Fish Trap

Fishing without holding a fishing rod. Craft a trap, sink it, bait it, and walk away. It keeps fishing while you mine, build or sleep, and what it pulls in depends on where you put it.

How it works

1. Craft the trap from sticks and string.
2. Place it fully underwater. The trap's block and the block above it both have to be water, so a puddle will not do.
3. Add bait in the top-left slot. Each catch consumes one.
4. Wait. The arrow fills, the trap catches something, and it lands in the 3x3 grid.

There is no miss chance. Every completed timer is a catch. When the grid is full, new catches drop into the water beside the trap, so a forgotten trap never silently wastes its bait.

Bait sets your pace and your luck

Six tiers, from bulk plant matter to genuine treasure lures:

Bait	Time per catch	Luck
Plant Bait	120–240s	-1
Worm Bait	80–160s	0
Fish Chum	60–100s	+1
Glow Bait	45–70s	+2
Prismarine Lure	30–45s	+3
Nautilus Lure	20–30s	+5

Luck feeds vanilla's own loot weighting, so better bait genuinely shifts the odds toward rare catches instead of just rolling more often.

Nets make the trap faster, luckier and greedier

The net slot sits under the bait slot, and the trap's funnel visibly changes colour to match the net you install.

Net	Speed	Luck	Double catch
Copper Net	10% faster	+0.5	—
Iron Net	20% faster	+1	10%
Gold Net	20% faster	+2	15%
Diamond Net	35% faster	+2	25%
Netherite Net	50% faster	+3	40%

Better nets also unlock catches that cheaper nets simply cannot land, including the rarest fish in the mod.

Location matters

Every trap rolls against a catch table chosen from the biome it sits in: ocean, warm ocean, cold ocean, river, swamp, and a fallback for everywhere else. A trap in a warm ocean pulls in different things than one in a swamp, so it is worth spreading them around.

Catches include six new species — trout, mackerel, catfish, crab, lobster and crayfish, each cookable — alongside vanilla fish, useful junk and treasure like nautilus shells and hearts of the sea.

✨ Fish

The rarest catch in the mod, and it needs a good net to show up at all. Eating one grants Absorption V for two minutes and Resistance II for one minute, and it is always edible, so it works as an emergency button rather than food.

Automation

The trap exposes its inventory to hoppers and pipes: pull finished catches out of the bottom, push bait in from any other side. A row of traps under a water channel runs itself.

Built to be modified

Bait, nets and catch tables are all plain datapack JSON, so a pack can add its own bait, retune the timers, or rewrite what a biome yields — no config file and no code:

• data/<namespace>/bait/<name>.json — item, min/max ticks, luck
• data/<namespace>/net/<name>.json — item, style, speed multiplier, luck, bonus chance
• data/<namespace>/loot_table/fish_trap/<biome>.json — standard fishing loot tables

/reload picks up changes immediately, and the server syncs the results to clients.