No. In standard Minecraft gameplay, players cannot breed tropical fish. You can catch and move them with a water bucket, but a bucket of tropical fish is used to breed axolotls—not more fish.
How to keep tropical fish
Use a water bucket on a tropical fish to collect it, then use the bucket to place the fish in another body of water. As Duncan Geere explains in Mojang’s “Taking Inventory: Tropical fish”, a bucket lets you pick one up and transport it farther. Tropical fish die if placed on land, so release them underwater.
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If you want more tropical fish, find them in their natural habitats rather than trying to breed them. Mojang describes them in warm and lukewarm oceans and lush caves, and in mangrove swamps in Java Edition; those habitat details can vary by edition and version.
What a bucket of tropical fish is used for
A bucket of tropical fish is food for axolotl breeding. The official Java 1.17 notes and Bedrock 1.17 notes document breeding axolotls with buckets of tropical fish. The axolotls reproduce; the tropical fish do not.
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#1 Best Overall
- Minecraft is a game about placing blocks and going on adventures
- Explore randomly generated worlds and build amazing things from the simplest of homes to the grandest of castles
- Play in creative mode with unlimited resources or mine deep into the world in survival mode, crafting weapons and armor to fend off the dangerous mobs
- Play on the go in handheld or tabletop modes
- Includes Super Mario Mash-Up, Natural Texture Pack, Biome Settlers Skin Pack, Battle & Beasts Skin Pack, Campfire Tales Skin Pack; Compatible with Nintendo Switch only
For this mechanic, use the bucket rather than a tropical-fish item. Mojang’s Bedrock 1.17 notes document the bucket-based interaction, while the Java 1.17 notes and Java snapshot 21w20a notes record a fix involving axolotls being bred with tropical-fish items instead of buckets.
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Rank #3
- Minecraft is a game about placing blocks and going on adventures
- Explore randomly generated worlds and build amazing things from the simplest of homes to the grandest of castles
- Play in creative mode with unlimited resources or mine deep into the world in survival mode, crafting weapons and armor to fend off the dangerous mobs
- Play on the go in handheld or tabletop modes
- Includes Super Mario Mash-Up, Natural Texture Pack, Biome Settlers Skin Pack, Battle & Beasts Skin Pack, Campfire Tales Skin Pack; Compatible with Nintendo Switch only
Rank #2
- Explore randomly-generated worlds and build amazing things from the simplest of homes to the grandest of castles
- Play in Creative Mode with unlimited resources or mine deep into the world in survival mode, crafting weapons and armour to fend off the dangerous mobs
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