How to get rare loot by fishing in Minecraft

Fishing in Minecraft is a surprisingly powerful system. It's one of the best ways to establish a renewable food source in a new survival world, and it can also give players access to a large range of loot, including enchanted books, fishing rods and bows, name tags, and nautilus shells. However, there's more to fishing up these useful items than you might expect.

Everything you need to know about how to fish up treasure can be found detailed below, along with an explanation as to which junk items are worth fishing for.

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How to catch fishing treasure in Minecraft

1) Craft a fishing rod

The crafting recipe for a fishing rod (Image via Mojang)

The first thing you'll need to do to start reeling in fishing treasure is craft a fishing rod. This will cost three sticks and two string, which is remarkably cheap for the amazing Minecraft items that you can get.

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2) Enchant it

A fully enchanted fishing rod (Image via Mojang)

The next step to fishing up as much treasure as possible is to enchant the fishing rod you just made. Minecraft's Luck of the Sea enchantment makes it considerably easier to catch treasure instead of fish. When the enchantment is at its maximum, Level 3, it more than doubles the chance of catching treasure from 5% to 11.3%.

It's worth noting that this step is optional. Luck of the Sea just makes fishing treasure more likely to be found, but it's not a requirement. If you already have a Minecraft enchanting setup, then try and get this one, but skip this step otherwise.

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3) Find a fitting fishing hole

Natural bodies of water are great for treasure fishing (Image via Mojang)

The final step to catching fishing treasure is to find a large body of water to fish in. There are a few conditions to check when looking for or making a treasure fishing hole. There needs to be two blocks of open water in each direction around the bobber when it's resting on the water's surface. Open water is defined as water source blocks, waterlogged blocks without collision, and bubble columns.

This change was made in direct response to AFK fish farms, which used to be one of the best farms in all of Minecraft. There are designs of automated fish farms that can still provide treasure, but they tend to be larger and more complex builds when compared to fish XP farms.

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Fishing treasure vs. junk in Minecraft

Jungle biomes are great for finding good junk items (Image via Mojang)

While fishing treasure loot tends to be great, there are actually two pieces of what the game considers fishing junk that are worth hunting for.

These are ink sacs and bamboo. Ink sacs are the only source of black ink in the game, meaning that they're quite useful for builders. Fishing them up gives a stack of 10, making it an okay way to collect the Minecraft dye. Bamboo is a useful item to be able to fish up in jungle biomes if you're unable to find a bamboo jungle.

Luck of the Sea decreases the rate at which junk is caught. At maximum level, the rate is reduced from 10% down to 4.2%. This means it might be worth carrying around an unenchanted fishing rod when attempting to get either of these items.