How to Make Fishing Spawn Live Mobs Instead of Items (Fishing Real Mod)

Understanding the Conversion

Fishing Real works by intercepting the loot you would normally pull out of water and swapping the item for a live entity. Every conversion is defined in a datapack JSON, so you are never stuck with the defaults — you can add, remove, or change any mapping yourself.

Setting Up a Datapack

1. In your world's datapacks folder, create a new folder for your pack.

2. Inside it, add a pack.mcmeta file so Minecraft recognizes it as a datapack.

3. Create the path data/<your_namespace>/fishing/.

4. Drop one JSON file per conversion into that fishing folder. The filename does not matter, but keep it descriptive.

5. Run /reload in-game. The mod reads the folder on reload, so you do not need to restart.

Writing a Conversion

Each file needs an input with the item you are replacing and a result with the entity to spawn. For example, mapping the tropical fish item to a tropical fish entity uses "item": "minecraft:tropical_fish" on the input side and "id": "minecraft:tropical_fish" on the result side. To override a vanilla conversion, simply use the same input item in your own file — your datapack takes priority.

Testing

Cast a rod into water and reel in. If your mapping is correct, a live entity appears where the item would have been. Check the game log if nothing spawns; a malformed JSON will silently fail to load.