How to make the best fishing rod in Minecraft

Fishing is a surprisingly powerful system in Minecraft. Not only does fishing provide an infinite food source for a Minecraft starter base's early days, but it can also result in players catching incredibly useful treasures, such as enchanted items and even the incredibly rare mending enchanting book.

There are a few key enchantments that players can use to make an incredible fishing rod that can pull in much more treasure than normal. The enchantments needed, as well as how to make this god rod, are detailed below.

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Minecraft's fishing enchantments

Luck of the sea can make finding fishing treasure much quicker. (Image via Mojang)

There are a few enchantments in the game specific to fishing. The first of them is lure. This enchantment increases the rate at which fish will bite by decreasing the time in between bites by five seconds per level, up to a maximum level of three. This means that lure III results in 15-second-faster catches, which is quite convenient.

The second of the fishing enchantments is luck of the sea. This enchantment has a maximum of three levels, with each level making players about 2% more likely to catch treasure when fishing. The starting chance is 5%, so at max level, players will have an 11.3% chance for every catch to be treasure. The amount of junk caught also decreases from 10% down to 4.2% at max level.

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Best general enchantments

Mending is undoubtedly the best enchantment in all of Minecraft. It allows for experience orbs collected by the player to be directly converted into durability for worn armor or held items. This means that a god rod with mending on it will never break, as catching something while fishing gives more XP than the rod loses in durability.

Unbreaking is one of Minecraft's most game-changing enchantments because it allows players to spend fewer resources. If a diamond pickaxe lasts three times as long, players can collect three times as many diamonds without spending any extra materials. Unbreaking tools last an average of level + one times longer than regular tools, which means unbreaking III will cause a rod to last four times longer.

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Making a god rod

1) Set up your crafting area

Enchanting setups are vital to creating a god rod (Image via Mojang)

The first thing you'll need to do to create the best fishing rod possible is set up the area where you'll make the rod. It is almost guaranteed that you'll need an anvil to get the best rod possible, so go ahead and use the iron needed to make one.

Once this is done, you'll need to set up a Minecraft enchanting area if you plan on creating the enchanted books and fishing rods to combine yourself. If you plan on fishing or trading, feel free to skip this. However, if you are relying on trading, you'll need to go ahead and build a Minecraft villager trading hall to get access to the needed enchanted books.

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2) Acquire enchantments

While not recommended, fishing could slowly assemble a god rod. (Image via Mojang)

Now that you have your area set up, it's time to actually get the enchantments themselves. If you plan on fishing for enchanted rods to combine, just start casting. The sooner you start, the sooner the RNG nightmare ends.

If you plan on trading with villagers for the mending, luck of the sea, and lure books, you'll need to actually spend the time breaking and replacing lecterns until you get the needed trades. There's no cap on the time this could take, but feel free to use these spare hours to get the best Minecraft trading discounts possible.

If you plan on enchanting books and rods to combine yourself, go ahead and start making books and rods. Similarly to fishing for treasure, this method is entirely dependent on RNG. Get ready to spend a lot of time unenchanting items. However, this process has the advantage of seeing a lot of level 30 enchantments. This means that you might end up making great tools or armor in the process.

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3) Combine all the different pieces

An example of a fully enchanted fishing rod. (Image via Mojang)

Now that the disparate pieces have been assembled, it's time to combine them. Return to the anvil you made earlier and start combining books and rods. Make sure to keep track of the number of combinations, as items eventually cannot be combined further. Additionally, make sure to try both positions for the items, as the results can sometimes have different XP costs.

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Once all the listed enchantments have been placed on a fishing rod, you officially have the best one possible in vanilla Minecraft. Just make sure to keep it safely tucked away in an ender chest when not using it to avoid any unfortunate lava-related accidents.