Tropical Fish

This article is about the mob. For item, see Tropical Fish (item). For other uses, see Fish.

Tropical Fish

Health points	3
Behavior	Passive
Hitbox size	In Java Edition: Height: 0.4 Blocks Width: 0.5 Blocks In Bedrock Edition: Height: 0.52 Blocks Width: 0.52 Blocks
Spawn	See § Spawning
Items usable on	Water Bucket Bucket

Tropical Fish are common passive mobs found in oceans. There are 3,584 possible variants.

Spawning

Java Edition

In Java Edition, tropical fish spawn in lukewarm, warm and deep lukewarm oceans in groups of 8 at 24 (cylindrical) to 64 (spherical) blocks away from the player, with random patterns (see below).

Bedrock Edition

In Bedrock Edition, fish spawn underwater at 12-32 blocks away from the player. Tropical fish spawn only in warm ocean biomes, in groups of 3-5 for the same preset pattern, and in groups of 1-3 for a random pattern. In addition, tropical fish only spawn on the surface (i.e., there must not be a spawnable block above the spawn location with a non-solid block on top).

Drops

• 1 tropical fish.
• 1 bone meal (5% chance) ‌^{[Java Edition only]}
• 1–2 bones (25% chance) ‌^{[Bedrock Edition only]}
• 1–3 when killed by a player or tamed wolf.

Behavior

Tropical fish tend to swim in schools of fish (a maximum of nine tropical fish per school).

The player may collect a fish by using a water bucket on it, which gives the player a bucket of fish. Fish placed with buckets do not despawn naturally. When that fish bucket is used against a block, it empties the bucket, placing water with that fish swimming in it. An empty bucket may be used as well.‌^{[Bedrock Edition only]}

Weaknesses

Tropical fish cannot survive out of water. Outside of water, they flop around like guardians for a while until eventually they suffocate and die like squid. In Bedrock Edition, they rotate when flipping. Fish cannot swim or breathe in cauldron water.

Fish have a weakness to weapons that have the Impaling enchantment, which also affects squid, turtles, guardians, elder guardians and dolphins.‌^{[Java Edition only]}

Varieties

The 22 common varieties of tropical fish in Java Edition.
top: White-Silver SunStreak, Tomato Clownfish, Yellow Tang, White-Gray Dasher
second row: Parrotfish, Queen Angel Fish, Red Cichlid, Red Lipped Blenny, Red Snapper, Threadfin
third row: Cotton Candy Betta, Dottyback, Emperor Red Snapper, Goatfish, Moorish Idol, Ornate Butterfly
bottom: Anemone, Black Tang, Blue Dory, Butterfly Fish, Cichlid, Clownfish

Java Edition

When tropical fish spawn in the wild, 90% of the time they appear as one of the 22 varieties seen on the right, and the other 10% of the time their patterns, size, and colors are completely random, drawn from any of 2 shapes, 15 colors, 6 patterns, and 15 colors for the pattern. The color black does not appear on any naturally-spawned tropical fish, since the eyes are usually hard to see. These result in 2,700 naturally-occurring combinations.

Tropical fish can be summoned with black as one or both of their colors, and/or without any visible pattern,^{[more information needed]} though even without the pattern they can still have a pattern color, causing a further 884 possible combinations, 480 of which look the same due to the missing pattern.

Bedrock Edition

Tropical fish do not have common varieties in Bedrock Edition. Instead, all tropical fish use randomly chosen patterns, sizes, and colors (except black).

Names

Tropical fish variants in buckets have names that are assigned based on their colors and type. In Bedrock Edition, the names are in the name of the bucket, giving names like "Bucket of Plum Blockfish", "Bucket of Sky-Orange Snooper", or "Bucket of Orange-Lime Dasher". In Java Edition, the type, and colors are displayed as item tooltips.

In Bedrock Edition, the following colors are renamed from their defaults when they refer to tropical fish. Parentheses indicate default name and color id - see § Entity data.

• Sky (Light Blue; 3)
• Rose (Pink; 6)
• Silver (Light Gray; 8)
• Teal (Cyan; 9)
• Plum (Purple; 10)

The base color is first, and the pattern color is next if it is different.

The fish type is determined according to the shape and pattern of the fish:

Flopper Glitter Betty Stripey Blockfish Clayfish

Kob Snooper Brinely Sunstreak Dasher Spotty

Some varieties of tropical fish don't follow the normal naming system; instead, they reference real-life fish species. In Java Edition, these unique fish are limited to the 22 common varieties. In Bedrock Edition, there are also 22 uniquely-named tropical fish, though they are not all the same as in Java Edition. These uniquely-named tropical fish aren't different from regular tropical fish in terms of design or behavior.

These varieties are:

Name	Type
Anemone	Orange-Gray Stripey
Black Tang	Gray Flopper
Blue Dory‌[BE only]	Gray-Light Blue Sunstreak‌[JE only] Gray-Sky SunStreak‌[BE only]
Blue Tang‌[JE only]	Gray-Blue Flopper
Butterfly Fish	White-Gray Clayfish‌[JE only] White-Gray Brinely‌[BE only]
Cichlid	Blue-Gray Sunstreak
Clownfish	Orange-White Kob
Cotton Candy Betta	Pink-Light Blue Spotty‌[JE only] Rose-Sky Spotty‌[BE only]
Dottyback	Purple-Yellow Blockfish‌[JE only] Plum-Yellow Blockfish‌[BE only]
Emperor Red Snapper	White-Red Clayfish
Goatfish	White-Yellow Spotty
Moorish Idol	White-Gray Glitter
Ornate Butterflyfish‌[JE only] Ornate Butterfly‌[BE only]	White-Orange Clayfish
Parrotfish	Cyan-Pink Dasher‌[JE only] Teal-Rose Dasher‌[BE only]
Queen Angelfish‌[JE only] Queen Angel Fish‌[BE only]	Lime-Light Blue Brinely‌[JE only] Lime-Sky Brinely‌[BE only]
Red Cichlid	Red-White Betty
Red Lipped Blenny	Gray-Red Snooper
Red Snapper	Red-White Blockfish
Threadfin	White-Yellow Flopper
Tomato Clown‌[BE only]	Red-White SunStreak
Tomato Clownfish‌[JE only]	Red-White Kob
Triggerfish	Gray-White SunStreak
Yellowtail Parrotfish‌[JE only] Yellowtail Parrot‌[BE only]	Cyan-Yellow Dasher‌[JE only] Teal-Yellow Dasher‌[BE only]
Yellow Tang	Yellow Flopper

Color-White Kob Variants

There are different base colors of color-white kobs. Using the /summon command to make a different base color-white kobs. In order to summon a color-white kob make sure its this: /summon tropical_fish ~ ~ ~ {Variant:(Color-White Kob ID)}

Name	Type	ID
Orange Clownfish	Orange-White Kob	65536
Magenta Clownfish	Magenta-White Kob	131072
Light Blue Clownfish	Light Blue-White Kob	196608
Yellow Clownfish	Yellow-White Kob	262144
Lime Clownfish	Lime-White Kob	327680
Pink Clownfish	Pink-White Kob	393216
Gray Clownfish	Gray-White Kob	458752

Sounds

Sound	Subtitle	Source	Description	Namespaced ID	Translation key	Volume	Pitch	Attenuation distance
-	None	?	Randomly	entity.tropical_fish.ambient	None	?	?	?
	?	?	Plays when it dies	entity.tropical_fish.death	subtitles.entity.tropical_fish.death	?	0.8	16
	?	?	Plays when on land	entity.tropical_fish.flop	subtitles.entity.tropical_fish.flop	0.3	?	16
	?	?	Plays when damaged	entity.tropical_fish.hurt	subtitles.entity.tropical_fish.hurt	?	?	16

Data values

ID

Java Edition:

Name	Namespaced ID	Entity tags (JE)	Translation key
Tropical Fish	tropical_fish	axolotl_always_hostiles‌[upcoming: JE 1.17]	entity.minecraft.tropical_fish

Bedrock Edition:

Name	Namespaced ID	Numeric ID	Translation key
Tropical Fish	tropical_fish	111	entity.tropical_fish.name

Entity data

See also: Chunk format

Tropical fish have entity data associated with them that contains various properties.

• Entity data
  • Tags common to all entities see Template:Nbt inherit/entity/template
  • Tags common to all mobs see Template:Nbt inherit/mob/template
  •  FromBucket: 1 or 0 (true/false) - Whether the fish had ever been released from a bucket.
  •  Variant: A 4-byte integer.
    • The least significant byte has a value of either 0 for a small fish, or 1 for a large fish. Values above 1 result in an invisible fish.
    • The next byte has a value from 0–5, representing the pattern on the fish. Values above 5 result in a fish with no pattern.
    • The next byte has a value from 0–15, representing the color of the fish's body.
    • The most significant byte has a value from 0–15, representing the color of the fish's pattern.

Color

Main article: Tropical Fish/DV

[edit]

The fish sizes and patterns are depicted in the following table, with white body color and dark-gray pattern color.

		second-least byte
		0	1	2	3	4	5
least byte	1	Flopper Glitter Betty Stripey Blockfish Clayfish Kob Snooper Brinely Sunstreak Dasher Spotty
	0

The 22 varieties of tropical fish most commonly found throughout the world have Variant tag values from the following table, which also lists what color/shape/patterns come from that value.

Shape	Pattern	Base color	Pattern color	Variant	Name
0	0	1	0	65536	Orange-White Kob
0	0	14	0	917504	Red-White Kob
1	3	14	0	918273	Red-White Blockfish
1	4	14	0	918529	Red-White Betty
1	5	0	1	16778497	White-Orange Clayfish
0	4	5	3	50660352	Lime-Sky Brinely
0	5	6	3	50726144	Rose-Sky Spotty
0	1	7	3	50790656	Gray-Sky SunStreak ‌[Bedrock Edition only]
1	0	0	4	67108865	White-Yellow Flopper
0	5	0	4	67110144	White-Yellow Spotty
1	1	4	4	67371265	Yellow Stripey
1	3	10	4	67764993	Plum-Yellow Blockfish
0	3	9	6	101253888	Teal-Rose Dasher
1	2	0	7	117441025	White-Gray Glitter
0	3	0	7	117441280	White-Gray Dasher
0	4	0	7	117441536	White-Gray Brinely
1	1	1	7	117506305	Orange-Gray Stripey
1	0	7	7	117899265	Gray Flopper
0	1	11	7	118161664	Blue-Gray SunStreak
0	1	0	8	134217984	White-Silver Sunstreak
1	0	7	11	185008129	Gray-Blue Flopper ‌[Java Edition only]
1	5	0	14	234882305	White-Red Clayfish
0	2	7	14	235340288	Gray-Red Snooper

The variant number is the sum of the most significant byte × 2²⁴ + second most significant byte × 2¹⁶ + second least significant byte × 2⁸ + least significant byte.

Achievements

Icon		Achievement	In-game description	Actual requirements (if different)	Gamerscore earned	Trophy type (PS)
		I am a Marine Biologist	Collect a fish in a bucket	Use an empty bucket on any fish mob to collect it.	20G	Bronze

Advancements

Icon	Advancement	In-game description	Parent	Actual requirements (if different)	Namespaced ID
	Tactical Fishing	Catch a fish... without a fishing rod!	Fishy Business	Use a water bucket to pick up any fish mob.	husbandry/tactical_fishing

History

Java Edition Alpha
June 28, 2010					Notch mentioned that fish might be a feature of coral, if he were able to add coral: "... I do know that the corals will have tiny fish particles around them."
October 4, 2010					Fish were a passive mob that Notch showed interest in adding. In the promotional graphic for the Halloween Update, Notch indicated he would add fish. However, they were only added as an item; there was no code for a fish mob.
Java Edition
October 5, 2012					Fish were jokingly teased in the fake snapshot 12marc40awesome, along with coral and "fish blocks".
April 13, 2013					When Jon Kågström was asked in his AMA on Reddit, "What mob would you like to implement into the game?" He responded, "I would like to add birds, fish and tree animals to make it more alive. However this will take some time before it can be done."
July 31, 2013					During Notch's AMA on Reddit, when asked about what happened to his plans of adding fish as a mob, he responded, "Oh yeah, the fish!"
1.13		November 18, 2017			Two fish mobs, presumably early tropical fish, were shown off in a clip presented at MineCon Earth.
		18w10a			Added tropical fish.
		18w10b			Tropical fish now make sounds and no longer use the player damage sound.
1.13.1		18w31a			Fish now have a 5% chance of dropping bone meal when killed.
Upcoming Java Edition
1.17		20w51a			Tropical fishes are now attacked by axolotls
Bedrock Edition
March 1, 2018					ThorsHand11 states on the official Minecraft Discord that "more than a handful" of tropical fish will be added.
1.4.0		beta 1.2.14.2			Added all 4 variants of fish mobs.
1.8.0		beta 1.8.0.8			Tropical fish are now slightly bigger.
1.13.0		beta 1.13.0.9			Tropical fish now drop experience when killed.
Legacy Console Edition
TU69		1.76	Patch 38		Added fish mobs.
Education Edition
1.4.0					Added all 4 variants of fish mobs.

Issues

Issues relating to "Tropical fish" are maintained on the bug tracker. Report issues there.

Gallery

• 

  An ocean with some fish visible.

• 

  Cod and tropical fish, along with a turtle and squid.

• 

  A screenshot of tropical fish up close.

• 

  Some tropical fish jumping on land.

Official Artwork

• 

  Tropical fish as shown in the Update Aquatic artwork

References

Entities

View at: Template:Entities/content [edit]