Rigs and baits · Blocks
• Keepnet · Tackle box — where the catch and the tackle go
• Progression · Water and conditions
• Electrofisher — the creative-only tool that is not tackle: it decides what lives in a water
• Crafting

Blocks

Nine blocks plus three crops. Everything with contents shows its counts through Jade if you have it installed.

Fishing Stall

Two jobs in one block:

• It is the Fisherman villager's job site (a registered point of interest, in minecraft:acquirable_job_site).
• Right-click it with an empty hand and it is the Tackle Station.

Materials left in the bench live in the block and drop when it is broken.

Rod Pods

A rod pod holds cast Bottom-flow rods so their lines stay in the water while you do something else. Two sizes: 1 slot and 3 slots. The pod faces the way you were looking when you placed it, so the rods point at the water.

Docking a rod

1. Cast the rod normally — you need a line already in the water. Without one: "Cast the rig first".
2. Right-click the pod with the cast rod in hand: "Rod on the pod".

Only Feeder, Bottom, Carp, Surf and Boat rods can be docked. Anything else: "Only bottom rods go on the pod". No free slots: "No free pod slots".

Taking it back

Right-click with an empty hand. The pod hands you a biting rod first if there is one, otherwise the first occupied slot. Whatever was in your main hand goes to your inventory.

• Grab a rod inside its bite window and the fight starts immediately.
• If the fish had hooked itself, you also get "The fish hooked itself — bring it in!"
• On a false alarm: "Nothing — false alarm".
• Otherwise: "Took the rod".

What a podded line does

Each podded line renders in one of three visible states, so you can read the pod from across the camp:

In the last ~10 seconds before a real take, the fish nibbles: faint water ticks at the rig and, with an alarm mounted, a barely-there stir of it. Spotting the shift from a nibble to a real bite is the whole thing.

When the bite fires:

• 40 % of real bites hook themselves against the rod's weight, giving you a full 30-second window to get there.
• The other 60 % give a wide 8–15 second reaction window.
• Miss a real bite entirely and the bait is gone: the line goes slack and needs recasting.

Podded lines also re-read the world every 15 seconds, exactly like a held line. (That context is not saved to disk, so after a chunk reload a podded line falls back to the wait it was given at the cast.)

Breaking a pod drops every docked rod and every mounted alarm.

The pod's own code comments mention a 5-slot variant; only the 1-slot and 3-slot pods actually exist.

Bite alarms

Alarms mount on the pod, not on the rod — right-click the pod holding one. It goes to the first occupied slot without an alarm, or to any free slot: "Alarm attached". If every slot already has one: "Need a rod on the pod without an alarm".

The digital alarm is also sold by a master fisherman for 10 emeralds.

Both keep signalling for the whole bite window, not just the first moment:

• The bell showers note particles every 5 ticks and rings every 20.
• The digital flashes redstone particles every 4 ticks and beeps every 8.

A false alarm has a shorter window (2–3.5 s) and resets itself if you ignore it — the line keeps waiting.

Without an alarm a bite makes no sound at all. Only water movement at the rig gives it away. The false-alarm rate is scaled by the difficulty preset's phantom multiplier.

The digital alarm's internal description claims it also sends a HUD alert. It does not — in the current build both alarms are sound and particles only.

Bait Trap

A "малявочник" — a net you stand in the water. It is a waterloggable block, so the water stays inside the net.

It works as long as it is waterlogged or has water below or on any of its four sides.

• Every 2 to 4 minutes it catches something.
• 35 % of catches are a real small fish (up to 150 g) drawn from the species that actually live in the water at the trap — a proper catch with its own weight and length, capped at 4 stored.
• The rest are fry, stored as Live Bait, capped at 12.
• Right-click with anything to collect everything at once. Empty: "The trap is empty for now".

Feeding the trap

Right-click it with groundbait and it runs at double speed: "Groundbait poured in — fish will come twice as fast". Each groundbait adds 4 charges, one charge is spent per catch, and the cap is 12 charges. Already full: "The trap is already fully baited".

The fisherman sells traps at apprentice tier (3 emeralds), and one is the reward for the Catch 10 fish quest.

Worm Farm

A composter for worms. It needs soil directly below it (any block in the dirt tag) to work.

• Right-click with anything compostable (the vanilla composter list, which since 0.8.2 includes the mod's own corn, pea and barley seeds) to raise the heap one level, up to 4. The heap is visible.
• Every 2 to 4 minutes the worms eat through one level: the heap visibly sinks and 3 worms are added, up to a stock of 24.
• Right-click with an empty hand (or anything non-compostable) to collect. Nothing yet: "No worms bred yet".

Sold by the fisherman at novice tier for 4 emeralds — the intended early exit from digging dirt by hand.

Maggot Farm

The same idea with carrion. Since 0.8.2 the farm reads the riverfishing:maggot_food tag: rotten flesh, a spider eye, and raw beef, pork, chicken, mutton or rabbit. Cooked food and fish stay out — it is a carrion box, not a larder — and being a tag, a pack can add its own.

• Right-click with rotten flesh to load one piece per click, up to 16. The heap rises a visible layer every 4 pieces. Progress reads "Rotten flesh loaded: N/16"; when full, "The farm is packed full of flesh".
• Roughly every 45–90 seconds one piece hatches into 4 maggots and the heap sinks. Stock caps at 64.
• Right-click with anything but flesh to collect. Nothing yet: "No maggots bred yet".

Sold at expert tier for 5 emeralds.

Note: breaking either farm returns the block, but not what was already growing inside it. The bred worms and maggots live as a counter on the block, not as items, so harvest before you move.

Mini Aquarium

Despite the item id trophy_stand, this is a desktop tank: a small pedestal with a glass box on top.

• Holds up to 5 fish, each 150 g or lighter. Too heavy: "Too big — the mini aquarium takes small fish up to 150 g". Full: "The aquarium already holds five fish".
• Right-click with a fish to add it, empty-handed to take the last one back out.
• It faces the player who placed it, so the fish look back at you.
• Breaking it pops every fish inside.

The Mini Aquarium has no crafting recipe in the current build — it is only obtainable in creative or by command. It does have a loot table, so once placed it can be recovered.

Aquarium

2 blocks wide × 2 tall × 1 deep, glass on top, wooden base with a nameplate below. All four cells place and break together, and it fails to place if there is not room for all four. As a block it is unchanged since 0.6; as a thing, since 0.9.0, it is a tank.

• Right-click any cell and it opens: six fish slots, food, groundbait, water, result and two module slots. The old right-click-with-a-fish verbs are gone — everything goes through the slots.
• A mature ♀ and ♂ of one species in their spawning window, fed and in clean water, give roe in three days; take the parents out and it incubates on the tank floor into fry. The whole procedure — feeding, water, the clutch, the hatch, the modules — is on the Breeding page.
• The water is drawn as it is: clear blue at 100 %, green murk at 50 % (nothing spawns below that), brown at 0 %; the modules in the slots stand as blocks in the back corners; six fish swim as six fish.
• The bottom-left cell is the master and holds the contents; break any cell and the whole thing comes down, dropping one aquarium plus what it held.

Drilled Ice Hole

Made by an Ice Auger from ice sitting on water, and the only way to ice fish.

It is a full copy of vanilla ice, so it is slippery, melts in bright light, and leaves water rather than a hole in the lake when broken. It also refreezes — a 25 % chance per random tick, roughly every 5 minutes, but only in a cold enough biome and only when no player is within 4 blocks.

Right-click it with an assembled Winter Rod to fish. Anything else: "Needs an assembled winter rod".

Bait crops

Three farmland crops for the plant baits. They behave exactly like vanilla wheat — bonemeal, random ticks, farmland requirement — with four visual growth stages.

Barley yields Pearl Barley directly — there is no threshing step.

Break an immature crop and you just get the seed back.

Getting seeds: each of the three drops from grass and tall grass at 5 %, exactly like vanilla wheat seeds but a little rarer. The fisherman also sells 3 seeds of a rotating type for 1 emerald at novice tier.

All three crops are registered into Serene Seasons' spring, summer and autumn crop tags, so they respect the seasons if that mod is installed.

Water upgrades

New in 0.9.0: five blocks for a pond of your own. None does anything right where it sits — each puts a mark on the water, and every cast within 24 blocks horizontally (six up or down) fishes over improved water. A second block of the same kind is only a second block, not a stacking bonus. The sample view of the fish finder lists the upgrades in reach.

The aerator, the snag pile and the gravel bed are waterlogged blocks placed on the bottom; the other two do not hold water. All five double as aquarium modules, where each means something narrower.

Private pond sign

New in 0.9.0. A sign placed within three blocks of water claims that body — up to 600 blocks of water: a dug pit or a village pond, never a river (a bigger body is refused). It is a board on a post, it faces whoever plants it, and its hitbox is the board.

• No wild fish move in. Nothing lives in a claimed pond but what you put in it.
• The depth, width, biome and province gates step back — a carp lives in a dug pit, an arapaima in your garden.
• Your own net is legal here, and the wait between hauls is a third of the wild one; anyone else's net is poaching the lot.
• Break the sign and the water turns wild again.

Recipe: any sign plus planks, shapeless. What a claimed pond does to the stocking ledger is on the Stocking page.

Jade integration

With Jade installed, looking at these blocks shows their contents without opening anything:

See also

• Tools · Tackle Station · Villager
• Tackle box — a block that also opens right there in your hand
• Rigs and baits · Ice fishing
• Crafting

The Keepnet

A keepnet is one inventory slot that swallows a day's catch. It is not a chest: a fish takes up room in the shape it actually is, so a metre of pike lies across the net as a long strip and a bream of the same weight sits as a short fat block. Room in the net is something you solve, not something you fill.

Four sizes — Small, Medium, Large and Huge Keepnet — each crafted from the one below.

Why you want one

Every catch carries its own weight and length, so no two fish stack. An hour on the bank is an hour of your inventory filling one slot per fish, and the twentieth roach costs exactly as much room as the catfish. The keepnet takes them all into a single slot and packs them by shape.

That is the trade the item makes: unlimited slots become a finite area you have to think about. Which fish to keep and which to throw back becomes a real question again.

The four sizes

Every cell is water. An earlier version reserved an edge column for bait and groundbait; it was dropped, so the whole grid is catch. Each net stacks to one and holds its contents in its own NBT — the fish travel with the item.

What may go in

This mod's fish, and nothing else. No tackle, no blocks, no food, no fish from other mods. Tackle has a box of its own.

Shape decides the room

The footprint of a fish is worked out from the length and weight that specimen was caught at — the two numbers already on its tooltip. Nothing is authored per species, so it falls out of the fish's own proportions.

long axis  = ceil(length_cm / 25)                  capped at 7 cells
K          = 100 × weight_g / length_cm³           Fulton's condition factor
short axis = round(long axis × K / 1.6)            capped at 4 cells,
                                                   and at (long axis − 1) from 3 cells long
taper      = a fish ≥ 3 cells wide AND ≥ 4 long loses its four corner cells

One cell is 25 cm of fish. K is the number a real angler's club uses to say how deep-bodied a fish is: an eel runs about 0.2, a pike about 0.7, a bream or a flounder over 2. So at the same length a carp is broader than an asp, and the grid shows it. A fish is never as wide as it is long, and the biggest footprint anything can reach is 7 × 4.

Worked examples, from the mod's own shape check:

The tapered corners are genuinely free space — another fish's nose can sit in them, and the % full figure counts only cells a fish really occupies.

Using it

Right-click a keepnet held in your hand to open it. That is the only way in: no hotbar shortcut, no opening it mid-fight.

Hovering a cell with a fish on the cursor ghosts the fish into the cells it would take, turned as it would land: green means it fits, red means it does not. Hovering a fish already in the net names it, because which one do I throw back is the question.

Tidy is worth pressing before you give up on a net: the room you think you have lost to awkward gaps is usually still there. Anything that genuinely no longer fits after a repack goes to your inventory, and to the ground if your inventory is full — never nowhere. Empty does the same with the whole catch.

Shift-click moves one fish per click on purpose: each fish is its own decision.

The tooltip reads Grid: W x H, and once there is something inside, Holds N, M% full.

Crafting

Shaped, · for an empty cell. Each size eats the one below it, so the chain is small → medium → large → huge.

Building a Huge Keepnet from nothing therefore costs 21 String, 4 Sticks and 6 Iron Ingots in total.

Buying one

The fisherman sells all four, one per trade:

What it does not do

• Nothing happens to a fish in the net over time. No spoiling, no condition loss, no weight drift — a fish comes out exactly as it went in.
• It is never placed. The keepnet is an item, not a block; it works in your hand and only there.
• Nothing else in the mod reads it. A fish inside the net is not in your inventory, so you cannot sell it to the fisherman, cook it or mount it until you take it out.

The journal's Guides tab carries a short version of this page in game, under The keepnet: shape decides the room.

See also

• Species reference — the lengths and weights that decide a footprint
• Villager — who sells the nets, and who buys the fish
• Crafting · Progression

The Tackle Box

Twelve line diameters, nine hook sizes, eleven rig types and dozens of baits, all living loose in the same nine rows as your food and your building blocks. The tackle box takes them.

It is a block and an item at once: one object that opens in your hand and stands on the bank. Four sizes, each a craft of the one below.

The four sizes

Rows of nine, so the grid lines up with the inventory underneath it. Boxes do not stack. The tooltip reads "N slots — tackle only", plus "N of M used" once something is inside.

The four icons are the same box drawn bigger with more latches on it, so a Huge reads differently from a Small in the hotbar without anyone having to hover it. The placed model grows with the size too.

Crafting

Shaped, · for an empty cell. There is a Chest at the heart of every one of them, and every size above Small is an upgrade of the size below.

Empty the box before you upgrade it. The three upgrade recipes are ordinary shaped recipes — they build a new box, and the contents, the name and the colour of the one you feed in do not come across.

Putting it down, and opening it

The controls are the ones every other block in the game already uses, so the box needs no rule of its own in your head:

A box already on the ground opens on any right-click, empty-handed or not.

Held or placed, it is the same object: the block stores the box item itself rather than a copy of what is in it. Sort the box on the bank, pick it up, and it is sorted in your hand — contents, name and colour with it. Walk more than 8 blocks away from an open placed box and the screen closes.

Break a placed box and it drops with everything still inside. So does it when it is blown up, burnt, or shoved by a piston. Middle-click picks it up loaded.

In creative mode, breaking a placed box destroys it and everything in it. The drop is deliberately skipped for creative players, and there is no loot table behind the block to fall back on.

All four sizes share one collision box, 12 × 7 × 10 pixels, while the models get bigger with the size. The lid of a Huge box overhangs the part of it you can actually hit.

What counts as tackle

Only tackle goes in, and one function decides it for every route in: the slot, shift-click and the fisherman's ready-made kits all ask the same question. Shift-clicking a non-tackle stack out of your inventory does nothing at all rather than quietly putting it somewhere else.

In: lines, hooks, rigs, leaders, baits and artificial lures — plus anything in the riverfishing:tackle item tag, which is where the Float lives and where a pack can add its own.

Out: rods, reels, fish, groundbait, and tackle boxes. Rods and reels are the things you hold, not the things you rummage for, and a box that swallowed a rod would be a backpack wearing a tackle box's name.

Naming

The top row of the box's own screen is the name field — no anvil, and no walk back to the village to use one. Type in it and the name is saved as you type, up to 32 characters. Clear the field and the box goes back to its default name.

The name sits on the box item, so it shows in your hotbar and stays with the box through being put down and picked back up.

Colour

Put the box in a crafting grid with one or more dyes, exactly like leather armour and exactly like dyeing a lure. The mixed colour lands on the box's inserts, and the contents come through the craft untouched.

The colour shows in three places: the insert stripe on the item icon, the band on the placed block, and a band behind the slots when the box is open. An undyed box is off-white.

All four are in the vanilla minecraft:dyeable item tag, so a water cauldron washes the colour back off.

Unlike a lure's colour, a box's colour does nothing to the fishing. It is navigation: four boxes with four names and four colours — pike, carp, winter.

Kits from the fisherman

The fisherman sells four ready-made boxes, each already named, dyed, and packed with tackle carrying the bench's weight stamp.

The float and pike kits share one journeyman slot: a stall offers one of the two, not both. A kit is the answer to "what do I need for pike" in a form you can carry.

Box or Station?

Two different blocks doing two different jobs.

Tie it at the station, carry it in the box.

See also

• Rigs and baits · Tackle Station
• Villager — the four kits · Blocks · Crafting

Fishing mechanics

Nothing bites by luck. This page is the full model: how the engine decides what takes and how soon, how the cast and the strike work, and how the fight is won or lost.

Contents

• The bite engine
• Casting
• The three flows
• Setting the hook
• The fight
• Fight patterns
• Losing the fish
• Snags, foul-hooking and bycatch
• What you land
• Gear wear
• Difficulty

The bite engine

For every one of the 91 species, the engine computes an attractiveness weight W. Species with W above zero go into a weighted lottery for which fish bites; the sum of all their weights decides how long you wait.

Match coefficient M — your tackle

M = 0.30 × bait
  + 0.15 × groundbait
  + 0.13 × rig
  + 0.12 × rod
  + 0.12 × line
  + 0.10 × hook
  + 0.08 × reel

The falloff used for hook size, line diameter and reel size is the same everywhere:

score = max(0, 1 − 0.25 × |actual − ideal| / tolerance)

So at exactly ±1 tolerance you still score 0.75, and the score only reaches zero at ±4 tolerances. Tolerance is a steepness setting, not a cut-off.

Environment score E — the world

E = waterFactor × season^1.5 × time^1.4 × weather × biome^1.3 × distance × community

Five hard gates zero it out entirely — the fish simply is not there:

1. The water-body type's factor is 0 (a pike has "sea": 0.0).
2. The water column is shallower than depth_min or deeper than depth_max.
3. The water body is narrower than width_min or wider than width_max.
4. No listed biome group matches the spot.
5. This patch of water's community does not hold the species.

The season, time and biome factors are raised to powers greater than 1, which amplifies the swings the profiles describe — when and where you fish is strongly felt.

The distance factor:

A species stocked into water that fails its natural gates survives at a quarter strength: E = max(natural, 0.25 × stockedPresence). See Stocking.

Species weight W

sizeExp = 1 + min(3, meanWeightKg / 2)

W = base × M^sizeExp × E × feedBonus × localStock × pressureFactor × (1 + naturalistBonus)

The M^sizeExp term is the heart of the difficulty curve. A bleak (30 g mean) has an exponent near 1, so a mediocre setup still catches it. A catfish (7 kg mean) sits at the exponent cap of 4 — halve your match score and its bite weight drops sixteenfold. Big fish demand a near-perfect kit.

Then a chain of multipliers, applied in this order:

And two more hard gates on top of the environment ones:

• No bait the fish wants on the rig → W = 0.
• Hook score below 0.34 → W = 0. The wrong hook size band means the fish will not take, full stop.

Time to bite

W_total = Σ W over all species
effective = W_total ≤ 1.5 ? W_total : 1.5 + (W_total − 1.5) × 0.3
T = 160 ticks / effective
ticks = −T × ln(1 − random)          (minimum 40)

The compression above 1.5 is the swarm cap: a huge shoal of small fish would otherwise floor the wait and turn a swim into a bite-per-few-seconds conveyor.

The sampled wait is then adjusted:

delay = ticks / spotDepletion × keenSenseMultiplier × underloadPenalty

and floored per flow:

Then a feeding frenzy divides it by 3, and a fresh fed spot takes off up to 40 %.

If the result still exceeds 2400 ticks (2 minutes) you are warned: "The fish are wary of this setup — it could be a very long wait". There is no upper cap — a barely-viable setup really is a long wait.

Live re-evaluation

A waiting Float or Bottom line re-reads the world every 300 ticks (15 seconds). Dusk falling, rain arriving, a frenzy starting, groundbait thrown after the cast — all of it rescales the remaining wait and re-picks which species will bite. A cast is not a frozen snapshot. (A koi decided at the cast stays a koi, so a long wait cannot compound its rarity into a certainty.)

If the water goes completely dead (night or season gating everything out) the line simply sits until a later re-evaluation revives it.

Casting

Hold right-click to charge, release to cast. There is no click-cast.

power(ticksHeld) = 0.15 + 0.85 × triangle(ticksHeld, period 40)

The bar is a triangle wave: power climbs from 0.15 to full over 20 ticks (1 second), falls back to 0.15 over the next 20, and repeats. Overcharging weakens the throw, so distance is a timing skill. Tick marks sit at 50 % and 85 %.

throw distance = 2 + power × (maxRange − 2)

maxRange is the blank's reach (see Rods) multiplied by the cast-weight factor. When the factor is below 1 the bar's far end is drawn as a red dead band with a hard cut-off marker — the fill physically cannot enter it.

The rig lands in the first water block found scanning down a 24-block column from two blocks above your eye level, along your look direction. If there is no water there: "No water to cast into".

Two refusals worth knowing:

• Water capped by a solid ice sheet is rejected: "Drill a hole with an ice auger".
• A reel-less rod aiming past 6 blocks: "A pole cannot reach past 6 blocks".

Casting an Active rod costs hunger — one whole food point every 4 casts.

The three flows

Float (Stick, Bamboo, Pole, Winter)

Cast, then watch. There is no "Bite!" text and no sound — the bobber plunges on your screen and spotting it is the game. The bite window is 72 ticks (3.6 s).

The strike-timing bar needs a reel, and no float blank takes one — all four save their single timing challenge for the pull-out.

Bottom (Feeder, Bottom, Carp, Surf, Boat)

A long cast and a long wait, with a very forgiving 200-tick (10 s) bite window and a plain click to set the hook — no timing bar. These are the rods you can leave on a rod pod with a bite alarm.

These rods are not retrieved. A right-click outside the bite window does not crank the reel — it reels the cast in and ends it. Cast once, then leave it alone until a fish takes. Only the Active rods below are worked with clicks.

Active (Ultralight, Spinning, Sea spinning, Trolling)

The bite clock does not even start until your first crank. Each right-click advances the lure 4 ticks and its gap from the previous click is the lure action — see working the lure.

retrieve length (ticks) = clamp(castDistance × coeff, 80, cap)
  Spinning : coeff 20, cap 340
  others   : coeff 10, cap 220

Reach the end of the retrieve with nothing on and the cast ends: "Nothing. Recast."

A take fires the strike-timing bar with a 60-tick window (35 for a topwater blowup). Either click again or release the retrieve button — both count as the hook-set.

Trolling is the exception: the boat's momentum sets the hook itself, with no timing at all.

Setting the hook

The timing bar

A marker sweeps back and forth across a bar as a triangle wave. Somewhere on it sits a green zone (a certain hook-up) flanked by an orange band (a 25 % chance). Outside both, the fish is gone. The green zone's position is random each time.

orange half-width = min(0.47, greenHalf + 0.11)

The Finesse skill widens the green zone by +1 % per rank.

The lure bar is deliberately easy — roughly half the bar is green — because it stands in for a hook-set, not a reaction test. The float bar is tighter, and an aggressive or heavy fish tightens it further.

Miss it and you get "Mistimed! You missed the strike window" or, on a timeout, "The fish got away…".

The pull-out (reel-less poles)

A wooden rod has no reel and therefore no tension fight. After the strike comes one decisive timing window: the pull-out. Land it in the green and the fish comes flying out; miss and it throws the hook.

First, a hard check — a fish too big for the line snaps it instantly:

if weightKg × 1.4 > max(0.4, lineStrainKg) → the line parts

Then the sweep and zone are set by the fish's weight, with the rod tier softening the curve:

A stick can never realistically land a trophy; a true pole can. A foul-hooked fish tightens the window further (−4 ticks period, −0.04 zone).

You get period × 2 + 10 ticks to click.

The fight

A boss bar appears. It does not name the fish — you learn what it was when you land it. Its fill is your landing progress; its colour is your tension.

The bar's title reports one state only: "🎣 Player" becomes "🎣 Player — tiring" once fatigue passes 70 %. A run is announced by the bar turning red, never by the title.

Under the bar sits the fight coach cue:

The three drag positions

The drag is one of the fight's two axes — how hard you hold:

Open the drag for jumps and runs you cannot hold. You only gain standing up. Crouch-and-spam is not an exploit: with the drag open the handle just spins against a slipping spool.

While crouched you also pay out line even between runs (−0.0025 progress per tick, −0.004 during a run), so camping in the open-drag position is not free immunity.

Steering the run

A run has a course, and answering it is the other axis. Four dedicated keys do it — ← and → pull the rod across, ↑ lifts it, ↓ pushes it down — on the arrows by default and rebindable in the vanilla Controls screen (Fight: pull LEFT / pull RIGHT / LIFT the rod / rod DOWN). Hold none of them and the camera answers instead: lean your view more than 6° off where it sat when the run began and that counts as pulling that way, so looking around mid-run is an input whether you meant it or not.

The pattern scripts the course: sounding pulls DOWN, greyhounding comes UP, relentless alternates sides, active_then_passive goes sideways twice and then sulks deep. Nothing spells it out — the blank bends toward the fish, and reading it is the game.

How well you are holding it is one number, align:

It multiplies four things at once: the tension of a crank by 2.2 − 1.7 × align, the progress of a crank by 0.2 + 0.5 × align, the run's own load by 1.9 − 1.35 × align, and how fast the fish tires by 1 + 1.8 × align². Held right, a run costs half the tension, pays most of a full crank and burns the fish out nearly three times as fast; held wrong it is 2.2× the tension for nothing at all. Outside a directed run — a calm crank, a head-shake, the final surge — every one of those multipliers is a flat 1.0.

Your feet are tackle too, read whether or not you know it. Backing away from the water wins line exactly as a crank does, and loads the rod the same way; walking at the fish puts slack in it. A second of slack warns you — "SLACK! Stop walking at it — the hook will fall out" — and past two seconds every tick rolls 5 % for the fish to spit the hook. Standing still fishes exactly as it always did, and a running fish keeps its own line tight, so a run can never go slack.

Tension and progress

fightMass       = weightKg ≤ 20 ? weightKg : 20 × (weightKg/20)^0.55
requiredKg      = max(0.5, fightStrength × (1 + fightMass) × 2)
effectiveStrain = lineStrainKg + 0.5 × fightDrag
breakTension    = clamp(effectiveStrain / requiredKg, 0.2, 1) / breakSensitivity
                        × overloadPenalty × steadyHandMultiplier      (clamped 0.1 … 1.0)

That single number is your margin. Thin or worn line, a heavy fish, a small reel and an overloaded blank all shrink it. Past 20 kg the mass a fight is fought against is compressed rather than counted: a 400 kg marlin is fought as 104 kg. Straight, the law would have asked 802 kg of line for it while the strongest braid in the game carries 108 — that fish was not hard, it was impossible.

Per crank:

wrongWay    = directed run ? 2.2 − 1.7 × align : 1.0
armStrength = 0.35 + 0.65 × anglerStamina

tension  += (running ? runPulse : calmPulse) × (1 − 0.55 × fatigue) × wrongWay
                                             × (1 + 0.5 × (1 − anglerStamina))
progress += landPulse × (directed run ? 0.2 + 0.5 × align : running ? 0.2 : 1.0)
                      × (1 + 0.6 × fatigue) × armStrength

Cranking into a run you are not answering spikes tension and gains almost nothing — that is the lesson. anglerStamina starts at 1 and every crank spends it — most of all a crank into a run — and it comes back only after a second with no click, twice as fast crouched. A spent angler pays half again in tension and winds at 35 % of the strength, so the answer to being tired is to stop, not to click faster.

The pulses themselves:

sensitivity = reel-less ? 1.3 : clamp(1 + (4000 − reelSize)/4000 × 0.5, 0.6, 1.5)
weightStress = clamp(weightKg / 5, 0.2, 2.0)
smallDamp    = min(1, 0.25 + weightKg / 1.5)
tackleMargin = effectiveStrain / max(0.5, requiredKg)
loadFactor   = clamp(max(0.05, tackleMargin)^−0.6, 0.25, 2.0)

runPulse   = 0.18 × sensitivity × (0.7 + 0.6 × weightStress) × loadFactor × smallDamp
calmPulse  = 0.07 × sensitivity × loadFactor × smallDamp
landPulse  = 0.05 / (0.7 + 0.6 × weightStress) × (0.9 + reelSize/14000)
relaxTick  = 0.010 + clamp(fightDrag/10, 0, 0.5) × 0.02

smallDamp is why a 50 g perch no longer loads the rod like a kilo fish. loadFactor is the whole reason to buy stronger line: tackle that out-guns the fish loads at as little as a quarter of the rate, tackle that is barely enough loads at double, and exactly-adequate tackle is the unchanged middle at 1.

Passively, tension falls by relaxTick per tick and progress bleeds back by 0.0008 per tick — leave the rod alone entirely and you make no headway.

Runs

A running fish loads the tackle by itself: tension += runPulse × 0.12 × (1 − 0.55 × fatigue) × wrongWay every tick, unless you have the drag open. Here wrongWay = 1.9 − 1.35 × align on a directed run and a flat 1.0 on a course-less one, so standing hands-off is ×1.36 of that load, holding the wrong key ×1.9, and answering the run ×0.55. Riding out a run with a locked drag is not free.

Runs are scheduled from a pattern-specific chance, duration and interval (see fight patterns), all damped by fatigue:

runChance   = (1 − 0.65 × fatigue) × patternChance
runDuration = max(14, patternDuration × (1 − 0.35 × fatigue))

The number of runs a fish has in it:

runs = max(1, profile.runs)
     + pattern bonus (aggressive +2, relentless +3, sounding +3, greyhounding +2; burst floors at 2)
     + 1 if the specimen is over 2 kg
     + predator bonus: 1 + round(clamp(weightKg/4, 0, 1.5))
     + 2 if foul-hooked

Fatigue

The fight wears the fish down — fast while it runs, slowly between:

staminaFactor = clamp(fightStamina / 0.70, 0.5, 1.6)
courseGain    = directed run ? 1 + 1.8 × align²  (1.0 … 2.8) : 1.0
fatigueTick   = 1/(20 × (10.4 + 6.5 × weightKg) × staminaFactor)

fatigue += running ? fatigueTick × courseGain : one fifth of fatigueTick   (capped at 1)

Full burn-out takes about (10.4 + 6.5 × kg) × staminaFactor seconds of running, and as little as a third of that if you answer every run: a 5 kg fish of median stamina burns out in 43 s held hands-off, in 15 s fought properly. A perch gasses out in seconds; a carp holds for half a minute; big game outlasts your drag instead. A tired fish pulls softer, comes in faster, runs less often and for less long — the boss bar says "— tiring" and that is your cue it is ready for the net.

Predator fights

Any fish caught on an Active rod, or any species that requires a leader, fights fast and mean. With wAmp = clamp(weightKg / 4, 0, 1.5):

A head-shake is a brief violent thrash between runs: a 6–11 tick mini-run, +1.25 × runPulse tension and −0.03 progress. Keep cranking through it and it snaps you off; the answer is to ease off for a moment.

An Ultralight rod stacks on top: run pulse ×1.15, break tolerance ×0.92, landing ×0.88, head-shake chance +0.006. Fragile finesse tackle is the hardest fight in the game.

The final surge

Reaching 85 % progress rolls for one last run — 28–41 ticks, or 38–51 for a trophy — announced as "A last dash at the bank!" with a drag scream, and steered by a course like every other run. Ease off or snap.

It is a roll, not a rule. A guaranteed surge became a ritual the player waited out, and a ritual carries no fear:

Rolled exactly once, at the moment the bank is reached. A failed roll is a quiet landing, not a retry — nothing rolls again at 90 %.

Timeout

fightTimeout = clamp(700 + weightKg × 80 + patternBonus, 900, 3400) ticks
patternBonus: burst 300, greyhounding 400, relentless 500, sounding 700
             (+300 more for any predator fight)

Run out the clock and the fish is simply gone.

Fishing together

• Anyone within 12 blocks is added to your boss bar and watches the fight.
• A friend can net your fish: empty main hand, crouching, within about 3.5 blocks, with the fish at 85 %+ and not running. It counts for you and earns the helper +5 angler XP. "%s netted your fish!"

Session guards

Your line drops if you switch to a different stack in that hand, or if you walk more than 40 blocks from where the rig landed.

Fight patterns

Seven patterns, set per species in its profile.

Sounding (deep dives)

While the fish is down, it takes line: one dive costs a flat 0.30 of the land bar, spread evenly over however long that dive runs. (It was a rate per tick until 0.8.2, which meant lengthening the runs silently doubled what a dive cost — a beluga was asking for 6.6 bars back.) Every 25 run ticks the long drag scream plays and you are told "Sounding — pump it back between dives!" You cannot fight a dive; you wait it out and pump the line back in the gap.

Species: Yellowfin tuna, Swordfish, Sturgeon, Halibut, Beluga sturgeon, Frilled shark, Goliath grouper.

Greyhounding (jump series)

Between runs, once progress is past 5 %, a 0.8 % chance per tick of a full-body breach — and it falls as the fish tires, down to 0.2 % at full fatigue, so a fight you are winning visibly calms down. "It jumps — give slack, do not reel!" opens a 15-tick window whose first 4 ticks are grace: the crank already on its way when the fish leaves the water is human reaction time, not a mistake. Crank inside the remaining 11 and there is a 35 % chance the hook rips straight out: "Thrown the hook on the jump...". The answer to a jump is the open drag.

Species: Mahi-mahi, Blue marlin, Sailfish, Mako shark, Atlantic salmon, Arapaima, Golden dorado, Tarpon.

Losing the fish

Tackle stress (the line break)

Crossing the tension limit does not snap the line instantly. Every tick over the limit rolls a break chance that grows with how far over you are and how long you have held it there:

overshoot   = (tension − breakTension) / breakTension
overStress += 0.015 + 0.02 × overshoot            (capped at 2.0)
chance      = min(0.5, (0.008 + 0.055 × overshoot + 0.028 × overStress) × breakSensitivity)

Ease off and overStress recovers at 0.02 per tick (0.05 with the drag open). With the drag open the line cannot break at all.

The first tick over the limit warns you once — "Tackle at its limit — ease off!" plus a rod creak. Surviving the abuse still frays the line: +1 wear every 15 over-limit ticks.

Brief spikes are survivable; cranking through a whole run is not.

What a break costs you

loseRigChance = clamp(0.30 × (weightKg × 1.5 / lineStrainKg), 0.05, 0.30)

• Rig kept (the common case with a strong line) — "Off! The fish threw the hook". Fish lost, tackle intact.
• Rig lost — "Snapped under ~N kg! Fish and rig lost". The message names the load in kilograms (tension × requiredKg), which is the best tackle lesson in the game. Your rig slot is emptied.

A strong line against a light fish nearly always just throws the hook (5 % floor). A weak line against a heavy fish loses the whole rig at the 30 % cap.

Leader bite-off

Rolled once, at the moment of hooking, for the fifteen toothy species:

chance = 0.75 × (1 − leaderProtection)

A bite-off always loses the rig: "Bitten clean through — around N kg of it. Use a leader!", which names roughly the weight of what took it. See leaders.

Catastrophic failure

A flat 0.3 % chance on every hook-up that the line simply parts and the whole rig is gone, fish and all — independent of weight or strain. It grants the hidden advancement "It Was DEFINITELY Huge".

Blunt-hook slip

Before the fight starts, a blunt hook can fail to set: (bluntness/100) × 0.5. "Empty strike — the hook was blunt".

Snags, foul-hooking and bycatch

Snags

On the default preset, per fishing action:

• 3 % — a dead snag. The rig is lost: "Snagged solid — lost the rig" (+6 line wear).
• 7 % — a recoverable snag. You tug it free: "Snagged! Pulled it free" (+3 line wear).

For still tackle (float and bottom) the roll happens at the moment of the "bite". For lure rods it is rolled up front at the cast and strikes somewhere in the second half of the retrieve, as the lure nears the bank.

Ice fishing into a clean hole almost never snags: a flat 1 %, and always the recoverable kind.

Foul-hooking

A moving lure can snag a passing fish in the body. 1 % per retrieve, lure rods only — a snag on still tackle can never be a foul-hook. Rolled up front and struck somewhere across the retrieve.

"Foul-hooked! Snagged by the body — this'll be tough". The consequences:

• +2 runs and run pulse ×1.3 — a sideways fish fights harder and longer.
• On a pole, a tighter and faster pull-out window.
• The fish does not count: no journal record, no XP, no quest progress, no advancements. The item is tagged "Foul-hooked — not counted".

Bycatch

On still tackle only (a moving lure doesn't pick up bottom junk), a "bite" can turn out to be something else:

• 4.5 % — junk: Leather Boots, Bone, Kelp ×1–2, Ink Sac, or Stick ×1–3.
• 1.3 % — treasure: Name Tag, Saddle, Experience Bottle ×3–5, Gold Ingot ×1–3, or Emerald ×2–4. Worth +15 angler XP.

It does not surface instantly. It hangs on the line as a short heavy pull — one dead-weight tug and about 1.5–2 seconds of dragging — indistinguishable from a big lazy fish until it breaks the surface. The line cannot snap on it. On a pole it uses the same pull-out timing as a fish.

Fishing up the Leather Boots earns the advancement "Catch of the Decade".

What you land

Every catch is a unique item carrying its own species, weight and length, so no two stack.

Weight

k = log((mean − min)/(max − min)) / log(0.5)        clamped 0.5 … 8.0
k += max(0, 0.85 − matchScore) × 2                  (a crude setup catches the small end)
u = random^k
weight = min + (max − min) × u

Solving the exponent from the profile's mean makes it the true median catch — half of all your fish of that species land under it. Profiles with no explicit mean fall back to the classic k = 2.4 big-fish-are-rare curve.

Two floors can raise the roll: a weighed live baitfish (≈6×) and a tied lure's weight (≈8×), both capped at 60 % of the range.

Length

Length follows weight by the real allometric law — mass grows with volume, so length tracks the cube root of weight, anchored to the species' own length range, with ±2 % natural variation. The endpoints map exactly: min weight → min length, max weight → max length.

The fish's in-world icon scales from its length alone: clamp(length/50, 0.45, 8.0), so a 50 cm fish renders one block long and a 380 cm mako nearly eight.

Trophies

trophy  ⇔  weight ≥ weightMin + (weightMax − weightMin) × 0.90

A trophy is not a dice roll: it is a property of the specimen. Any fish whose weight lands in the top tenth of its species' range is one, which across the 91 profiles works out at roughly 2–7 % of catches — rare on a species with a long tail, commoner on one with a tight range. Everything that pushes a fish up its own range pushes it towards the band: livebait, a heavy lure, Angler's Luck. The journal publishes each species' threshold weight, so it is a number you can look up rather than infer. A trophy shimmers like enchanted gear, prefixes its name with ★, gives triple XP and runs longer than an ordinary fish of its species. The 0.90 is configurable.

Prime grade

prime threshold = ceil(species maxWeight × 0.7)

Any legal catch at or above 70 % of its species' maximum is graded prime — "Prime specimen — the buyer wants this". Only prime fish can be sold to the fisherman, and every prime landing nudges that species' market price down.

Legendary fish

Eight species hide one unique specimen per server, rolled at the moment of landing: