Luck of the Sea III Tops Out at 11.34%

Verified: Java 26.3 · 2026-10-14 · Java model; Bedrock not covered

This guide reads fishing straight out of the files Java 26.3 ships with: the three-way pick behind every catch, what Luck of the Sea does to it, the open-water rule that can switch treasure off, and the timer that decides how long you wait. The short version: Luck of the Sea III moves treasure from 5% of catches to 11.34%, Lure III halves the wait, and a roof over the bobber undoes the Lure. The fishing calculator applies all of it to any rod and spot.

Where the numbers come from

The Java server download from Mojang carries the game's own data pack, and in it the fishing loot table, the three sub-tables it draws from, and the files for Luck of the Sea and Lure. The arithmetic that turns those files into a catch, and the timer that decides when a fish bites, sit in the game code in the same download, and this guide follows that code.

All of it was checked against a second source, the fishing calculator on mctoolbox.net, read the same day. Its script carries the same weights, the same luck formula and the same timer, and re-running it gives the same figures as this site's calculator for every rod, water and weather setting. The per-level effects match crafty.gg's entries for Luck of the Sea (+1 fishing luck a level) and Lure (5 seconds off the wait a level), both up to level III.

Step one: fish, junk or treasure

Every catch starts with one weighted pick between three tables: fish at weight 85, junk at 10 and treasure at 5. Each table also has a quality, −1 for fish, −2 for junk and +2 for treasure, and the weight that counts is the weight plus quality times luck, never below zero. Luck of the Sea adds 1 to luck per level, so each level moves weight from junk and fish to treasure.

That is why level III stops at 11.34% rather than something rounder: treasure gains 6 points of weight, junk loses 6 and fish loses 3, so the total shrinks to 97 and 11 of it is treasure. Junk falls from 10% to 4.12%. Fish hardly move, 85% to 84.54%, so most of what you catch is still fish.

Step two: which item

Inside the chosen table, a second weighted pick names the item. Fish: cod 60, salmon 25, pufferfish 13 and tropical fish 2, out of 100. Treasure: the name tag, saddle, bow, fishing rod, enchanted book and nautilus shell, one each, so each is a sixth of the treasure share; the bow and rod come enchanted at level 30 with 0 to 25% of their durability left, and the book is enchanted at level 30. Junk: lily pad 17; leather boots, leather, bone, water bottle, bowl, tripwire hook and rotten flesh 10 each; string and stick 5; a damaged fishing rod 2; and a stack of 10 ink sacs 1, which makes 100. In a jungle, sparse jungle or bamboo jungle, bamboo joins the junk list at 10, so the junk total becomes 110 and every other junk item gets a little rarer.

Luck never touches this second pick. It changes how often you land in the treasure table, not what you find there.

Open water decides treasure

The treasure table carries a condition: the bobber must count as in open water. The game checks the 5 by 5 area centred on the bobber in four layers, from one block below it to two above. Each layer has to be all source water with nothing solid in it, or all air and lily pads; the bottom layer has to be water, and water may not sit above an air layer. One block of flowing water, a slab or a fence post in that area fails the check.

When it fails, the treasure table is not in the draw at all. With Luck of the Sea III, fish and junk then split 82 to 4: 95.35% fish and 4.65% junk, and no treasure however lucky the rod is. A one-block hole cut into solid ground fails too, because the blocks around the bobber are not water.

The bite timer

The wait runs in game ticks, 20 to the second. When the bobber settles, the game draws a whole number of ticks from 100 to 600, that is 5 to 30 seconds, and Lure takes 100 ticks off per level. If that leaves zero or less, the draw is thrown away and made again on the next tick, which happens on two draws in five at Lure III. The countdown then runs, and when it ends a fish swims in for another 20 to 80 ticks, 1 to 4 seconds. Then it bites, and you have 20 to 40 ticks, 1 to 2 seconds, to reel in.

Without Lure the average wait is 20.05 seconds: 350 ticks of countdown, 50 of approach and the one tick of the draw. Lure III brings it to 10.1 seconds, with the countdown down to 150.5 ticks on average. It halves the wait but cannot remove it, because the redraws and the approach stay.

Rain and roofs

Each tick the countdown normally moves by one. When rain falls on the bobber, a quarter of the ticks move it by two, and Lure III's 10.1 seconds become 8.1; rain with Lure II, 10.1 seconds, already matches Lure III in dry weather. When the block above the bobber cannot see the sky, half the ticks do not move it at all, and every wait nearly doubles: 40.1 seconds with no Lure, and 20.1 with Lure III, about what a bare rod manages in the open. Rain only counts where the sky is visible, so the two never combine.

One enchanted book, worked out

With Luck of the Sea III in open water, a book is 11.34% ÷ 6 = 1.89% of catches, about one in 52.9. It takes 37 catches for an even chance of at least one book and 121 for a 90% chance. At Lure III's 10.1 seconds a bite, that is about 8.9 minutes of waiting per book. A rod with neither enchantment catches a book once in 120 catches, 0.83% of the time, and at 20.1 seconds a bite that is about 40.1 minutes. Reeling in and casting again come on top of both figures.

What this leaves out

The game adds the player's own Luck attribute to Luck of the Sea when it rolls the catch. mctoolbox.net's calculator does not model it, and with one source this site does not either. The code also drops 1 to 6 experience points with every catch, which mctoolbox.net does not cover. Bedrock Edition is not modeled: Mojang's Bedrock sample files weigh the enchanted book above the other treasure and use a different junk list, as mctoolbox.net also notes, and there is no Bedrock code to check the timer against.

Sources, read 2026-10-14: the fishing loot table and its fish, junk and treasure sub-tables, luck_of_the_sea.json and lure.json in the vanilla data pack of the Java 26.3 server download from Mojang, and the FishingHook, FishingRodItem, LootPool and loot-entry code in the same download; the mctoolbox.net fishing calculator and its script; crafty.gg's Luck of the Sea and Lure entries; Mojang's bedrock-samples repository on GitHub. The game version was checked the same day against Mojang's launcher manifest and its release changelogs: Java 26.3 is the current release.