How to Stop Losing Your Fish Buckets When Crafting

Why Your Buckets Disappear

In vanilla Minecraft, when a bucket of fish (Pufferfish, Salmon, Cod, or Tropical Fish) is used as a crafting ingredient, the game returns an empty Bucket instead of the original bucket. This is the intended behavior for water buckets, but it means you permanently lose the fish and the bucket type. With What The Bucket Mod installed, this is corrected so you get an empty Bucket back rather than losing the item entirely.

What You Need to Do

1. Install What The Bucket Mod on your client (or ensure the server has it, since server-side installation fixes it for all players).

2. Gather the fish buckets you want to use as ingredients.

3. Place them into the crafting grid as you normally would for your recipe.

4. Take the crafted result out.

5. Check your inventory — you should now have an empty Bucket returned instead of nothing.

Verifying It Works

After crafting, look at the output slot and your inventory. If the mod is active, the empty Bucket will appear in the crafting grid's remaining items slot. If you are on a server without the mod, ask the admin to install it — client-side installation alone will not fix the bug on a vanilla server.

No configuration is needed. The fix applies automatically to all affected bucket types.