I'm playing on a vanilla Minecraft survival server, and have been trying to get Mending books by fishing. It turns out that I've only gotten one book in about a week of play, and it was Fortune II. This is weird, because my rod is Lure III, Luck of the Sea III, Unbreaking III, Mending, basically the best you can get, and I've been fishing for a very very long time.

I've thought about Lure having something to do with it, after all, it decreased the chances of finding treasure to find more fish in earlier versions, but my question is, does it still happen now, or am I just unlucky?

  • Curing zombie villagers, and making an infinite breeder is probably a lot less time consuming. Also, once you have a mending librarian, you basically have an infinite supply of mending books. – Zoredache Oct 12 '16 at 20:39
  • @Zoredache Yeah, we are working on that atm. Seems to be the best option. – ChemiCalChems Oct 12 '16 at 20:51

According to Minecrafts Gamepedia Enchanting page, Lure only increases how often the fishing rod will catch something:

Increases rate of fish biting your hook

Decreases wait time until a catch by 5 seconds per level. At Level VIII, the fish-catching particle effects start almost instantly. At Level IX, you are not able to catch anything.

Meanwhile Luck of the Sea increases chances of treasure:

Increases luck while fishing

With the default loot tables, this lowers chance of "junk" catches and increases chance of "treasure" by about 2 percentage points, and decreases the chance of fish by about 0.15 percentage points.

So to answer the question, I really see no reason as to why Lure would counter the effects of Luck of the Sea. I think you are just really unlucky.

Note: According to a table on an almost duplicate post on Reddit, your chances of catching treasure are still at a low 11.34% (though much better than the standard 5%).

  • What bugs me is that I get lots of treasure, but even though I have a 1.9% probability of getting a book, and I've made more than 500 captures, possibly 1000, I've gotten only 1 book. I guess I'm just very unlucky. – ChemiCalChems Oct 12 '16 at 18:34


Similarly, Luck of the Sea does not effect how often you get a bite. There are however other factors that determine how long you have to wait:

  • If your fishing bobber is not exposed directly to sun/moonlight, the time taken to catch a fish will double
  • If you fish in the rain, the time taken to catch a fish will be 20% less

Keep in mind that fishing up a mending book is very rare.

  1. With Luck of the Sea III, the chances of getting junk/treasure/fish are roughly:

    • Junk: 4.1%
    • Treasure: 11.3%
    • Fish: 82.5%
  2. If Treasure is chosen, your chance of getting an enchanted book is then 16.7%.

  3. With some experimentation I found the chance of an enchanted book, enchanted with the same parameters as fishing enchants books with, having mending is 3.7%.

This all means overall that your chance of getting a mending book is 0.113×0.167×0.037=0.000698, or 0.07%.

This means that you will have to catch, on average, roughly 1,400 things before catching a mending book.


I guess you're rather unlucky coz my main fishing rod is Lure III, Luck of the sea III andd mending but I seem to get a number of cool stuff e.g a mending book and tonnes of other books and enchanted bows and fishing rods. But with my Luck of the sea III and mending rod I got Frost Walker! (but it mysteriously disappeared). So it of course counters the luck but its kinda better to have Lure and Luck together. Hope that helped...late reply though lol

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