AFK Fish Farm: Free Enchanted Books and Treasure

Fishing is the most underrated source of enchanted books in Minecraft. With Luck of the Sea it produces treasure items — including Mending — without trading, exploring or fighting anything. An AFK fish farm automates the tedium.

The rule that decides everything: open water

This is the mechanic that makes or breaks a fish farm, and it is not explained in-game.

For treasure loot to be possible, your bobber must land in open water. The game checks a 5x4x5 area centred on the bobber: it must contain only water and air, at the correct depth, with no solid blocks, no lily pads, no boats — nothing but water and air.

If that check fails, you can still catch fish and junk, but treasure becomes impossible. Every disappointing fish farm is a failed open-water check.

This is why cramming a 1x1 hole into a wall does not work for books. The build has to preserve genuine open water around where the bobber lands.

Luck of the Sea and Lure

Two enchantments matter, and they do different jobs:

• Luck of the Sea III — improves your chances of treasure over junk. This is the one that gets you books.
• Lure III — reduces the wait time between bites. Faster catches, but note it does not improve *what* you catch.

Mending on the rod is also worth having: the XP from fishing repairs the rod as you go, so it never breaks. Combined, that is a rod that fishes indefinitely without maintenance.

Getting Luck of the Sea III and Lure III usually means either a lucky enchanting table roll or a Librarian. Our enchanting setup guide covers reaching level 30 reliably, and the max enchantments tool shows everything a fishing rod can hold.

What you can actually catch

Four categories:

• Fish — cod, salmon, pufferfish, tropical fish. Common.
• Junk — sticks, string, bowls, leather, damaged rods, lily pads. Common and mostly worthless, though string and leather have uses.
• Treasure — enchanted books, enchanted bows and rods, name tags, saddles, nautilus shells. This is the reason to build the farm.
• Nautilus shells specifically — eight of them plus a heart of the sea makes a conduit.

Enchanted books from fishing are randomly enchanted, which means Mending is genuinely obtainable this way. It is slower than trading with a Librarian, but it needs no villagers at all.

Building one

The mechanically honest version is straightforward:

1. 1.Make a body of water that passes the open-water check. A pool at least 5x5, ideally larger, with nothing but water and air in the surrounding volume.
2. 2.Stand where your bobber lands in the middle of it — not against a wall.
3. 3.Put a hopper beneath your standing position feeding into a chest, so caught items are collected rather than filling your inventory.
4. 4.Hold right-click. That is the entire mechanism.

Keeping right-click held is what "AFK" refers to. How you do that is up to you and depends on the server rules you are playing under — many servers explicitly prohibit automation of input, and it is worth checking before setting anything up.

Managing what you catch

The output is mostly junk by volume, so sorting matters if you leave it running:

• Feed the hopper chain into a simple item sorter and filter out sticks, bowls and lily pads.
• Keep string — it is useful for wool, bows and scaffolding.
• Keep leather for books, which you will need in quantity for bookshelves.
• Set enchanted books aside; combine them properly at an anvil rather than one at a time. Our anvil guide explains why the order matters so much.

Realistic expectations

Fishing is a slow trickle, not a firehose. Treasure is a minority of catches even with Luck of the Sea III, and enchanted books are a fraction of treasure. Over a long session you will get books, but if you specifically want Mending right now, rerolling a Librarian is faster and more targeted — see our villager jobs guide.

Where fishing wins is that it needs nothing: no villagers, no fortress, no End access. Early in a world, before you have a trading hall, a fish farm is one of the few ways to get treasure enchantments at all.

Worth pairing with

The output stacks well with other early projects. Leather feeds bookshelves; string feeds mob farm alternatives and scaffolding; and the steady XP repairs your rod while topping up levels for enchanting. It is a good thing to have running in the background while you work on something else nearby.