1. Start fishing with any ordinary Minecraft fishing rod.
2. Hold a rod, crouch, and use/cast it before your line is out to open the fishing menu.
3. Choose Shop, Skills, or Fishing Diary.

Crouching with an existing line out still lets you reel in. Touch controls have a button-based layout for the fishing hub and traps; keyboard, mouse, and controller controls use inventory menus. If needed, /gnf menu also opens the hub.

Custom fish appear as inventory items when caught. The water where your hook lands determines which species are available. Rivers, swamps, oceans—including their warm, cold, frozen, and deep variants—and other habitats have different catches. Some species also need the right time, weather, or moon phase.

An iron rod never catches vanilla fish or Common custom fish. If no eligible fish are available, it can return no fish. A better rod does not bypass a species' habitat or conditions.

Use Water Reading to uncover fishing hints in your diary. The separate full fish catalogue lists all 129 species by rarity, with minimum, ideal, trophy, and maximum weights in pounds—including Nemo, Dory, Tiny Kitty, and Ariel the Mermaid.

A copper or iron rod holds one lure OR one bait type. It can carry up to 64 bait, or one lure.

To equip tackle, pick it up on your inventory cursor and click it onto the rod. Matching bait refills the rod; changing tackle returns the previous lure or unused bait. Leave inventory space for the returned items. On mouse controls, right-click adds one bait and left-click adds as much as fits.

Crafting also works:

• Craft a rod with tackle to attach it or refill matching bait.
• Craft an equipped rod by itself to remove its tackle.
• To switch tackle through crafting, remove the old tackle first, then craft the rod with the new one.

Reel in before moving, upgrading, or changing a cast rod. Tackle is fitted through inventory or crafting controls, rather than the fishing hub.

Tackle favors matching, eligible species; it does not guarantee a catch or bypass habitat rules.

Losing tackle

Bait and lures are consumable, but casting alone costs nothing. By default, a bite has a 75% chance to use one bait or a 4% chance to lose a lure. A snag has a 20% loss chance instead. Only one loss roll happens per cast, so a bite followed by reeling does not charge twice.

A fish can take bait even if you miss the catch. Baiting Hands reduces these chances. If the last bait or lure is lost on a bite, that bite still receives its tackle benefit.

Active fishing earns Fishing XP, separate from Minecraft experience. You start at level 1 and gain one skill point each time you level up. Open Skills, select an upgrade, and confirm to spend a point. Each skill has five ranks; the default level cap is 21.

Baiting Hands reduces the existing chance: at rank 5, the default 75% bait-use chance becomes 45%.

Water Reading reveals these hints in order:

Rarer catches earn more Fishing XP, and your first active catch of each species gives bonus XP. Traps, buying, trading, and selling do not award Fishing XP.

Use a crafting table for rods and traps. Rod upgrades keep the original rod's damage, enchantments, and equipped tackle.

Copper and iron rods

Put the rod in the center with four metal ingots around it:

. M .
M R M
. M .

. = empty slot. For a copper rod, R is a vanilla fishing rod and M is a copper ingot. For an iron rod, use a copper rod and iron ingots.

Fish traps

The basic trap holds three individual catches and needs no Trapcraft ranks. Surround a barrel with eight string:

S S S
S B S
S S S

S = string; B = barrel.

Each upgrade needs the previous trap, five string, and three iron ingots:

S S S
S T S
I I I

T = previous trap; I = iron ingot.

Upgrade one tier at a time. Pick up a placed trap through its menu before upgrading it. Trapcraft limits crafting only: you can use a larger trap made by someone else. Larger traps hold more fish; they do not catch faster or unlock rarer fish.

1. Place a trap in source water, keeping source water beside or above it. While swimming, aim into clear water and use the trap to place it about two blocks ahead.
2. Interact with your trap to open its menu.
3. Add Nightcrawler or Glow Grub bait. Either works, but each targets different fish. Traps hold one bait type at a time, up to 64 bait, and do not accept lures.
4. Return to Collect catches. Fish that do not fit in your inventory stay in the trap.

Use Take unused bait before changing bait types. Use the pickup button to recover the trap, bait, and catches; you need inventory room for everything. Pickup leaves water behind. Traps are managed through their menus, and hoppers cannot move their contents.

Traps target eligible local Common and Uncommon fish. An attempt may catch a fish, lose bait, or do nothing. Your Baiting Hands skill can preserve bait.

Shared fish populations

By default, rods and traps share four custom fish per 32×32 area. Traps leave the final fish available for rod fishing. The area replenishes over time while loaded, and extra traps do not create extra fish or extra attempts.

Traps pause when full, unbaited, without suitable water, or in unloaded chunks. They do not make up missed catches when the area loads again. You can build nearby while they work, but leaving the area unloaded pauses them.

Rare and rarer catches cannot be cooked at a Stove. The cooking seam refuses them on purpose, so a trophy fish stays a trophy — and it refuses every jellyfish at any rarity. The Sushi Station is where those catches become food instead of sitting in a chest.

Crafting the station

Surround a barrel with four dried kelp:

. K .
K B K
. K .

. = empty slot, K = dried kelp, B = barrel. The recipe is in your recipe book. Place it — it sets down as a sushi counter — and right-click to open it. Crouch with an item in hand to place that item instead of opening the station. Redstone and pistons leave it alone, and breaking one gives the station back.

Preparing a dish

The station uses the same layout as the Stove — a three by three grid on the left, the result on the right, the cook book beside it — in light blue instead of grey.

Put the fish and its ingredients anywhere in the grid. Slot order never matters: a dish asks for a set of things, not an arrangement, so there is nothing to memorise. When the grid holds exactly what a dish needs, the dish appears in the result slot.

Exactly what it needs, and nothing more. One spare item in the grid and no dish appears — that is what stops two similar dishes fighting over the same layout. Anything still in the grid when you close the window comes back to you.

Thirty dishes

Six tier dishes take any fish of a rarity, twenty named signatures are locked to one specific fish each, and four jellos turn jellyfish into dessert — Purple Jello being the only two-fish recipe.

Open the cook book from the station itself, or from Sushi Cook Book in the fishing hub. The full Sushi Cook Book is here, with every dish, the fish it takes and what goes in alongside.

Every newly caught custom fish has its own weight and occupies one inventory slot. Each species has a minimum, ideal, trophy, and maximum weight. Most fish are near their ideal weight; trophy-sized catches are much rarer.

Matching tackle and Trophy Angler improve the chance of exceeding the trophy benchmark. Each species still has a firm maximum, and catches close to that limit are exceptionally rare.

Open Fishing Diary to browse species and see your catch counts, personal best weight, and first catch's time and location. Rod and trap catches are counted separately. The diary remembers your records after you sell a fish. Admin test catches do not count.

Open Shop from the fishing hub to buy bait individually or in packs of 16, or buy individual lures. Sell catches to earn the currency shown by your server: its regular economy currency or separate Fishing Coins.

You can select an individual inventory slot, or sell all fish, custom fish only, or vanilla fish only. Selecting a slot sells the eligible contents of that slot, including a full vanilla stack. Review the fish and payment, then confirm. Move fish you want to keep into a chest before a bulk sale.

Heavier custom fish sell for more than lighter fish of the same species, up to twice the base value by default. The shop also buys plain raw vanilla fish and older unweighted custom fish. Admin test fish cannot be sold.