22.5k Bait And The Consequences Of Using It All

[Just Some Random Kid]

Context for this project. If you want to get to what the results were just skip this section.

I recently found out about a method of acquiring large amounts of bait in a small time frame. I already knew about how good fishing was and had done it a few times with the scrap>bones>Bait method. However my partner recently came across a new method which I will detail below. Needless to say I acquired around 30k bait worth of materials in like 30ish minutes. Crafting 22.5k worth of it with the materials I had on hand and I decided since there isn't much info about this kind of stuff I would compile it myself doing this is one sitting (which I would highly recommend against). Then I decided for the hell of it I'd also post it here for those who might also be curious about what you can expect from doing mass amounts of fishing. Thank you for coming to my TED talk now onto the details.

The method in question for acquiring the bait. First you need a hammer and a compost bin. That is it. Go to a tile on the world map (preferably the tree tiles that have an abundance of blue flowers) and collect flowers. Do this for about 5-10 minutes. Take the flowers you get and hammer them turning them into leaves. Because flowers are a food item the leaf material is raw food, some of you might see where this is going. Take those leaves and collect enough sticks to turn the leaves into makeshift arrows. The material for the arrows are now also raw food. Put those arrows into a compost bin and let them become fertilizer. Take the fertilizer and hammer it, turning the fertilizer into corpses. Turn the corpses into bait and boom you now have 10k bait and you can fish for as long as you want.

Before I move on an interesting bit about this is that the corpse material is soil so they don't rot. Meaning that this is a relatively good way to stockpile corpses for whenever you want to max out your worshiping tier for a god.

Now onto some of the basic statistics.

This entire process took roughly 25-30 hours to complete. 20-25 of it being just the fishing with another 2 hours on top for the sawmilling of the fish themselves. Now I wasn't doing it super active so you could probably do this whole thing in 20 hours maybe even less if you were hyper active about it and having more stamina then I (I had 98 a day as it was the limit that my bed could do when I slept)

Actual stats on items/xp now.

My levels changed as followed

Fishing Potential 100 went from base 61>137.39 Over doubling the stat. With my bonuses It went from 97>173.39

Carpentry Potential 100 (from sawmilling the first) went from 25.15>47.53 almost doubling it.

Appraising Potential 100 went from (roughly) 28>33.99

Literacy Potential 100 gained around 20 levels from low 20s to 43.77. I forgot to track it before starting the project because I forgot about how many books you can get from fishing.

Other miscellaneous amounts of xp in skills like strength and weightlifting that were minimal but did happen. That's about it for notable amounts of XP gains.

Miscellaneous but valuable items gained.

543 Small Medals (The reason I did this in the first place)
160ish Platinum Coins (forgot to get the exact number I had before doing this so this is a low estimate)
426 Voynich Manuscripts
27 Revelations Of Glaaki
91 Ponape Scriptures
7 G'Harne Fragments
164 Dhol Chants

1 Statue Of Luck
1 Statue Of Machine
1 Statue Of Healing
1 Statue Of Harvest
2 Statue's Of Wind
2 Statue's Of Element

Now onto the fish. Before that though the reason why there are multiple Basses and Tuna is just because there are two separate types that don't stack with the same name (at least when rotted).

478 Moonfish
936 Sunfish
83 Sharks
204 Ancient Fish
974 Deep Sea Fish
91 Coelacanth
35 Whales
921 Sand Borers
458 Salmon
493 Sea Breams
1403 Sardines
1059 Flatfish
179 Blowfish
484 Tuna
1067 Bonitos
366 Turtles
211 Red Breams
1164 Makerals
1093 Basses
1125 Stripped Jacks
1371 Sweetfish
722 Arowanas
450 Tuna
1218 Scads
1293 Tilefish
300 Sea Urchins
1547 Basses
1525 Muddlers
1539 Gobies
752 Eels
323 Goldfish
1751 Tadpoles
1553 Bitterlings

Now lastly before I get onto how much this made in orens I have some thoughts/notes.

This entire thing took almost an entire in-game year to do. Spanning from 3/8 all the way to 2/18. I would never recommend doing this much fishing in one go ever. It took me about 3 days to complete. I also had 2 fishermen and 2 Historians going during this time all at novice level so they did add a small bit of fish/books to the total but it's insignificant in the grab scheme of things. Maybe 20-30 books in total and around 100-150 fish.

And if you do decide to do something like this and you rely on rotten food via a piece of equipment for easy mass food that doesn't rot like I did don't forget to equip it for the first 3 months of a project like this. Never thought I'd see a character this far into a game with base physical stats of almost 2s and 3s across the board.

Now onto the money breakdown.

I ended up with a total of

109,412 Bonito Flake Wine
8663 Cursed Bonito Flake Wine
5049 Blessed Bonito Flake Win

That combined with the books gained equated to a total of

3,857,636 Orens
3,501,184 from Bonito Flake Wine
138.608 from Cursed Bonito Flake Wine
201,960 from Blessed Bonito Flake Wine
9,394 from Voynich Manuscriptures
3,674 from Dhol Chants
2,046 from Ponape Scriptures
594 from Revelations of Glaaki
176 from G'harne Fragments

Thank you for reading this however much of it you decided to read. No clue if this is going to be useful to anyone and it's the first time I've done ANYTHING like this for any game let alone deciding to then share said information with other people but yea. Thank you regardless.

[SpaceLobster]

I hope all the fishing was done at a fishing spot/beach/sea for the fishing bonus. You miss out on a lot of extra fish without the bonuses.

[Just Some Random Kid]

Originally posted by SpaceLobster:

I hope all the fishing was done at a fishing spot/beach/sea for the fishing bonus. You miss out on a lot of extra fish without the bonuses.

It twas not. I found out about those bonuses half way through the project and didn't want to screw with the sample at that point. Any other questions and I'd be happy to answer them.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Just Some Random Kid:

And if you do decide to do something like this and you rely on rotten food via a piece of equipment for easy mass food that doesn't rot like I did don't forget to equip it for the first 3 months of a project like this. Never thought I'd see a character this far into a game with base physical stats of almost 2s and 3s across the board.

I'm unclear what you're referring to with this.

Also if you don't want food rotting couldn't you put a few fridges next to the fishing spot so you can dump everything in there? Or is there a maximum stack size in a container?

[Just Some Random Kid]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Originally posted by Just Some Random Kid:

And if you do decide to do something like this and you rely on rotten food via a piece of equipment for easy mass food that doesn't rot like I did don't forget to equip it for the first 3 months of a project like this. Never thought I'd see a character this far into a game with base physical stats of almost 2s and 3s across the board.

I'm unclear what you're referring to with this.

Also if you don't want food rotting couldn't you put a few fridges next to the fishing spot so you can dump everything in there? Or is there a maximum stack size in a container?

So I have a piece of gear that lets me digest rotten food without consequences and I have a few crops that when rotten don't provide any negative effects. So I bulk make some food that is rotten because it's not a problem. I however forgot to have it equipped for the first 3 months of my fishing and so ended up with most of my physical stats at 2-3 because eating rotten food lowers your stats.

[Sotanaht]

Is it really worth using Food Arrows for for bait? It used to be that you got 1 fertilizer per arrow. Now since the weight-fertilizer patch I only get 8 fertilizer for 40 arrows. I only did a single test so there could be some variability, but assuming that holds true if you can mine Scrap at 4x the speed you produce sticks and flowers (each), you should be able to get more bait per minute with the scrap method.

If you're doing flowers from the world map, there's no way in hell you're getting them even 1/4th as fast as you would scrap. Same for sticks. If you grow your own flowers and trees (remember you can hammer logs into sticks) it's much more likely you can make that quota, but then you're spending Fertility that could go towards something directly profitable. Farming is worth a LOT of money if optimized.

Even then, you need to plant 2.5 flowers per 1 harvest (the rest for seed). That's 5 total actions per 1 flower harvest. Sticks are more efficient, but you're still cutting close to the 8 much simpler actions to mine 8 scrap. It really doesn't seem plausible at all that you would be getting more bait-per-minute from flowers than from scrap.

[Mantu]

did you turn into bonito flakes even the whales, sharks, coelacanths and ancient fish?
turning them into wine directly nets you more orens

[mentalmen000]

I DO hope that the devs don't patch this.

[Nitram]

Wasnt that kind of patched already lol

[twitch.tv/GFYE]

Originally posted by Sotanaht:

Is it really worth using Food Arrows for for bait? It used to be that you got 1 fertilizer per arrow. Now since the weight-fertilizer patch I only get 8 fertilizer for 40 arrows. I only did a single test so there could be some variability, but assuming that holds true if you can mine Scrap at 4x the speed you produce sticks and flowers (each), you should be able to get more bait per minute with the scrap method.

If you're doing flowers from the world map, there's no way in hell you're getting them even 1/4th as fast as you would scrap. Same for sticks. If you grow your own flowers and trees (remember you can hammer logs into sticks) it's much more likely you can make that quota, but then you're spending Fertility that could go towards something directly profitable. Farming is worth a LOT of money if optimized.

Even then, you need to plant 2.5 flowers per 1 harvest (the rest for seed). That's 5 total actions per 1 flower harvest. Sticks are more efficient, but you're still cutting close to the 8 much simpler actions to mine 8 scrap. It really doesn't seem plausible at all that you would be getting more bait-per-minute from flowers than from scrap.

A stack of 1k arrows net me around 600 fertilizer which ended up being roughly that many baits after converting them from corpses. Theres no way scavenging bones or any other source of bait that can make 100s or 1000s at a time within the same span of time. It is still worth doing if you've stockpiled things, because I can't be bothered to mindlessly mine out scrap from a RNG dungeon that might not appear.

Its more reliable but either way its kind of how people want to play. Mining scrap is only going to be comparable at really high mining skill where your time to mine is about equal to the immediate pick time of flowers and low level lumber. If you don't have grass sticks laying around or you have to manually harvest the sticks processing the trees down with the hammer it might not matter. Low level lumber is not hard to find, but finding a copper dungeon is pure RNG.

The good thing about this method is leveling up the relevant skills and also the amount of sleep/time passage allows you to cram lots of + stat foods down to power level that way. Mining scrap targets fewer skills?

[Astasia]

Thanks, this was an interesting read. I haven't really messed with fishing yet, it's nice to have a breakdown of how likely some of these things are, like the statues.

I also realized I really need to start hitting things with a hammer more often, I had no idea you could get leaves from flowers, or sticks from logs.

Originally posted by mentalmen000:

I DO hope that the devs don't patch this.

They already did, they nerfed fertilizer to be based on item weight significantly reducing what you get through this method. Though it's still a lot. I don't really expect anything further done to it.

[Just Some Random Kid]

Originally posted by Sotanaht:

Is it really worth using Food Arrows for for bait? It used to be that you got 1 fertilizer per arrow. Now since the weight-fertilizer patch I only get 8 fertilizer for 40 arrows. I only did a single test so there could be some variability, but assuming that holds true if you can mine Scrap at 4x the speed you produce sticks and flowers (each), you should be able to get more bait per minute with the scrap method.

If you're doing flowers from the world map, there's no way in hell you're getting them even 1/4th as fast as you would scrap. Same for sticks. If you grow your own flowers and trees (remember you can hammer logs into sticks) it's much more likely you can make that quota, but then you're spending Fertility that could go towards something directly profitable. Farming is worth a LOT of money if optimized.

Even then, you need to plant 2.5 flowers per 1 harvest (the rest for seed). That's 5 total actions per 1 flower harvest. Sticks are more efficient, but you're still cutting close to the 8 much simpler actions to mine 8 scrap. It really doesn't seem plausible at all that you would be getting more bait-per-minute from flowers than from scrap.

This makes sense as I am playing on a patch that's a couple weeks old. In this case my suggestion would be to gather a good amount of bait through your preferred method (remember that 1 leaf plus 1 stick still equates to 7 bait roughly when accounting for lost product from hammering) and use the whales, shark, moonfish, and sunfish that you get to recycle a good 40-50% of your bait that you use. I had almost 1k sunfish which would have accounted for a lot of extra bait. While this does cut into profits a small bit these fish are worth a LOT more in bait then they are to turn into anything else.

[Just Some Random Kid]

Originally posted by mentalmen000:

I DO hope that the devs don't patch this.

Seems like the efficiency of the bait gathering method was nerfed but realistically not by a ton for normal players. If you want a few thousand bait it's still easy enough to gather it in 15 or so odd minutes. Plus with recycling your heavy fish like Whales, Shark, Moonfish, and Sunfish you can make your bait last much longer.

[Just Some Random Kid]

Originally posted by Mantu:

did you turn into bonito flakes even the whales, sharks, coelacanths and ancient fish?
turning them into wine directly nets you more orens

I did for consistency purposes. It certainly isn't the most efficient use though.

[Sotanaht]

Originally posted by twitch.tv/GFYE:

Originally posted by Sotanaht:

Is it really worth using Food Arrows for for bait? It used to be that you got 1 fertilizer per arrow. Now since the weight-fertilizer patch I only get 8 fertilizer for 40 arrows. I only did a single test so there could be some variability, but assuming that holds true if you can mine Scrap at 4x the speed you produce sticks and flowers (each), you should be able to get more bait per minute with the scrap method.

If you're doing flowers from the world map, there's no way in hell you're getting them even 1/4th as fast as you would scrap. Same for sticks. If you grow your own flowers and trees (remember you can hammer logs into sticks) it's much more likely you can make that quota, but then you're spending Fertility that could go towards something directly profitable. Farming is worth a LOT of money if optimized.

Even then, you need to plant 2.5 flowers per 1 harvest (the rest for seed). That's 5 total actions per 1 flower harvest. Sticks are more efficient, but you're still cutting close to the 8 much simpler actions to mine 8 scrap. It really doesn't seem plausible at all that you would be getting more bait-per-minute from flowers than from scrap.

A stack of 1k arrows net me around 600 fertilizer which ended up being roughly that many baits after converting them from corpses. Theres no way scavenging bones or any other source of bait that can make 100s or 1000s at a time within the same span of time. It is still worth doing if you've stockpiled things, because I can't be bothered to mindlessly mine out scrap from a RNG dungeon that might not appear.

Its more reliable but either way its kind of how people want to play. Mining scrap is only going to be comparable at really high mining skill where your time to mine is about equal to the immediate pick time of flowers and low level lumber. If you don't have grass sticks laying around or you have to manually harvest the sticks processing the trees down with the hammer it might not matter. Low level lumber is not hard to find, but finding a copper dungeon is pure RNG.

The good thing about this method is leveling up the relevant skills and also the amount of sleep/time passage allows you to cram lots of + stat foods down to power level that way. Mining scrap targets fewer skills?

Copper dungeon isn't really RNG. There are 4 types of dungeons, each of which has its specific icon on the world map. To find copper dungeons, you simply go to any dungeon with the fort/ziggurat style icon and it's guaranteed to be copper. While exactly where they spawn is RNG, there should always be plenty of these dungeons around except maybe if you have extremely low Fame.

As for skills, Mining gets you mining and crafting, with an option for cooking if you also grind the bone into bone powder (which can be hammered for corpses, the extra bait for doing it this way is minimal so I don't really recommend it). Flowers gets you gathering (useless), Lumberjacking (sawing fish gives more), and crafting. The rest of the skill gains are all from things you do either way.

[Just Some Random Kid]

Originally posted by Sotanaht:

Originally posted by twitch.tv/GFYE:

A stack of 1k arrows net me around 600 fertilizer which ended up being roughly that many baits after converting them from corpses. Theres no way scavenging bones or any other source of bait that can make 100s or 1000s at a time within the same span of time. It is still worth doing if you've stockpiled things, because I can't be bothered to mindlessly mine out scrap from a RNG dungeon that might not appear.

Its more reliable but either way its kind of how people want to play. Mining scrap is only going to be comparable at really high mining skill where your time to mine is about equal to the immediate pick time of flowers and low level lumber. If you don't have grass sticks laying around or you have to manually harvest the sticks processing the trees down with the hammer it might not matter. Low level lumber is not hard to find, but finding a copper dungeon is pure RNG.

The good thing about this method is leveling up the relevant skills and also the amount of sleep/time passage allows you to cram lots of + stat foods down to power level that way. Mining scrap targets fewer skills?

Copper dungeon isn't really RNG. There are 4 types of dungeons, each of which has its specific icon on the world map. To find copper dungeons, you simply go to any dungeon with the fort/ziggurat style icon and it's guaranteed to be copper. While exactly where they spawn is RNG, there should always be plenty of these dungeons around except maybe if you have extremely low Fame.

As for skills, Mining gets you mining and crafting, with an option for cooking if you also grind the bone into bone powder (which can be hammered for corpses, the extra bait for doing it this way is minimal so I don't really recommend it). Flowers gets you gathering (useless), Lumberjacking (sawing fish gives more), and crafting. The rest of the skill gains are all from things you do either way.

Sawing fish actually gives carpentry not Lumberjack XP which is significantly more useful.