Hello and welcome to my tutorial on how to capture a guardian and build it a fishtank.

Contents:
- Where to find guardians
- How to take them home without being zapped to death
- How to put them in a fishtank without getting lazered to a crisp
- Decorating your fishtank
- Screenshots from my survival world

Disclaimer: this guide is intended for normal guardians only, elder guardians do not fit into boats so cannot be extracted through this method. Try minecarts instead.

Equipment:
- Lots of boats
- Potion of Invisibility (optional)

Where to find Guardians
If you've played Minecraft for a while, you probably know that guardians spawn in ocean monuments. To find a monument, you could always buy a (pricey) map from a cartographer villager, but if you're low on emeralds or want to play it cheap, just grab a boat and sail around in the nearest deep ocean. Not warm, nor shallow, but deep. They should be easy to spot from the surface by their distinctive shape and glowy sea lanterns (pro tip: try doing this at night. By the way, you'll be safe because your boat's too speedy for drowned to catch you).

How to capture a Guardian
You'll need quite a few boats for this- preferably at least one inventory's worth. If you've got a tree farm, or 15 minutes to spare, you can easily get enough wood for this, but if not, it also works with one or two boats (but it'll take way longer).
The way this works is if you cover the top of the monument with boats, guardians swimming near the surface of the ocean will (automatically) get trapped in the boats, then you can sail away with one of them. Fortunately, there seems to be a bug (or maybe it's an intended feature) where ranged mobs can't hit you when you're in the same boat as them. They'll try their best but their projectiles always go straight through you. This is the case with guardians too- you can't get zapped if you're in a boat with them.

Now that the theory's out of the way, here are the steps:
1. Cover the top of the monument with boats- spread them out evenly. This is a good time to use a potion of invisibility (remember that you can only wear one piece of armour (for this purpose, elytra counts as armour) otherwise you'll be noticed- I recommend a protection chestplate or a respiration helmet).
2. Fall back to a safe distance to wait for a guardian to inadvertently swim into a boat.
3. Quickly get into the boat with it and sail off before the other guardians spot you and attack.
4. You can now take it home with you. If your home is near the sea, then that's not a problem, but if you live in the mountains, I have some tips below to help with that.

**IMPORTANT**
Remember to remove the boats afterwards! It is way more difficult to remove them later because they'll be filled up with angry guardians. If this happens, you could always break them with a thrown trident (with loyalty, of course) from a distance. I forgot about this, and when surfacing after raiding the monument, I was greeted by a horde of unhappy guardians trapped in the boats. Don't be like me lol.
Mobs in boats don't despawn so they'll be there for a while.
It's also a good idea to plan out how you're going to take it home before capturing one.

How to move a boat on land
So you've got your guardian, but now you need to bring it to your house in the mountains. You have several options:
- Put the boat in a minecart. Due to a bug, boats can ride minecarts. Drive the boat onto rails, then run a minecart through it and it should be picked up. Now of course, to do this you need to have made a rail line in advance, and risk getting lazered while you're placing down a minecart. But after the minecart picks up the boat, it should move off at a great speed, and the guardian will be out of range in no time. Of course, you could ride in the boat with the guardian but it's a little tricky to get in since it's moving so fast.
- To move a short distance, you could put pistons in the ground, drive the boat onto them, and use levers to power them, pushing the boat up a block. This is very tedious though.
- Dig a channel- time-consuming but not a bad idea if your house is near a river connected to the sea.

How not to move a boat on land
- Stairs and slabs don't work- a boat can't even move up a fraction of a block (not even from a grass path to normal height blocks)
- Flowing water- boats sink and can't move up waterfalls

How to put a Guardian in a fishtank
- Make a glass tank- use blocks, not glass panes! If they become waterlogged it's a huge pain (haha geddit?) to remove all the water, and your house will likely become flooded too. Leave a 2x2 opening (2 wide, 2 tall) and put fence gates there.
- Put two layers of water inside. Now's a good time to add decoration- perhaps kelp and seagrass? coral and sea pickles? Though guardians don't really give me a tropical vibe.
- Drive your boat through the fence gates into the water, the guardian should dismount (mobs automatically dismount boats when in water) and you can collect the boat and make a run for it.
- Replace the fence gates with glass. It helps, if you put glass in your off hand and an axe in your main, and quickly right click after breaking the fences to fill the hole with glass (otherwise the guardian can escape, being less than 1 block wide).
- Fill up the rest of your fishtank. To avoid being lazered you can put blocks to hide behind or momentarily duck behind the rim of the tank.
- Put a roof on because you don't want it escaping that way.
- Remember to name tag it, or it'll despawn!

Adding More Decoration
So now you have your guardian in your fishtank, and you suddenly remember that you forgot to light up the inside or add decorative touches to it. Whoops.
All is not lost though, you could simply use a potion of invisibility and jump inside to fix that. Remember to take off all but one piece of your armour- you don't want to be spotted.

Screenshots from my survival world
or, how I managed to do it


The boats don't need to be that close together, you could probably even do this with less than ten boats, but it'll take longer for a guardian to wander into one. I emptied my inventory of any valuables, apart from my sword and some potions, and set off to capture some guardians. FYI, the guardian shooting in the subtitles was shooting at a squid, not me! I was wearing an invisibility potion. Boats are probably the best way to do this, they're entities which means mining fatigue doesn't affect your ability to break them.


Here, I've dug a channel into my base since the floor was only slightly above sea level, and it was near a river connected to the ocean. I also have a pillager from when I decided to make a friendly pillager (see my previous article). I got the boat out of the water through two pistons (not shown here, I hadn't built it yet in that screenshot) so getting it up was quite quick.


Here I have the guardian inside the fishtank. I later decided to add some decoration (mostly kelp and sea grass) so I drank another potion of invisibility to sneak inside unseen. To not waste that potion, I also added decoration to my other tanks (containing two drowned and some tropical fish) at the same time, and found out the hard way that angry trident-wielding drowned can sometimes see you through glass and while invisible too. But that's a story for another day, perhaps I'll write a tutorial on making a zombie zoo next.


Why you so aggro? And why can you see through glass while the other drowned can't? mayhaps that trident of yours granted you special powers

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I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it helpful. Perhaps now you can get your own pet guardian without the mishaps that I faced along the way.