Overview
Bad Luck is the mirror of Luck, subtracting from the same loot roll and pushing fishing results towards junk instead of treasure. Like its counterpart it has no survival source in Java Edition, and unlike its counterpart nobody wants one — there is no potion, no mob that applies it and no food that carries it, so a player will meet it only on a server or an adventure map where somebody has chosen to inflict it. That narrow role is genuinely useful to map makers. Because the value is hidden and no icon explains what it is doing to your rolls, Bad Luck is a quiet way to make a fishing challenge harder, to penalise a losing team, or to model a cursed area where nothing good ever comes out of the water. It reads as bad fortune rather than as a rule, which is the effect a designer usually wants. For an ordinary survival world the entry is worth reading once for the reassurance: if your fishing has gone badly for an hour, it is variance, not this. Nothing in vanilla survival can hand it to you.
Map and server design: quietly worsening a player's fishing and loot rolls to make a challenge harder, without an obvious rule the player can read off the screen.
Worsens fishing loot quality. Like Luck, it has no survival source.
As a status effect, Bad Luck counts as harmful. No potion produces it, so it lasts however long the source keeps applying it.
You will see it as an inventory icon in the top-right corner with a countdown, plus a trail of particles in the effect's colour — faint rather than absent when a beacon or a conduit applied it. There is no beacon version, so it always runs out.
How to get it
No survival source at all — no potion, no mob, no food carries it. /effect give @s minecraft:unluck 600 0 applies 10 minutes of it; the registry id is unluck, which is not what the display name suggests.
Tips
- The command id is
unluck, notbad_luck— the most common reason a command block silently does nothing here. - Milk clears it, which is worth knowing if a map hands it out and you are allowed a bucket.
- It is the only way to make fishing worse; even a rod with no Luck of the Sea rolls the neutral table.
- Nothing in survival applies it, so a long run of bad fishing luck is genuinely just variance.
What each level does
What the inventory calls level II is amplifier 1, because the amplifier counts from zero. Level by level:
Levels above I exist but cannot be obtained in survival — a command can go up to 255.
| Level | Effect |
|---|---|
| I | −1 to the fishing and loot-table luck roll |
Properties
No potion produces Bad Luck. Its sources are Command, and its duration is whatever they give it. Milk is the only cure, and it clears every effect you are carrying at once.
- Category
- Negative
- Highest level in survival
- I
- Particle colour
- #C0A44D
- Removed by
- Milk
Where it comes from
Bad Luck comes from Command.
- Command
Command
This gives you thirty seconds of Bad Luck I with cheats on. The trailing number is the amplifier, so 1 means level II.
Give the effect
/effect give @s minecraft:unluck 30 0Clear it
/effect clear @s minecraft:unluckGuides and tools that cover this
Frequently asked questions
How long does Bad Luck last?
Bad Luck has no potion form, so whatever applied it sets how long it lasts.
How do I get rid of Bad Luck?
Milk — and be aware it wipes your other effects at the same time.
Is Bad Luck good or bad?
Bad. It sits with the harmful statuses.
