Interloper Fishing

[Sconkel]

A joke but a bad joke... i tried it now again on interloper and got nearly everthing. Bow, arrows, selfmade knife, axe, hacksaw, wood for 8 hour fire, 2 fishing rods, about 600 kalories and 20 % hp left at the fishing hut ressort in Costal Highway.
- 15 degree so no risk to hunt, just go fish. Have to take 6 matches for starting a fire.. great hp down to 13 %. Fire is running 8 hours. Breaking the ice, 1st fishing rod in, fishing for 4 hours, got 1 fish with 122 kalories, rod broken. 2nd rod in, 225 kalories, rod broken.

all over-> lost around 800 kalories + 600 kalories to get wood, 2 fishing rods, 6 matches, and near dead. Great fishing thing.
Back to the roots of TLD where fishing is worth nothing. And for nearly sure another permadead because of this.. "bug"... really frustrating.

Anyone fishing on interloper ?

Update result: For all who don't want to read all day, yes it works, but you need fishing lvl 2 and a lot of wood / fire.

[Coldea]

It is not a bug, you are just REALLY unlucky.
Fishing is a near infinite and safe source of food, hunting is not (well, creating arrows is more than doable, but losing arrows is pretty harsh especially in interloper). Also, hunting deer is hard, hunting wolves can give you parasites...
There are some fishes that are worth more than 2000 calories, no parasite, get oil, get cooking up, etc etc...
Fishing is the key to 100+ days game in Interloper.

[maurice]

Yeah its luck based.Was fishing yesterday for 5 hours,no breakage and 6 fish.Worked good that time...

[ecian]

Anyone fishing on interloper ?

Of course! 2-3 days in a row every 2 weeks. Even on lvl 3 fighing is great.

[Julz]

Lv5 i fish every week and get at least 20lbs of fish!

[Orion]

I've done a LOT of fishing the last month or so on my 3 100+ day interloper runs where I did fishing-only as my playstyle. What I learned is that fishing goes generally not so well until you get to level 2 fishing skill (read one book to accomplish that). Finding fishing books on interloper is pretty easy, I often find 2 (there's almost always a fishing skill book in one of the cabins around mystery lake or out on the front porch).

You also have to select a good fishing location, and I see a lot of people on the forums making a mistake in this area. The best spots to fish in interloper are ALL in mystery lake (and surprisingly the fishing hut in PV as well--but there's no good home base close to that one).

On stalker, a great home base for fishing (or hunting for that matter) is jackrabbit island or various other spots in CH/DP. In my opinion after fishing A TON over multiple interloper games, both of those maps are much worse than mystery lake for fishing on interloper. The smaller varieties of fish are far less rewarding calorie-wise, less reliable, and there are more wovles to avoid that are also harder to avoid than the ones on mystery lake.

Coho salmon seem like the ultimate fish for a fishing-based playstyle, but I found that not to be the case at all. When I moved from CH to ML on my first fishing-only interloper game, it got at least 40% easier immediately (not even counting the wolves or weather--which both got easier as well). The fish in mystery lake seem to be more reliable, and for sure they are a better return on the fishing investment because you get more calories/fish AND more calories/hour of fishing on the small fish, and the big fish don't become reliable until you get at least level 4 fishing skill no matter which map you're playing in.

Once you've got level 2 fishing skill, you've got a decent chance of not having lines break very often. The best thing to do is stock up on firewood as best you can and live in a fishing hut for 3-4 days (or however long you can manage) and just fish, cook, eat, boil water, rest, repeat.

You can get from level 2 to level 3 fishing skill fairly quickly using this approach a couple times. Once you get to level 3, you'll hardly ever break a fishing line. You'll start catching fish more often, and also bigger fish more often than before.

It takes quite some time to get from level 3 to level 4, but once you do that, you can basically fish like a pro for the rest of the game. You'll almost never break a line, you'll catch huge fish all the time, and often get 3-4k calories in 3 hours of fishing.

If you stick with that long enough (it takes a LONG time--more than 100 days unless you ONLY fish for food, no or very little hunting), you'll eventually reach level 5. At that point, you don't even have to think about broken lines anymore, and you pull up huge fish several times per session of fishing on a regular basis.

The key is to get to level 2 fishing skill within the first 2-3 days of your game. Then, assuming you got some guts on day 1 from one of the deer carcasses scattered around the maps, by the time the gut(s) from day 1 is fully cured, you've got level 2 fishing skill before you even go out fishing the first time. It makes the whole thing work (you'll break 2-3 lines to get to level 3 on average in my experience, but I had a few bad runs in the 8-9 area as well).

That's why I always make sure to harvest 2 deer carcasses on day 1/day 2 of interloper games if I'm playing fishing-only or mainly fishing playstyle. If you get 4 guts curing on day 1-2, you're virtually guaranteed to have enough fishing lines to get to level 3 fishing skill before running out of lines. And then you'll most likely never have enough bad luck to run out of fishing lines for the rest of your game (depending on how long you like to play a game, of course).

So essentially, fish a TON right up front as soon as you can, and fishing will work much better for you in the long run. Even on a game where fishing is just a backup plan for you, it's worth having a minimum of level 3 fishing skill imo, because that's the first skill level where fishing works more than 50% to your advantage overall. You can still have bad runs, and I do have them every game, but then you'll also have times when you catch 4 big fish in a row in 1-2 hours of fishing. I think it all evens out.

The single most important thing I've learned is: NEVER fish at level 1 skill. Get to level 2 with books before you ever go fishing for the first time. Nearly all of the bad fishing line luck happens betewen level 1-2.

[terryt3535]

Originally posted by molicious13:

The single most important thing I've learned is: NEVER fish at level 1 skill. Get to level 2 with books before you ever go fishing for the first time. Nearly all of the bad fishing line luck happens betewen level 1-2.

Is one book enough to get you to level 2? So far I have only found two fishing books on Interloper.

[Sconkel]

ok thx very much, i thought i am veteran but you never learn out.
I have some fishing books but no kalories for reading them.. i am just on lvl 1 fishing :(
I hope my 2 rabbit slings will get my hunger / hp up a bit so perhaps i can start over .. i dont want to get one with the long dark :(

keep fighting :)

PS: I did it ^^. rabbit slings were empty but 2 lucky headshots with bow and 2 deer down.
While cooking a bear came.. back to 4 % hp and resting :))

PPS: 1 book and 2 little fishs were enough for me to get lvl 2 fishing.

[Orion]

Well, perhaps I'm remembering it wrong but afaik I've gotten to level 2 skill on both fishing and cooking several times with just 1 book. But perhaps it's not always the same amount of experience from each book? The other answer is that I'm just remembering it wrong and you have to catch a couple fish to get to level 2.

Either way, the book should always be the first priority because getting from level 1-2 with just pure fishing experience and no books is virtually guaranteed to break all of your lines. At the beginning of an interloper game, that's very dangerous. You can't really afford to waste your first 2-4 guts. They really need to be made into snares or fishing lines as soon as they're cured imo.

[Ungoliant]

This guy definitely knows what he's talking about.

Originally posted by molicious13:

I've done a LOT of fishing the last month or so on my 3 100+ day interloper runs where I did fishing-only as my playstyle. What I learned is that fishing goes generally not so well until you get to level 2 fishing skill (read one book to accomplish that). Finding fishing books on interloper is pretty easy, I often find 2 (there's almost always a fishing skill book in one of the cabins around mystery lake or out on the front porch).

You also have to select a good fishing location, and I see a lot of people on the forums making a mistake in this area. The best spots to fish in interloper are ALL in mystery lake (and surprisingly the fishing hut in PV as well--but there's no good home base close to that one).

On stalker, a great home base for fishing (or hunting for that matter) is jackrabbit island or various other spots in CH/DP. In my opinion after fishing A TON over multiple interloper games, both of those maps are much worse than mystery lake for fishing on interloper. The smaller varieties of fish are far less rewarding calorie-wise, less reliable, and there are more wovles to avoid that are also harder to avoid than the ones on mystery lake.

Coho salmon seem like the ultimate fish for a fishing-based playstyle, but I found that not to be the case at all. When I moved from CH to ML on my first fishing-only interloper game, it got at least 40% easier immediately (not even counting the wolves or weather--which both got easier as well). The fish in mystery lake seem to be more reliable, and for sure they are a better return on the fishing investment because you get more calories/fish AND more calories/hour of fishing on the small fish, and the big fish don't become reliable until you get at least level 4 fishing skill no matter which map you're playing in.

Once you've got level 2 fishing skill, you've got a decent chance of not having lines break very often. The best thing to do is stock up on firewood as best you can and live in a fishing hut for 3-4 days (or however long you can manage) and just fish, cook, eat, boil water, rest, repeat.

You can get from level 2 to level 3 fishing skill fairly quickly using this approach a couple times. Once you get to level 3, you'll hardly ever break a fishing line. You'll start catching fish more often, and also bigger fish more often than before.

It takes quite some time to get from level 3 to level 4, but once you do that, you can basically fish like a pro for the rest of the game. You'll almost never break a line, you'll catch huge fish all the time, and often get 3-4k calories in 3 hours of fishing.

If you stick with that long enough (it takes a LONG time--more than 100 days unless you ONLY fish for food, no or very little hunting), you'll eventually reach level 5. At that point, you don't even have to think about broken lines anymore, and you pull up huge fish several times per session of fishing on a regular basis.

The key is to get to level 2 fishing skill within the first 2-3 days of your game. Then, assuming you got some guts on day 1 from one of the deer carcasses scattered around the maps, by the time the gut(s) from day 1 is fully cured, you've got level 2 fishing skill before you even go out fishing the first time. It makes the whole thing work (you'll break 2-3 lines to get to level 3 on average in my experience, but I had a few bad runs in the 8-9 area as well).

That's why I always make sure to harvest 2 deer carcasses on day 1/day 2 of interloper games if I'm playing fishing-only or mainly fishing playstyle. If you get 4 guts curing on day 1-2, you're virtually guaranteed to have enough fishing lines to get to level 3 fishing skill before running out of lines. And then you'll most likely never have enough bad luck to run out of fishing lines for the rest of your game (depending on how long you like to play a game, of course).

So essentially, fish a TON right up front as soon as you can, and fishing will work much better for you in the long run. Even on a game where fishing is just a backup plan for you, it's worth having a minimum of level 3 fishing skill imo, because that's the first skill level where fishing works more than 50% to your advantage overall. You can still have bad runs, and I do have them every game, but then you'll also have times when you catch 4 big fish in a row in 1-2 hours of fishing. I think it all evens out.

The single most important thing I've learned is: NEVER fish at level 1 skill. Get to level 2 with books before you ever go fishing for the first time. Nearly all of the bad fishing line luck happens betewen level 1-2.

I'd like to push my anti-fishing agenda once again, but honestly i think all the data points in this entire quoted post are actually supporting arguments for my Never-Fish philosophy, so i'm not taking a stance of arguing against anything hes saying. I'd first like to preface a disclaimer since the subject has been brought up in this post and some other posts in this thread:

breaking lines is not a good argument against fishing
There are valid reasons to avoid fishing. Breaking lines is not one of them. Both mystery lake and CH have very easy-access rabbit trapping areas close to base locations that are near fishing huts. If you spend your first deer-carcass harvests on snares instead of fishing lines, you will never have to worry about breaking lines, ever. Prefacing a fishing-style playthru with rabbit trapping has multiple advantages. snares can be packed very close together with no disadvantage, yielding multiple rabbits in range of a single campfire. this can give lots of gut, and lots of rabbit fur for crafting warm clothing. The meat gathered from rabbits pads your fishing harvests against bad RNG days. if you get 2 rabbits at once, thats 1000+ guaranteed calories for not much work if you have a hacksaw. gut should not be an issue. if you have problems with acquiring enough scrapmetal for 4 hooks, (which is all you should need), you should likely move back down to stalker.

Ok, so reasons not to center a playstyle around fishing

Mystery Lake, and ONLY Mystery Lake
that sucks. I don't want to use a specific geographical area as a crutch. nor should you. this also hinders exploration if you wait a long time to do it, as decay will ruin all the food on the map eventually. Exploration is pretty clutch to collecting resources you will want for long-term survival, and fish weigh a lot per calorie. If you need to carry big fish around with you to keep from starving while you are exploring other zones, its going to be more difficult.

trying to switch from hunting only to fishing only after day 50 really sucks.
as noted in the post above, getting from lv3 to lv4 takes a very long time. During lv 3 you are going to have a LOT of bad fishing days, and you are going to want to have those bad days well out of the way before day 50.

fishing has no synergy with any other TLD activity
fishing involves staying in one spot next to a fire for long periods of time and hitting a button. No other activity can be done simultaneously with fishing. Even boiling water is a seperate action to fishing, you can't do an hour of each at the same time. Contrast to hunting (or scavenging in the early days), even on your bad hunting RNG days if you cannot find an animal or cans of food, or get bit by a wolf and need to stay close to home to heal for a day afterward, you still can accomplish lots of other things. Exploration, gear collection, wood collection, beach combing. Beach combing is a renewable action, so its doubly important, and yields items like big fish, pain killers, and saplings. Some days while collecting wood, you can end up with a deer. some days hunting deer in new unexplored areas can net you a magnifying glass or a bedroll in a structure you explored. Fishing never yields anything but fish.

huge resource consumption
there is a cold snap that happens around day 18-20ish (in my experience). we all know about weather decay. but it gets pretty bad. Even fully decked out with the best clothing on earth, there is no way to complete even a 4 hour fishing session after day 30ish without lighting a fire. Coupled with bad RNG, sometimes you will be in desperate plights for food, and fishing will become absolutely necessary some days, regardless of weather. this leads to excessive match use, as you wont always be able to have good weather for a mag glass when you need to start that fire to get your fishing game rolling for the day. Wood/coal collection times start becoming excessive if you are having bad fishing days, and stockpiling gets harder. Avoiding hunting also means less deerskin and wolfskin clothing articles, which means more fire-lighting when you are roaming around doing things other than fishing as well.

skill decay
pressing the "catch fish" button does not make you better at TLD. I guarantee it. In fact, if you are a journeyman TLD player, and have a nice 75 day fishing-only run, complacency will actually start causing you to make poor decisions, take more risks, and stop using advanced strategies to survive, making you more prone to dying when a ♥♥♥♥-hits-the-fan event happens. Playing my first pre-interloper 1000+ day stalker run when i could chop wood on the front porch made me a pretty bad TLD player for a while (this was long ago).

boredom
hitting the fish button over and over gets really, really, reaaaaally boring. brain shuts off, just keep hitting the fish button. It gets old.

I'm sure theres a few more reasons I haven't thought of. I wanted to address my issues here in this thread under the quoted guys text, because all of these reasons are completely independant of his points, and does not conflict with anything hes saying. Yes, you can fish as a viable playstyle. All of the above quoted points are accurate and will work, and no i still don't want to do it. My focus is always on stockpiling the most gear and surviving the longest time conserving the greatest amount of tools humanly possible forever. I'm fairly certain that bad weather and match consumption, along with exploration difficulty, will eventually lead a fisherman to an earlier death than a hunter on average, if you stretch the days out. Also, boring.

[Sconkel]

Boredom :) sorry but thats what i excactly search after all that wolve and bear fighting running and so on. sure it will get boring soon but as now it is my onliest way to survive.. getting back to 100 % have some extra food and water.. buy some time to let more guts and hide ready for crafting :) BTW. to maintain the fire i think it is necessary to play at CH because of the good access the coal mine at CH. To get back on my feed i used to take 40 coals and burned already 20 of em in 1 day of fishing :) got me about 6000 kalories at lvl 2 fishing. GREAT :)
Now i get a second bear wandering right through my base :().
I will survive !

[goblin]

Originally posted by Coldea:

It is not a bug, you are just REALLY unlucky.

I wouldn't call that unlucky.
He's basically doing everything wrong.

Done right, fishing is the most effective means to stay alive in interloper.

Edit- My comment might come across as rude. But come on, you tell us that you used up 6 matches to make one fire. Those should have lasted you 30-50 days, and then we're being generous. You should learn the ins and outs of interloper before claiming that one aspect or the other is a joke.

[VA gamer]

Originally posted by goblin:

Originally posted by Coldea:

It is not a bug, you are just REALLY unlucky.

I wouldn't call that unlucky.
He's basically doing everything wrong.

Done right, fishing is the most effective means to stay alive in interloper.

Edit- My comment might come across as rude. But come on, you tell us that you used up 6 matches to make one fire. Those should have lasted you 30-50 days, and then we're being generous. You should learn the ins and outs of interloper before claiming that one aspect or the other is a joke.

Sorry for the tangent, but how pray tell can one make six matches last over a month?

[Mattman]

Originally posted by VA gamer:

Originally posted by goblin:

I wouldn't call that unlucky.
He's basically doing everything wrong.

Done right, fishing is the most effective means to stay alive in interloper.

Edit- My comment might come across as rude. But come on, you tell us that you used up 6 matches to make one fire. Those should have lasted you 30-50 days, and then we're being generous. You should learn the ins and outs of interloper before claiming that one aspect or the other is a joke.

Sorry for the tangent, but how pray tell can one make six matches last over a month?

I am on interloper and have not used a match in over 200 days except during the 4-day event (just past day 450 on my current run). The key is to build up huge stores of water, food and fuel. You then only use fire when it is sunny (using a glass). When I do have fire, I will often use it for 3-4 days straight... I boil 20-30 gallons of water in one sitting (over a few days). When I fish, I wait until there is a sunny day and then fish for days on end.... when I cook up meat, I make sure the days I go hunting are sunny. On the off days I collect more fuel and walk the shorelines for loot.

[Julz]

Originally posted by VA gamer:

Originally posted by goblin:

I wouldn't call that unlucky.
He's basically doing everything wrong.

Done right, fishing is the most effective means to stay alive in interloper.

Edit- My comment might come across as rude. But come on, you tell us that you used up 6 matches to make one fire. Those should have lasted you 30-50 days, and then we're being generous. You should learn the ins and outs of interloper before claiming that one aspect or the other is a joke.

Sorry for the tangent, but how pray tell can one make six matches last over a month?

Only use matches to boil huge ammount of water, cook food for at least a week, or better yet start a fire with a firestriker... if you need to start a fire indoor, start it outdoor with firestriker, take brand from fire, go inside and start fire with the brand.

Just like above post, i didn't use a match in roughly 40 days.

[Mattman]

Originally posted by Julz:

Originally posted by VA gamer:

Sorry for the tangent, but how pray tell can one make six matches last over a month?

Only use matches to boil huge ammount of water, cook food for at least a week, or better yet start a fire with a firestriker... if you need to start a fire indoor, start it outdoor with firestriker, take brand from fire, go inside and start fire with the brand.

Just like above post, i didn't use a match in roughly 40 days.

@Julz... great point. I use the glass to start a fire outside my base house (not the striker). Then take a brand and carry the fire inside. Also recently learned that I can start a fire in an outside stove using the glass (in fishing huts and things like that). So no need to create a fire outside and then bring it into the hut