River Fishing 🎣

A realistic river, ice and sea fishing simulator, built to be the thing a modpack is about rather than a minigame beside it. Fishing here is a process, not a click on the water: you assemble a rod from a blank, a reel, a line and a rig; you match bait, hook size, groundbait and leader to the fish you actually want; you read the water, the season, the hour and the barometer; and then you fight what takes.

Nothing bites by luck. A data-driven bite engine weighs your whole setup against every one of 79 species under the current conditions and decides both what takes and how long you wait.

Versions

• 1.20.1 — Fabric & Forge
• 1.21.1 — Fabric & NeoForge
• 26.1.2 — Fabric & NeoForge
• 26.2 — Fabric & NeoForge

Requires Architectury API; on Fabric also Fabric API.

The mod runs fine alone, but the balance is written around two optional add-ons:

• Serene Seasons — unlocks the full seasonal bite (spring spawning runs, the winter slow-down).
• Biomes O' Plenty — a richer world for the habitat and biome factors to work in.

JEI and Jade are supported on 1.20.1 and 1.21.1.

You can see into the water

Lean over a lake and the fish are there — drifting under the surface, at their real size, in the numbers the water actually holds. A shoal of roach reads as a shoal. A single big shadow on the bottom is a single big fish, and you will want to know what it is.

What you never get is a label. You get a shape and a size, and working out what it is stays yours.

Muddy water, rain and a roof over the water dim them. And the fish can see you — sprinting along the bank, jumping about, breaking blocks, splashing in the shallows all spook the water you are standing over, and a spooked fish does not bite. Move up quietly, or wait for it to settle.

Six ways to fish

• Float fishing — the classic pole. Set the float depth, watch it plunge, strike on the click — then a timing bar for the pull-out decides whether it comes over the bank. Panfish and silver fish, close in.
• Spinning — active lure work. Cast and retrieve a spinner, spoon, wobbler or soft plastic to trigger pike, zander, perch and asp, and set the hook on a timing bar. Against toothy fish a leader is the difference between a fish and a cut line — and which one matters: steel is bomb-proof but glints and costs you bites, fluorocarbon is near-invisible and earns them, titanium is both.
• Long-cast bottom fishing — feeder, bottom and carp rods reach far water and sit there with a loaded groundbait feeder. Patient, and where the big bream, tench, carp and catfish come from.
• Ice fishing — drill a hole with the auger, drop a short winter rod, work the mormyshka in a rhythm. A whole winter mode of its own.
• The sea — surf, sea-spinning and boat blanks, the heavy reels and lines to match, and big-game fights. Cod, seabass, conger, halibut, tuna, marlin, swordfish, mako. How deep and how open the water is decides what lives there, so the surf line, the shelf and blue water fish differently.
• Trolling — hold a steady speed in a boat and the line goes out by itself, the lure working astern. The pelagic species hook themselves: mahi-mahi, wahoo and tuna, with marlin and sharks further out.

The fight asks you questions

Every run has a course, and you answer it on the arrow keys — rebindable in Minecraft's own controls, so WASD stays your feet. The fish tracks left, you lean on it from the right; it goes deep, you lift the rod; it comes up to jump, you put the rod down. The boss bar names the course and the key, and the rod tip is dragged the way the fish is going, so you can read the fight off the rod as well as off the bar.

Answering right is not a tax — it is what lets you work. The fish tires nearly three times as fast and the run loads your tackle at half rate. Pull the same way it is going and you get none of that.

• Your feet are tackle. Backing away from the water is pumping with your legs: it wins line and loads the rod, the same trade a crank makes. Walk the whole way and you snap. While a fish is on you cannot step off the edge of a block, so a pier is not a trap.
• The angler runs out. Holding a rod against a running fish costs you, and pointing it the wrong way costs more. It comes back only when you stop pulling, so the answer to tired arms is to stop rather than to click faster — and the rod tells you when you are spent.
• The rod bends under tension, in six steps driven by the real stress on your tackle.
• Over-pull and the line snaps. A real breaking-strain model means big fish demand the right line and a drag you know how to use — and a heavier line genuinely buys you time.
• Every species tires differently, and small fry stop fighting like monsters.

Tackle you build

• The Tackle Station. Right-click a Fishing Stall with an empty hand and it becomes a bench: pick a form, step the weight, feed it hooks, iron and string, take the finished tackle out. Weight is a decision — it sets your cast distance, it has to fall inside your blank's test window, and a lure's mass is its size, so a heavy pilker genuinely silences the small stuff.
• Dye a lure at the bench. The colour affects the bite.
• The tackle box, in four sizes, 9 to 36 slots. Tackle only — line, hooks, rigs, lures, bait, leaders. Rename it in the box, dye the inserts, break it and it keeps everything.
• 13 rod blanks, 11 reels, 23 lines, 11 rigs and 9 hook sizes. The blanks, reels and lines craft as one unbroken ladder; a few of the rest come from the fisherman.

The catch

• The keepnet is a grid, not a stack of slots. A fish takes the space its body needs — a pike lies across four cells, a roach takes one — so you choose what is worth keeping.
• A fish wears its age. A young one is paler and greyer than an old one of the same species, and some carry named morphs on top of that: a golden tench, an albino, a stunted fish that is short and thin for its weight and looks it.
• Eight legendary fish, one per world each, with their own names and their own fights — the Tsar-Fish, Grandfather Sazan, the Leviathan, the Megalodon and four more.
• Land one and you get a unique item carrying the species, weight and length.

A living world

• Over-fish a species and it thins out, per chunk, recovering over time and faster in spring.
• Stock a water yourself and the species settles in — or does not, depending on whether the water suits it.
• The electrofisher (creative only) removes a nuisance species from one particular water, and can put it back.
• A fisherman villager who sells tackle, ready-made kits and assembled rods, and buys your prime catches at prices that move: overfish a species and its price falls; his order of the day pays ×2.5 for one species, and one seat on his counter always shows it.

Progression

A bestiary journal with a page for every one of the 79 species, 29 of them hand-illustrated so far and more each update. Angler levels through four ranks, a six-perk skill tree, an eight-stage quest chain that ends at the sea, and 22 hand-crafted advancements including some tricky and some funny ones. Plus bait farms, a live-bait trap, an aquarium and a mini aquarium, cooking and fillets.

The order of the day is the tutorial. The fisherman names a species, and the journal entry for it is one click away — so the game answers "what do I do now" with a specific fish, a place and a bait instead of a menu.

Configurable

config/riverfishing.json is written on first run with every knob at its default: difficulty presets plus individual dials for phantom bites, break sensitivity, depletion, line and hook wear, snags, foul-hooking, how much the fish notice you, and where the trophy bar sits. A modpack can retune the whole thing without patching.

How to play — the first hour

1. Get bait. Dig dirt, grass or sand with a shovel — worms drop about one time in ten. Later: breed your own on a worm or maggot farm, gather live bait in a bait trap, or buy from the fisherman.
2. Craft tackle. A Stick Rod is three sticks on the diagonal. Hooks: one iron nugget makes two #16 hooks; add a nugget to step up a size (a bigger number is a smaller hook). Line: a ring of 8 string makes the thinnest mono; put a line in the centre of another ring to thicken it a step.
3. Assemble the rod. Hold it and sneak + right-click. Reel-less rods take a line; a reeled rod takes a reel first and the line spools onto it; bottom rods add a swappable rig. Incompatible parts are refused with the reason written in the window.
4. Load the rig. Drop a hook and bait into the rig's inline slots. Predators want artificial lures, not worms, and they bite through a bare line — fit a leader.
5. Feed the spot (optional). Right-click water holding groundbait; the fed spot fades over the next few minutes and the type decides what it pulls in.
6. Cast. Hold right-click to charge, release to throw. An under-loaded blank cannot reach.
7. Watch the float — silently. There is no "Bite!" text. The float plunges, the line twitches, and you strike with a plain right-click. Lure rods put a timing bar on the strike itself.
8. Fight it. Read the course off the boss bar, answer on the arrow keys, ease off when it runs, and watch your stamina.

Read the journal for a per-species "how to catch", or scan the water with the fish finder to see what is biting and how the pressure is trending.

Admin commands

• /rffish unlockall — fill the journal so every quest goal is met.
• /rffish reset — wipe your records, XP and quests.

Wiki and community

qwazar14.github.io/riverfishing — 24 pages in English, Russian and Ukrainian, one URL with a language switcher. Every rod, reel, line, rig, bait, species, block and mechanic with the actual numbers, and every shaped and shapeless recipe drawn as a real crafting grid generated from the recipe files, so the wiki cannot drift from what the game loads.

discord.gg/Kk2nKvsuRh — bug reports and catches equally welcome. Several features in this mod exist because a player asked for them by name. A report with a screenshot and your mod list gets fixed far faster than one without.

The mod speaks English, Russian and Ukrainian in full — 934 strings each, with real angling vocabulary and real fish names rather than transliterations.