🐟 CycleOfFish

CycleOfFish (COF) turns Minecraft's vanilla fish into a living ecosystem.

Instead of fish simply existing as mobs that swim around until they are caught or killed, COF gives them a natural lifecycle involving hunger, feeding, breeding, growth, aging, and death.

🌿 A Living Fish Ecosystem

Fish now have their own internal hunger that gradually decreases as they move around.

When fish become hungry, they can seek out nearby kelp and feed from it. Feeding restores their hunger, allowing them to continue living and eventually reproduce.

Fish don't just endlessly multiply either. Their population naturally changes over time through:

• 🌿 Food availability

• 🐟 Hunger

• ❤️ Breeding

• 🐣 Baby fish

• 📈 Growth

• 🧓 Aging

• 💀 Natural death

• 💔 Starvation

• 🎣 Fishing and other environmental causes

This creates a renewable population cycle rather than an infinite supply of fish.

❤️ Natural Breeding

Fish can naturally reproduce when the appropriate conditions are met.

• Cod breed with cod

• Salmon breed with salmon

• Tropical fish breed with tropical fish

• Pufferfish breed with pufferfish

Tropical fish are treated as one species for breeding purposes, so their different vanilla appearances do not prevent them from reproducing with one another.

When breeding succeeds, a baby fish is born and begins its own lifecycle.

🐣 Fish Grow Up

Baby fish start smaller than adults and gradually grow over time.

As they grow, their physical size and other lifecycle properties change with them.

You can actually watch a tiny baby fish gradually become an adult.

🧓 Fish Age

Fish aren't immortal.

Every fish has its own age and progresses through different life stages as it grows older. Eventually, fish can die naturally from old age.

This means a fish population can contain different generations living together.

💔 Starvation

Fish can also die if they go without food for too long.

Starvation is intentionally not instant. A hungry fish has time to find food and recover before prolonged hunger becomes dangerous.

This makes food availability an important part of maintaining a healthy fish population.

🎣 A Renewable Fish Population

Because fish can reproduce and grow naturally, fishing becomes part of the ecosystem rather than simply removing fish permanently.

A simplified cycle looks like:

🐟 Fish → 🎣 Fishing → fewer fish → survivors grow → ❤️ breeding → 🐣 babies → 🐟 population recovers

The goal is to make fish feel like an actual population living in the world.

🐟 Vanilla Fish

COF works with Minecraft's existing fish:

• Cod

• Salmon

• Tropical Fish

• Pufferfish

COF uses the vanilla fish rather than replacing them with custom fish entities, allowing their normal appearances, variants, buckets, and other vanilla behavior to remain intact.

⚙️ Version 1.0.0

This is the first public release of CycleOfFish.

The core ecosystem and lifecycle systems are working, while additional configuration, compatibility, and refinement features are planned for future versions.

🐟 A Note About the First Generation

During the very first testing of CycleOfFish, two salmon became the first generation of fish to live in a COF ecosystem.

Unfortunately, they died from starvation before I had added enough kelp to their small cave. 💔

Their deaths helped me realize how important the food system was to the ecosystem, and their cave was turned into a small memorial before the next generation of salmon was introduced.

The salmon population that exists today can trace its story back to that little cave.

Rest in peace, first-generation salmon. 🐟🐟💔