Can you breed fish in Minecraft?

There are a ton of different mobs wandering around Minecraft's blocky world. The game's oceans are just as rich with life as dry land. With more than a dozen different mobs, it can be hard to remember exactly which mechanics apply to each one. Given how easily fish are farmed in the real world, you might expect the creatures to also be breedable in the game.

Unfortunately, none of Minecraft's fish mobs can be bred for farming. That being said, all of the game's breedable aquatic mobs can be found detailed below, along with their uses outside of breeding.

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Minecraft's fish mobs

A small school of salmon (Image via Mojang)

There are four kinds of fish found throughout Minecraft's oceans: cod, salmon, pufferfish, and tropical fish. As previously mentioned, none of these mobs can breed, but that's not to say they're useless.

Cod and salmon make for great sources of early-game food and can also drop bones or bone meal, depending on if you're playing Bedrock or Java Edition, respectively.

Pufferfish will inflate when near a player or Minecraft mob, dealing contact damage and poisoning the offending entity. This makes them quite unique, as they're a passive mob that deals damage.

Tropical fish are the least useful of the fish. They can be eaten but not cooked, making them worse than cod or salmon when it comes to surviving. However, they are unique in that there are a whopping 2700 different natural variants of tropical fish in Bedrock and 3072 in Java.

This makes them incredible within Minecraft decorations such as fish tanks, where their unique appearances can really shine.

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All breedable aquatic mobs in Minecraft

An axolotl swimming around (Image via Mojang)

While different fish found in the game might not be able to breed, there are several aquatic mobs that can. Axolotls, for example, can be bred by giving them buckets of tropical fish. This is actually the only way to obtain the rare blue axolotl; there's always a 1/1200 chance for a newly born axolotl to be that color.

Turtles are another aquatic mob that players can breed. These mobs need seagrass to breed, which can be obtained in large numbers using shears. This is useful, as a baby turtle will drop a turtle scute when growing up, which can be crafted into a turtle shell helmet or used to brew turtle master potions.

Frogs and tadpoles are an interesting mob. Frogs are technically not aquatic mobs, though they do prefer jumping on lilypads over other blocks. However, when given slimeballs to breed, frogs will need to lay their eggs on water source blocks. The tadpoles that hatch will also spend the first minutes of their lives in the water as fully aquatic mobs before growing up.