Tropical Fish

Tropical Fish are common passive mobs found in oceans and lush caves. There are 2,700 naturally occurring variants. Using commands, up to 3,587 visually distinct variants can be spawned.

Java Edition
$$, tropical fish spawn in groups of 8 at 24 (cylindrical) to 64 (spherical) blocks away from the player, with random patterns (see below) in lukewarm or warm oceans and lush caves, as well as their deep variants.

In ocean biomes tropical fish will only spawn at Y levels between sea level, and 13 blocks below sea level.

Bedrock Edition
$$, tropical fish spawn underwater at 12-32 blocks away from the player. Tropical fish spawn only in warm, lukewarm, deep lukewarm ocean biomes and lush caves, in groups of 3-5 for the same preset pattern, and in groups of 1-3 for a random pattern. In addition, tropical fish in warm, lukewarm ocean and deep variants can only spawn at Y levels between 50 and 64 and must be on the surface (i.e., there must not be a spawnable block above the spawn location with a non-solid block on top). Tropical fish in lush caves can spawn on any Y levels but require underground.

Drops

 * 1.
 * 1 (5% chance)
 * 1–2 s (25% chance)
 * 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 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 against a block, it empties the bucket, placing water with that fish swimming in it.

Weaknesses
Tropical fish cannot survive out of water. Outside of water, they flop around for a while until eventually they suffocate and die. $$, 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
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, 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 $$. Instead, for naturally spawned tropical fish spawn in attempt as 22 preset and another attempt use randomly chosen patterns, sizes, and colors (except black). Tropical fish from spawn egg will 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. $$, the names are in the name of the bucket, giving names like "Bucket of Plum Blockfish", "Bucket of Sky-Orange Snooper", or "Bucket of Orange-Lime Dasher". $$, the type, and colors are displayed as item tooltips.

$$, the following colors are renamed from their defaults when they refer to tropical fish. Parentheses indicate default name and color id - see § Entity data.
 * (Light Blue; 3)
 * (Pink; 6)
 * (Light Gray; 8)
 * (Cyan; 9)
 * (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:

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

These varieties are:

ID




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


 * See Bedrock Edition level format/Entity format.
 * See Bedrock Edition level format/Entity format.