Bucket of aquatic mob

Buckets of fish are a form of water bucket with a fish inside.

Buckets of axolotl are instead buckets with an axolotl inside.

Obtaining
A bucket of fish can be obtained by a water bucket on any fish. Once an empty bucket or a water bucket is used, the fish is picked up along with the water source block. The fish bucket obtained corresponds to the fish picked up.

Trading
Wandering traders have $1/6$ chance to either sell a bucket of pufferfish or a bucket of tropical fish for 5 emeralds.

Novice-level Fisherman villagers have a 50% chance to sell a bucket of cod for 3 emeralds.

Usage
Pressing with a bucket of fish places a water source block, and spawns the corresponding fish back into the world, leaving an empty bucket in the player's inventory. For buckets of tropical fish, the patterns and color of the tropical fish are remembered and stored in the bucket. Placing a bucket of fish in the Nether causes the same particles to appear that generate when a normal water bucket is placed in the Nether, and the fish is spawned alone.

Fish caught in buckets then released do not despawn, unlike fish that spawn naturally in oceans.

If a bucket of fish is inside a dispenser, the dispenser spawns the fish and water block in front of it upon activation.

If a bucket of fish is named a certain name through an anvil, the fish inside display that name as if it were named with a name tag. Alternatively, if a named fish is captured with a bucket of water, the resulting fish bucket shares a name with the captured fish.

Bucket of tropical fish
Tropical fish also have assigned names that can be seen after capture, so that smaller text under the item name is displayed showing the fish name, similar to the text that displays enchantments under enchanted items. Their colors are mostly named according to the colored block names, though with a few exceptions:



The base color comes first, and if the pattern color is different, it comes after that. Lastly, the fish bucket is given a name according to the shape and pattern of the fish:

Some tropical fish don't follow the normal naming system, and instead, reference real-life fish species. Apart from these names, these types of fish aren't different from regular tropical fish in terms of design or behavior.

These varieties are:

A bucket of tropical fish purchased from a wandering trader or pulled from the Creative inventory spawns random tropical fish when used, due to it having no associated NBT.

ID




Item data

 * : The item's tag tag.

Normal buckets of fish use only the BucketVariantTag tag to store the variant of any tropical fish that is picked up, and the item's display name to store the fish's custom name.

Metadata
$$ buckets use data value to determine contents. Once used, each data value is set to 0 (Empty Bucket). If no data value is provided, data value is 0.

Trivia

 * When a water bucket is transformed into a bucket of fish, it actually pushes the bucket texture down one pixel. According to Dinnerbone, JAPPA says this is due to the "weight of the fish".
 * Buckets of tropical fish always appear to contain a clownfish, regardless of whatever fish is actually inside.
 * Since empty buckets can be used to capture fish $$, it is possible to create an infinite amount of water source blocks simply by catching a fish mob with a bucket and continually placing and re-capturing the mob.
 * The bucket of cod and bucket of tropical fish are actually re-colors of each other.
 * Using an nbt editor, one can change the nbt data of the mob inside the bucket to be any mob with any data, letting one make stuff like custom villager trades without any addons/mods. $$ only.
 * In 20w51a, if one was to capture a baby axolotl with a water bucket, placing it down will spawn an adult axolotl. This is most likely a bug.