🎣 Every catch has a weight. And your rivals are watching.

Reel Rivals turns vanilla fishing into a competition. Every fish you reel in is weighed to the decimal — flashed on your screen, inked onto the catch — and the moment you beat a species record, the whole server hears about it, with your name on the ledger to prove it. From there, it escalates.

🐟 28 species across every water in the game

Rivers hide Golden Bass by day and Mudskip Gar by night. Quiet ponds hold Mirror Carp and the moonlit Koi. Oceans run on schedules — Sunfin Tuna under the sun, Storm Marlin in the rain, and the Thunderfin, which surfaces only while thunder splits the sky. Warm reefs, frozen seas, swamps, jungles, the deep dark — every biome fishes differently. Three legends crown the ledger: the King Sturgeon (up to 25 kg, anywhere, almost never), the Ancient Coelacanth haunting the deep oceans — and the Void Skate, which bites only in the End, where there is no water unless you bring your own.

🪝 Learn the fish. Craft the lure.

Catch a species once and you learn it — unlocking a craftable lure that targets it. Hold the lure in your offhand and about 1 in 3 common bites become the fish you're hunting, in its home water. Special lures cheat nature itself: the Nightcrawler catches Midnight Eels at noon, the Storm Jig lands Marlins under clear skies, and the King's Roe — heart of the sea, golden apple — tempts the King himself, 1 time in 10. Stack Bait Tins (Luck I–V) on top and go all in.

🏆 Tournaments with real stakes

Any player can host — no ops, no plugins, one command:

• Pick the rules: Total Weight, Biggest Catch, or Most Catches · 5/10/15 minutes
• Pick the fish: any species — or Rivers & Lakes only, Ocean only, or a Trophy Hunt where only rare and legendary species score
• Pick the gear: open class, Fair Play (no Luck of the Sea — everyone on even rods), or Pro League (Luck of the Sea IV+ required)
• Set the stakes: buy-ins from 1 emerald to 64, winner-takes-all or 60/30/10
• Fish the frenzy: bossbar countdown, live standings, per-catch score updates on your actionbar, and a +25% Feeding Frenzy at halfway
• Take the pot: automatic crash-proof payouts, trophies for the podium stamped with the tournament day and final score, and your name broadcast to everyone who lost

📈 Two paths to the top

Every angler earns the same first two rods. Then the ladder forks — and you can walk both.

Fish every water in the world — river, lake, open ocean, warm reef, frozen sea, the deeps, swamp, jungle, and the End — and the Naturalist's Rod is yours. Finish the entire ledger, all 28 species, with a 15 kg leviathan on your record, and you forge the Legend Rod: Luck of the Sea VIII, unbreakable, the finest rare-hunting rod in the game.

Or win. Five tournament victories crown you Grandmaster, and the Grandmaster's Rod fishes roughly twice as fast as anything else on the water — the rod you want when the clock is running and volume decides it.

Neither is strictly better. Luck of the Sea pulls rarity; Lure pulls speed. Around them: five bait tiers up to King's Feast (Luck V), Abyssal Chum at 100 catches, Master of the Deep at 1,000, and a /trigger rr.top live leaderboard of the server's best.

📖 The Angler's Almanac

Every player gets a free in-game field guide — 29 pages with a clickable, linked table of contents and a << Contents jump on every page: every species with where and when it bites, every lure recipe, and both rod build paths. /trigger rr.guide any time.

And your catch is never wasted: every fish is still real vanilla food. Cook it and it becomes an ordinary meal — or frame it, and the name and weight stay forever. Eat it or mount it.

⚙️ Zero-friction install

Drop the release zip as-is (don't extract it) into world/datapacks, done. 100% vanilla — works on vanilla servers and modded servers alike (verified on both a pure vanilla dedicated server and NeoForge). Everything runs on /trigger, so players never need permissions. If fishing ever gives plain, weightless fish, another pack is overriding the fishing loot — the pack detects this and prints the one-command fix in chat.

Command
/trigger rr.help	how to play
/trigger rr.host	host a tournament
/trigger rr.join	enter the lobby
/trigger rr.records	per-species record ledger
/trigger rr.top	live Top Anglers leaderboard
/trigger rr.guide	the Almanac

Tip: /gamerule doLimitedCrafting true makes gear unlocks binding.