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 79 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 0.7.0, 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
• 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 — 38 of the 79 species rate it, 21 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.

Sixteen 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 and Round goby.

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, no new keys:

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.
3. You only gain standing up. Crouching forever is safe but goes nowhere.
4. At 85 % there is one guaranteed last dash at the bank. Ease off through it.

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 roughly three times as fast as a 1000.
• 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 the twitchiest of all at 1.3.
• 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.

Their in-game names are not perfectly consistent, as the tables show — the thin end of each ladder was added before the heavy tier, so the capital letter and the word Braided were quietly dropped at 0.50 and 0.40 respectively. Same items, same behaviour.

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. Seven species are toothy enough to bite straight through a bare line — pike, zander, conger eel, wahoo, barracuda, mako shark and taimen.

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 79 species: 33 are bottom, 28 mid, 9 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 "Baitfish: N — culls the small takers". 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

Eight 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.4).

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

Four categories. Right-click water while holding groundbait to feed a spot.

How many species list each category as ideal: cake 19, powder 12, pellet 11, grain 8.

The fed spot

A hand-fed spot is a 3×3 column zone:

• Each feed adds 0.6 freshness, stacking up to 1.0.
• Freshness halves every 1800 ticks (90 seconds) and the zone is completely spent after 3600 ticks (3 minutes).
• The centre column counts at full strength; the outer ring at 60 %.
• Coloured particle clouds mark active zones — pale for powder, golden for grain, brown for pellet, olive for cake.

What it does:

right groundbait category for the fish : groundbait score 1.0
wrong category                          : 0.3
unfed spot                              : 0.4
bite weight ×= clamp(1 + freshness, 1, 2)
time-to-bite ×= 1 − 0.40 × freshness

So a freshly fed spot with the right groundbait roughly doubles a fish's attractiveness and cuts up to 40 % off the wait.

A feeder cage (the Groundbait slot on a feeder / flat feeder / 3-hook / carp rig) delivers one charge automatically on every cast, feeding the landing spot exactly as hand-feeding does. A cage counts as a fixed 0.5 freshness; if a hand-fed zone is fresher, the zone wins.

See also

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

The Tackle Station

Right-click a Fishing Stall with an empty hand and it becomes a tackle bench: pick a form, pick a weight, feed it hooks, 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 3×3 grid.
3. Step the weight with the < Weight: N g > control. The weight is the real decision.
4. Fill the four material wells at the bottom: Hook, 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.
5. 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
string  = 1 for lures, 2 for rigs, 3 for the 3-hook rig
hooks   = 1, or 3 for the 3-hook rig
dye     = optional, lures only, 1 dye

Rigs come out of the bench with their hooks already slotted — ready to bait. 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 eight 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 is their only source.

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 300 g of fish, at most a stack from any one specimen.

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. Six tabs — Fish, Baits & Lures, Gear, Quests, Skills 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 twelve written pages: the drag, tackle stress, live bait, every water is its own, working the lure, topwater, trolling, sea giants, legendary fish, the market and the daily order, fishing together, and the tackle bench.

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 / 300)

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
• 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) 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 Rotten Flesh.

• 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

A proper display tank: 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.

• Holds up to 3 fish of any size.
• Right-click with a fish to add, empty-handed to remove the last one.
• The bottom-left cell is the master and holds the contents; break any cell and the whole thing comes down, dropping one aquarium plus every fish inside.

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.

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

Seventeen line diameters, six hook sizes, four 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 79 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).

Reeled float rods run the strike-timing bar. Reel-less ones (all three wooden blanks) do not — they 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 also reports the state: "🎣 Player", "🎣 Player — running!", or "🎣 Player — tiring" once fatigue passes 70 %.

Under the bar sits the fight coach cue:

The three drag positions

This is the whole fight, expressed with no new inputs:

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.

Tension and progress

requiredKg      = max(0.5, fightStrength × (1 + weightKg) × 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.

Per crank:

tension  += (running ? runPulse : calmPulse) × (1 − 0.55 × fatigue)
progress += landPulse × (running ? 0.2 : 1.0) × (1 + 0.6 × fatigue)

Cranking into a run spikes tension and gains almost nothing — that is the lesson.

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)

runPulse   = 0.18 × sensitivity × (0.7 + 0.6 × weightStress) × smallDamp
calmPulse  = 0.07 × sensitivity × 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.

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) every tick, unless you have the drag open. 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(6, patternDuration × (1 − 0.5 × 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:

fatigue += running ? 1/(20 × (4 + 2.5 × weightKg)) : one fifth of that      (capped at 1)

Full burn-out takes about 4 + 2.5 × kg seconds of running. 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

The moment progress reaches 85 %, one guaranteed run fires — 28–41 ticks, or 38–51 for a trophy — announced as "A last dash at the bank!" with a drag scream. Ease off or snap.

Timeout

fightTimeout = clamp(700 + weightKg × 80 + patternBonus, 700, 3000) 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: progress drains 0.0035 per tick. 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.

Greyhounding (jump series)

Between runs, once progress is past 5 %, a 1.2 % chance per tick of a full-body breach. "It jumps — give slack, do not reel!" opens a 15-tick window. Crank inside that window 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.

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 seven toothy species:

chance = 0.75 × (1 − leaderProtection)

A bite-off always loses the rig: "Bitten through the line — use a leader!" 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 79 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 named specimen per server, rolled at the moment of landing:

The actual weight varies ±3 % around the listed figure, the length is the species maximum, and it is always a trophy. The catch is broadcast to the whole server in bold gold and recorded forever — there will never be another. A foul-hooked fish can never be the legendary one.

Gear wear

Line wear per cast is fractional (0.1, or 0.06 on fluorocarbon) — a single cast usually adds nothing at all, and the remainder becomes a probability, so wear creeps up over many casts. Full details in Reels and lines.

The engine always reads and dulls your sharpest hook — you fish with your best one.

Difficulty

Nine of the harsher mechanics — phantom bites, break sensitivity, spot depletion, leader bite-off, line and hook wear, snags, foul-hooking and how sharply fish spook — move together on a single preset: arcade, realism, hardcore or custom. realism is the default and the one every number on this page assumes; arcade cuts the harsh multipliers to roughly a third, hardcore raises them by 60–70 %.

The preset lives in a config file, and a pack can override each of the nine individually as well as the trophy bar, frenzy speed, bait consumption and the bycatch rates. Every key, default and range is in Configuration.

See also

• Water and conditions — the world half of the bite engine
• Species · Progression
• Rods · Reels and lines · Rigs and baits

Water and conditions

Where and when you fish matters as much as what you fish with. This page covers the world half of the bite engine.

Water bodies

Every cast classifies the spot into one of six types. Each species' profile carries a factor per type; a factor of 0 means the fish does not live there at all.

Ocean, river and swamp are decided purely by biome with no flood-fill at all, so classifying a spot in the middle of an ocean is free. Only ambiguous inland still water runs a flood-fill, and it is hard-capped at 400 blocks — just enough to tell puddle from pond from lake. Results are cached per spot.

The is_swamp tag lists vanilla Swamp and Mangrove Swamp, plus Biomes O' Plenty's Bayou, Marsh, Wetland, Bog and Mangrove when that mod is installed.

Width

Width is the longest open-water span through your cast point — four cardinal scans (each capped at 64 blocks), taking the larger of the X and Z spans.

Width drives three things:

• Habitat gates. A species with width_min: 16 is absent from anything narrower.
• Long-range casting. On water narrower than 12 blocks the six long-range blanks get "Water too narrow for a long cast" and every fish's environment score drops to ×0.4.
• Species richness. See community below.

Depth

Depth is the number of water blocks straight down from the surface at your cast point, counted up to 16. It is a hard gate on both sides: a species with depth_min: 5 is absent from shallows, and one with depth_max: 3 is absent from a deep hole.

Depth also darkens the water for lure colour purposes.

Biome groups

Every spot is classified into a set of groups. A species' biomes map lists the groups it lives in with a factor each; the best matching group wins, an empty map means "anywhere", and no match at all means the fish is absent.

Exactly one of cold / temperate / warm applies to the water block itself; the rest stack on top.

A river also reads its banks. A river is its own biome in Minecraft — minecraft:river, base temperature 0.5 — so the land it runs through never reached the water: a river across a taiga scored as plain temperate, and a species asking for cold or taiga was absent from every river in the world however river-dwelling it was. Since 0.7.1 a river block also takes the groups of the first land found in each of eight directions, out to 32 blocks, skipping any water it crosses on the way. So a taiga river is cold and temperate, and since the best listed group wins, the taimen can live there without evicting the roach. Lakes, ponds and the sea are unchanged — they already sat inside the biome they belong to.

How many of the 79 species reference each group: temperate 55, cold 34, warm 32, ocean_biome 15, deep 12, mountain 8, taiga 7, beach 5, swamp 5, cherry 5. The river_biome, forest, jungle and dry groups are recognised but no shipped species currently uses them — they exist for datapacks.

Note that Biomes O' Plenty biomes carry the vanilla tags, so the habitat model works across it without any extra data.

Time of day

The time factor is raised to the power 1.4, so the daily rhythm is strongly felt. A burbot has day: 0.0 and is genuinely uncatchable in daylight; a catfish at night: 1.4 becomes 1.4^1.4 ≈ 1.61.

Weather

Three buckets — clear, rain, thunder — applied at face value with no exponent. Most bottom feeders like rain; surface hunters and sight-feeders prefer clear.

Seasons

Seasons come from Serene Seasons. Without that mod installed the season is undefined and every species' season factor is a flat 1.0 — you lose the whole seasonal layer.

With it, the factor is raised to the power 1.5, the strongest exponent in the engine. A burbot's summer: 0.0 means no burbot in summer at all; smelt at winter: 1.5 becomes 1.5^1.5 ≈ 1.84.

Spring is spawning season: a fished-out water recovers about 2.5× faster.

The mod also registers its bait crops into Serene Seasons' spring / summer / autumn crop tags.

Barometric pressure

Minecraft has no atmosphere, so the mod synthesises one — deterministically, from the world seed and game time, with no saved state. Three layered sine waves (periods 1.6, 3.7 and 0.8 in-game days) produce a smooth synoptic wander between roughly 991 and 1035 hPa.

The barometer deliberately leads the vanilla sky — reading it is how a real angler anticipates.

trend       = pressure now − pressure 3000 ticks ago     (3 in-game hours)
trendFactor = clamp(1 − trend × 0.045, 0.85, 1.28)       (falling glass boosts)
absFactor   = clamp(1.05 − (hPa − 1008)² × 0.00035, 0.82, 1.05)
biteFactor  = clamp(trendFactor × absFactor, 0.70, 1.35)

This is a uniform multiplier on every species' bite weight, so it scales the whole water's time-to-bite. A falling glass feeds everything; a settled bluebird high slows everything down. The absolute value nudges on top, peaking just under 1008 hPa.

The Fish Finder shows the reading, an arrow (a change under 1 hPa across the window counts as steady), and a colour-coded outlook:

Feeding frenzy

Twice per in-game day the whole water feeds. The two windows are derived from the world seed and the day number, so every player on the server sees the same frenzy with no saved state:

• A morning-ish window starting somewhere in ticks 500–8500
• An evening/night window starting somewhere in ticks 11500–20500
• Each lasts 2000 ticks (about 100 seconds)

During a frenzy bites come 3× faster, fish visibly splash around your float, and the cast reports "Feeding frenzy! The water is boiling". Landing a fish in one earns the Feeding Time advancement.

Fed spots

Right-clicking water with groundbait creates a 3×3 fed zone. Full details in Rigs and baits: 0.6 freshness per feed stacking to 1.0, halving every 90 seconds, dead after 3 minutes, worth up to double bite weight and 40 % off the wait.

Spot depletion

Fishing pressure is tracked per chunk, saved with the world.

Pressure decays with a 30000-tick half-life (25 minutes idle), or about 10 minutes in spring. It caps at 1.5.

attractiveness = clamp(1 − pressure, 0.1, 1.0)

Fishing out the bream slows only the bream — the perch keep biting as before. About 40 minutes of steady casting will visibly deplete a spot, and around ten kept fish of one species in quick succession is enough to drive that species to the floor. Below 0.4 you are told "This spot is fished out — move on". The floor is 10 %, so nowhere ever goes completely dead.

Releasing fish reverses it — see Stocking.

Every water is its own

Each ~128-block region of water holds its own species set, derived from the world seed. This lake is a tench lake forever; the taimen river has to be found.

absent fraction by width:   < 8 blocks → 60 %      < 16 → 45 %
                            < 32      → 30 %       ≥ 32 → 20 %

So a small pond is species-poor and a big river or lake is rich. Then, per species:

• Species whose profile base is 0.95 or higher live everywhere — the ubiquitous commons, so no water is ever dead. There are sixteen: Bream, Crucian Carp, Roach, Rudd, White Bream, Perch, Gudgeon, Ruffe, Bleak, Bluegill, Mackerel, Herring, Rotan, Nase, Smelt and Round goby.
• A stocked species is always present.
• Otherwise a stable seed hash decides. Above the absent threshold the species lives here at ×1.0 — and the top 8 % of rolls become the water's signature fish, biting at ×1.8.
• Below the threshold the species is absent, unless a recent release has left a temporary population there.

The Fish Finder reads all of this out: which species are biting here right now, a "Known for:" line naming the signature fish, and live stock percentages.

The full picture

Putting it together, this is the environment half of a fish's bite weight:

E = waterBodyFactor
  × season^1.5
  × timeOfDay^1.4
  × weather
  × bestBiomeGroup^1.3
  × distanceFactor
  × communityFactor

with hard gates on water type, depth, width, biome match and community presence — and then, uniformly across all species, the barometric factor and the spot's depletion.

See also

• Fishing mechanics · Species
• Stocking · Tools
• Sea fishing — how the ocean zones map onto biome groups
• Fish in the water — the same community, drawn under the surface before you cast

Fish in the water

Since 0.7.0 the water shows you what is in it. Stand anywhere near water and the fish it actually holds drift below the surface — the right species, at their own depth, at their real size. Nothing has to be cast and you do not need a rod in your hand.

This page is about reading them.

What you are looking at

The shoal is chosen by the same function that decides what takes your bait, and the same one the Fish Finder reads: water type, depth, width, season, time of day, weather, biome group and the water's own species community.

Two consequences worth having:

• Your tackle is not part of it. Swapping a lure never makes a fish appear or vanish. You are seeing what lives here, not what is interested in you.
• It follows the state of the water. Fishing pressure thins the shoal where a species has been fished down and lets it fill back in as the swim recovers; a stocked species shows up once it is actually there. A hammered swim looks empty because it is.

The make-up of a shoal is fixed to the in-game hour: it holds still while you fish it, and has moved on when you come back later.

How much is shown

Water is described in 12×12-block cells pinned to the world grid, out to 24 blocks each way from where you stand — the 3×3 chunks around you, so a lake is populated to the far bank instead of in a ring at your feet. At most 20 cells and 96 fish at once.

Because the cells are pinned to the world rather than to you, walking adds and drops whole shoals at the edges instead of dragging the fish along with you.

Fish are handed out by distance, so a far cell is not starved by a near one:

Nothing at all is drawn past 42 blocks, and the last ten blocks of that are a fade rather than an edge. Small fish thin out with distance the way they really do: a 20 cm roach thirty blocks off is two pixels of noise, while a metre of pike is worth seeing from the opposite bank.

How busy a patch looks follows how rich it is — within the caps above, good water is crowded and poor water is bare.

Water more than 20 blocks above or below you is skipped. The lake at the foot of the cliff you are standing on is not the water you are looking at.

How well you see them

Each patch carries a clarity that decides how solidly its fish are drawn.

Rain multiplies that by 0.7 and a thunderstorm by 0.45. Water that sky light does not reach — under a roof, under an overhang, in a cave — is dimmed to as little as 0.35 of the figure above.

Depth deliberately hides nothing. A fish on the bottom of a clear lake is drawn as plainly as one just under the surface. Only the water itself dims a fish. If you bother to lean over and look, you get to see what is down there.

What the shoal tells you

• Size is true. One block is one metre, with a small readability bias, and never smaller than 0.16 or larger than 4.5 blocks on screen. A shape you can make out from the bank is a genuinely big fish.
• These are everyday fish, not the record book. The specimens shown scatter around the species' average weight; a trophy is something you catch, not something you spot.
• Colour is age. Young fish are pale and silvery, old ones darken toward their species' adult colour — the same table that paints the fish in your hand.
• Depth is the species' habit. Surface species sit in the top block or two, mid-water species hang in the middle, bottom species travel just off the bed.
• Small species travel in numbers. A species averaging under 900 g comes out in groups of three to six sharing one circuit; anything heavier swims alone.
• There are no labels. You get a shape, a size and a colour. Working out what it is stays yours to do — that is what the Fish Finder and the journal are for.

The fish also respect the shoreline: they turn before they reach the bank, and they hold to their own patch instead of wandering into the next one.

They react to you

Anything that frightens the water frightens the shoal, and you get to watch it happen. A cast landing on their heads, footsteps on the bank, a jump, wading in, a moving boat, a block broken nearby, or your own shadow thrown across the water by a low sun.

A frightened shoal:

• turns away from you and breaks for open water — over about a second, not instantly
• swims at up to 3.2× its cruising speed (a fish cruises at roughly half its own body length per second)
• drops about a block deeper
• dims as it goes, and once the water is badly stirred there is nothing left to draw at all

They come back as the water calms, which takes 30 to 90 seconds depending on the water: a murky swamp or a deep, open lake forgets you fastest, while clear shallows and a small pond stay wary longest. Crouched and standing still makes no noise at all — that is the whole counter-play. Setting spook to 0 in the config switches the reaction off entirely.

It is the same disturbance that cancels bites: a rig sitting in frightened water goes quiet in proportion to how frightened it is, whether it is in your hands or on the rod pod. So a patch of water emptying in front of you is a warning worth reading.

What it is not

• Not a live census. The shoal is refreshed every 2 seconds, and only when what it says has actually changed. It is ambient scenery, not a HUD.
• Not a fish finder. No names, no stock percentages, no biting-now list — see Tools for those.
• Not a promise of a bite. A fish you can see still has to want what you are offering.

See also

• Water and conditions — what decides which species live here
• Fishing mechanics · Species
• Stocking · Tools

Ice fishing

Ice fishing is vertical: no casting, no aiming. You drill a hole, drop a jig straight down, and work it in a rhythm until the nod twitches.

What you need

The Winter Rod is reel-less, so it takes no reel — just a line and its built-in rig.

Drilling a hole

Right-click a block of Ice, Packed Ice, Blue Ice or Frosted Ice that sits directly on water with the auger.

• The ice becomes a Drilled Ice Hole: "Drilled a fishing hole".
• Costs 1 durability (the auger has 64) and puts a 15-tick cooldown on the item.
• Over anything but water you get "No water under the ice" and nothing happens.

A pickaxe just breaks the ice; only the auger makes a hole you can fish.

The hole is temporary

The Drilled Ice Hole is a full copy of vanilla ice, so it behaves exactly like it — slippery underfoot, it melts back to water in bright light, and breaking it leaves water rather than a dry gap in the lake.

On top of that it skins over. On each random tick there is a 25 % chance it refreezes into ordinary Ice — roughly every 5 minutes on average — but only when:

• the biome is cold enough to freeze water, and
• no living player is within 4 blocks.

So the hole you are standing at never freezes under you; the one you walked away from will need re-drilling.

Fishing the hole

Right-click the hole with an assembled Winter Rod.

• Any other rod: "Needs an assembled winter rod".
• A Winter Rod aimed at open water instead: "The winter rod only fishes a hole — right-click drilled ice".
• Any other rod trying to cast into water that is capped by a solid ice sheet: "Drill a hole with an ice auger".

The first click drops the jig; there is no power bar and no aiming. The mormyshka goes straight down and the line renders with no float on it.

Winter conditions are forced

Fishing through a hole sets the bite context's season to WINTER regardless of the real season, and flags the cast as an ice hole. So only cold-water fish bite — everything with winter: 0.0 is simply absent.

The wait is clamped to 200–2400 ticks (10 seconds to 2 minutes) — a patient winter wait, but never an endless one.

Jigging

While you are waiting, every right-click works the jig. The rhythm matters:

The bite can never be dragged closer than 10 ticks away. Each jig plays a soft retrieve click and throws splash particles at the hole — three for a good rhythm, one for a bad one.

The take

The bite fires the standard Float-flow window of 72 ticks (3.6 s), with no sound — you watch the line. Because the Winter Rod is reel-less it does not run a strike-timing bar; the click sets the hook directly, and the single timing challenge comes afterwards as the pull-out.

The winter rod's pull-out uses the same forgiving curve as the Pole Rod — sweep period 30 − kg × 4.0 (floor 14 ticks), green zone 0.20 − kg × 0.033 (floor 0.060).

Snags are almost absent

Fishing vertically into a clean hole is a flat 1 % snag chance, and that 1 % is always the recoverable kind — the mormyshka comes back. Compare 10 % (3 % of which loses the rig) for ordinary fishing.

What bites under the ice

Baiting the winter rig: its single slot takes a mormyshka or any natural bait. Eight species rate the Ice Jig at all:

Bloodworm is the other classic under the ice — Smelt, Whitefish, Gudgeon, Ruffe and Blue bream all rate it 1.0.

The strongest winter species by season factor:

Only Smelt and Whitefish actually list the winter rod and the winter rig as their ideal tackle. Everything else you pull through the ice is being caught on gear it doesn't strictly want — which costs you on the rod and rig components of the match score, but is entirely playable.

Seven species have winter: 0.0 and will never bite through the ice: Crucian Carp, Rudd, Bleak, Chub, Tench, Catfish and Eel. Carp, Mirror Carp, Wild Carp, Grass Carp and Silver carp are effectively shut down at 0.02–0.05.

Progression

The mod tracks fish landed through the ice as its own counter, feeding quest stage 6 — Under the ice:

There is also the code-driven advancement From Under the Ice — pull a burbot through a hole with the winter rod.

Stage 6 unlocks once 70 % of stage 5's tasks are done, and completing 70 % of stage 6 opens stage 7, the north and the taiga.

See also

• Rods · Rigs and baits
• Fishing mechanics · Water and conditions
• Progression · Tools

Sea fishing

Saltwater is a separate tier, not a coat of paint. The freshwater ladder tops out at 7 kg of reel drag and a 220 g cast; ocean fish are an order of magnitude heavier, so the sea gear is a gate.

The saltwater gear

Four blanks, four reels, and a heavy line tier.

All four are diamond-built and repair with a diamond. Their recipes differ only in the tip — prismarine shard, two shards, prismarine crystals, nautilus shell — so the ladder reads at a glance. Full details in Rods.

The four saltwater reels (8000, 10000, 12000, 14000) need ocean loot: prismarine, crystals, a nautilus shell. See Reels and lines. Their drag climbs steeper than the freshwater ladder — 9.5 / 14.5 / 19.5 / 24.5 kg — which is what makes the pelagics stoppable at all.

For line, the heavy tier exists precisely for these reels: mono up to 0.80 mm (64 kg) and braid up to 0.60 mm (108 kg). A 400 kg marlin needs it.

The universal saltwater hook bait is Fish strip — four from any caught fish. Nineteen species rate it, nine of them at 0.9 or better.

Four sea species are toothy enough to demand a leader: Conger eel, Wahoo, Barracuda and Mako shark.

Getting the gear

Two routes:

• Craft it. Diamonds plus ocean loot — see Crafting.
• Buy it. A master-tier fisherman has one rotating listing that offers a fully assembled sea spinning (30 emeralds), surf (34), boat (34) or trolling (40) rod, plus rotating listings for the big reels, the heavy lines and the No.2/No.1 hooks.

The ocean zones

Sea fishing means the water body classified as sea — the biome is tagged ocean or deep ocean. Within that, three biome groups shape what lives where:

The other layer is the water column itself. Every sea species has a depth_min gate on how deep the water must be at your cast point:

And a width_min gate, running from 10 blocks (herring) to 24 (blue marlin, swordfish).

The in-game guide says "the pelagics live over deep water only". Strictly, what gates them is the water-column depth and the width, not the deep-ocean biome tag — the deep group merely gives them their best factor (1.2–1.3 for the pelagics). In practice you find them by getting a long way offshore over genuinely deep water, which is the same thing.

The coastal and shelf nine

Round goby also lives in the sea (factor 1.1), and Smelt is primarily a sea fish (1.2) — both ungated or nearly so, and both good first saltwater catches.

The pelagic four and the big-game trophies

Three of these hide a legendary specimen: yellowfin tuna (Old Ridgeback, 140 kg), blue marlin (The Leviathan, 380 kg) and mako shark (The Megalodon, 390 kg).

Halibut is the deepest gate in the mod alongside the sturgeon — angler level 9.

Trolling

Trolling is fishing from a moving boat. The boat does the casting and the retrieving; you steer and then fight.

Arming it

You need, all at once:

1. An assembled Trolling rod or Sea spinning rod in your main hand.
2. A boat you are riding. Any watercraft that actually moves you works.
3. Horizontal speed inside the working window: 0.12 to 0.60 blocks per tick (roughly 2.4 to 12 blocks per second), measured as a smoothed average of the boat's real position change.

Hold that for 60 consecutive good ticks (3 seconds) and the line goes out by itself at a fixed 0.55 power along your look direction: "Trolling: line is out behind the boat".

A rough patch — a turn, a wave — decays the arming counter by 3 rather than resetting it, so you don't restart the whole 3 seconds every time the boat wobbles.

Fishing it

• The lure trails about 14 blocks astern and the target follows the boat, so the line visibly drags behind you and never trips the 40-block session guard.
• The boat's own movement works the lure — a retrieve tick every 2 ticks, automatically. You never wind it in. There is no "retrieve empty" and no end of cast; the lure trails for as long as you like.
• Over open sea there are no snags and no foul-hooking.
• No strike timing. The boat's momentum sets the hook itself: "Fish on! The boat's pull set the hook — fight it!" You go straight into the fight.

Hold the speed: too slow and the lure sinks, too fast and the fish spook. Stop the boat and fight when you are hooked up.

Nine species list trolling as ideal tackle: Mahi-mahi, Wahoo, Yellowfin tuna, Barracuda, Blue marlin, Sailfish, Swordfish, Mako shark and, in fresh water, Taimen.

Big-game fights

Two fight patterns exist only out here. Both are covered in full in fight patterns; the short version:

Sounding — Yellowfin tuna, Swordfish, Halibut (and the freshwater Sturgeon)

The fish dives, and while it is down it takes line — your progress bar drains 0.0035 per tick. Every 25 ticks of the dive the long drag scream plays and you are told "Sounding — pump it back between dives!"

You cannot out-muscle a dive. Ride it out, then pump the line back in the 3.5–6.5 second gap before the next one. Sounding fish get +3 runs, a 92 % run chance and the longest fight timeout bonus in the game (+700 ticks).

Greyhounding — Blue marlin, Sailfish, Mahi-mahi, Mako shark (and Atlantic salmon)

Between runs the fish breaches: "It jumps — give slack, do not reel!", opening a 15-tick window. Crank inside it and there is a 35 % chance the hook rips straight out. The answer is the open drag — crouch, ride the jump, then stand up and wind.

And in general

Everything caught on an Active rod counts as a predator fight — sharper pulls, a tighter break margin, slower landing and extra head-shakes, all scaling with weight. A 100 kg marlin on a trolling rod is about as far from a roach on a pole as the mod goes.

Progression into the sea

Quest stage 8 — The sea and big game is the sea chain. Its ten goals, in order:

Stage 8 unlocks once you have finished 70 % of stage 7. Stage 7's completion reward is the Surf rod — that is the intended door into saltwater.

See also

• Rods · Reels and lines · Tackle Station
• Fishing mechanics · Water and conditions
• Species · Progression

Stocking

Every water holds its own species set, fixed by the world seed. If a species you want isn't there, you can put it there — by releasing fish. This is the mod's answer to "my pond is boring", and it is designed to be the backbone of a server economy.

How to release a fish

Throw a caught fish into water. The item floats, shrinks away over 40 ticks (2 seconds) with bubbles and a splash, and is gone — released. Pull it back out onto land before the two seconds are up and the release is cancelled.

It works for every species, not just koi. The fish's own weight is what matters.

Releasing does two separate things, and it is important to keep them apart:

1. It always banks stock — the fish physically swims here now.
2. If the species does not already live here, it rolls to settle — to become a permanent resident.

Regions and chunks

Two different scales are in play:

• Residency (does this species live here permanently?) is stored per ~128-block region — the same regions the seed's species communities use. Settle a species and it is a resident of that whole region forever.
• Stock level (how many are there right now?) is stored per chunk, and read across the 3×3 chunk neighbourhood — fish don't respect chunk borders.

Habitat fit

Before anything else the game measures how well the water actually suits the species. It runs the same environment score the bite engine uses — water body, depth, width, biome groups, season — but without the community factor (settling is exactly the act of joining a community you're not in yet) and with time flattened to day and weather to clear. Viability is about the water, not the hour.

fit = 0        →  hostile water
fit > 0        →  livable

The three residency tiers

A native species has no upper limit trouble: it fattens up to two and a half times its normal density. A settled transplant caps at 150 %. An unsettled one has no 100 % baseline at all — its population grows from zero, is catchable while it lasts, and disperses if the species never takes hold.

A hostile-water release (fit = 0) banks nothing unless it settles on that very throw.

Banking stock

sizeRatio = weight / species mean weight
units     = 0.5 × clamp(sizeRatio, 0, 3) ^ 1.5

The exponent is superlinear in size, which is the whole point: sport catch-and-release of prime fish is what feeds a water, not bucketfuls of fry.

Each unit removes 0.18 from the chunk's per-species pressure, and pressure below zero is the surplus.

Feedback in the action bar:

Released: Bream — local stock 180 %

Settling

If the species is not already resident, every release also rolls for permanence:

chance = 0.18 × (0.03 + min(1.2, fit)²) × clamp(sizeRatio, 0.1, 2.0)

rolled once per fish in the stack. The fit² term is what makes water quality decisive; the flat 0.03 is a sliver that is never removed, so even completely wrong water keeps a chance.

Note that size here uses the raw ratio, not the superlinear units — settling is about the specimen being an adult, not about tonnage.

Feedback:

A failed settle is not a wasted fish. While the surplus lasts, that species is temporarily catchable at this spot, at a strength proportional to its temporary population. It only truly disperses if the species never takes hold.

Living outside your element

A species that has settled in water that fails its natural gates does not vanish — it lives at a quarter strength:

environment score = max(naturalScore, 0.25 × stockedPresence)

So the settled shark in the river is genuinely catchable, just never comfortable. This is what makes non-standard stocking real rather than cosmetic.

Decay and drain

The surplus is not permanent. It decays on the same 30000-tick (25-minute) half-life as ordinary fishing pressure — the fish disperse. Spring speeds the clock up 2.5×, which cuts both ways: fished-out water recovers faster, and a stocked surplus disperses faster.

What is permanent is residency. Once a species has settled in a region it lives there forever, whatever happens to the stock number.

There is also a drain: while a spot is running above roughly 125 % stock, each fish you keep thins the school 25 % faster than normal. A packed pond is easy fishing, but it does not stay packed. Releasing your trophies is how you keep it going.

Reading the water

The Fish Finder reports it all:

• The species biting here right now (up to eight)
• A "Known for:" line naming the water's signature fish
• A "Stock:" line listing every species whose level is more than 10 % away from normal — with a (temp) marker on unsettled transplants
• The barometer and bite outlook

The operator Ichthyologist's Tablet adds the raw numbers: each species' environment score, its level gate, its favourite bait, and stock vs TEMP percentages — plus a diagnosis grouping every absent species by the first gate that blocks it (water / depth / width / biome / season / time / weather).

In short

• Release big fish, not many small ones.
• Release into water that actually suits the species if you want it to stay.
• Every release helps even when it fails — the fish is catchable there meanwhile.
• Natives pack to 250 %, settled transplants to 150 %, and an over-packed school thins faster.
• Sport fishing is what feeds a water.

See also

• Water and conditions — how the seed decides what lives where
• Fishing mechanics · Species
• Tools