Our Minecraft fishing guide has helped many players that needed a fun activity and a stable source of food. It’s also a great way to see the type of aquatic animals the game has to offer. These include tropical fish, dolphins, cods, axolotls, pufferfish, salmon, tadpoles, turtles, and even the scary guardian and elder guardian. While you can’t fish them all, you can surely watch them pass you by, and some you’ll be happy to stay away from. Moreover, you can catch initially undesirable items such as saddles, sticks, bowls, books, name tags, and cocoa beans you’ll appreciate later. But first, you need to learn how to make a fishing rod in Minecraft.
1. Craft a fishing rod in Minecraft Survival Mode
While we mentioned crafting and enchanting fishing rods in the guide, we barely touched on the topic. This time we’ll focus on several ways to get the item in your inventory, and the first is crafting.
Materials required to make a fishing rod in Minecraft
Items needed for making fishing rods in Minecraft are as follows:
- 2x String
- 1x Stick
The rod for fishing can’t be crafted in your Minecraft player interface, so you’ll need a crafting table. As for finding materials, here are some ways to obtain them:
- You may find sticks by adding any two types of wood plank above another in the 2×2 or 3×3 crafting grid. Two plans equal four sticks in that case. Moreover, players can turn two bamboo sticks into one wood stick with the same placement. These also drop from witches, dead bushes, and leaves, and appear in Chests in villages.
- You can get strings as a drop from cobwebs, spiders, cave spiders, striders, and cats (and cat gifts). They also appear in chests across many biomes.
Recipe to create a fishing rod in Minecraft
Once you have the needed items, you can make, place, and use a crafting table. When it opens, you will see a 3×3 crafting grid, and can position items in this order:
- First row. Leave the first two slots empty, then put a stick in the third one.
- Second row. Don’t put anything in the first slot. Place a stick in the second and a string in the third.
- Third row. Put a stick in the first slot. Don’t place anything in the second. Place a string n the third.
The recipe also works reversed, i.e., if you place the first stick in the top square, then two sticks vertically to the bottom right-hand side. If you do that, you have to place two pieces of string in two slots below the stick (second row, first slot and third row, first slot).
If you did things right, you’ll see a fishing rod icon show up in the single slot on the right-hand side. Move it to your inventory or the hotbar.
Other ways to obtain fishing rods in Survival Mode
Although these methods don’t fit the “make a fishing rod” criteria, Survival Mode players, especially those in multiplayer, will appreciate our input. Here are several methods to get a fishing rod in Minecraft outside crafting:
- Fishing — If you read our fishing guide, you know you can catch a fishing rod, enchanted one as a “treasure” and the regular one as “junk”.
- Looting — You can find an enchanted fishing rod in a small ruin chest and a big ruins chest in the underwater ruins structure. Furthermore, if you kill a drowned mob that spawned with a fishing rod, you can kill it and loot the item.
- Trading — Giving 6 emeralds to a journeyman fisherman villager will get you an enchanted fishing rod with enchants identical to those in levels 5 to 19 of an enchantment table.
- Converting — If you can find a player with warped fungus on a stick or carrot on a stick, exhausting its durability to 0 makes it a regular fishing rod.
2. Add a fishing rod in Creative Mode
We specified Survival Mode for a reason. If you play in another game mode or enjoy single-player gameplay or are an administrator on a server, you don’t need to go through the trouble. If you want to switch, first type the /gamemode creative command in the chat and send it. Now, open your inventory and get a fishing rod this way:
- Search for “fishing rod” after clicking the compass icon in the upper right corner. Otherwise, find it in the Tools, Equipment, or Tools, Weapons and Armor tabs.
- Drag the Fishing Rod icon from the list to your hotbar. You can now use it without its durability going down. Moreover, you can switch to Survival Mode, and it will remain.
3. Use commands for adding fishing rods
Our guides customarily mention the ability to enable Minecraft cheats and use Minecraft commands to save time by getting instant results. That is the case with crafting, too. Therefore, you can type the following commands to add a fishing rod to your inventory:
- In case you’re using Java Edition for Mac or PC between 1.13 and 1.19.2, you can use this /give command to spawn a fishing rod in your inventory:
/give @p fishing_rod 1 - For players that play on Java Edition 1.8 and later and all other versions of Minecraft, the /give command for adding a fishing rod is the following:
/give @p fishing_rod 1 0