Catching Fish without Lures or Bait

[Gary Childress]

I haven't sat down and done a controlled experiment, not sure I even know how to go about it. But has anyone else determined if it's better to fish with lures and bait than with nothing but tackle?

I've started out fishing at times with nothing but tackle and I'll catch maybe one fish per hour for the first couple of hours and then I'll go a couple of hours without catching anything. Other times I'll start out with a lure or bait and it seems like I get pretty similar results using them. Now that bait and lures have been introduced, shouldn't going without either pretty much always yield nothing? Maybe once a day I could catch a fish without lures or bait but it seems kind of a waste to introduce lures and bait and then allow fishing without them to be almost as productive. I mean, I remember my days out on fishing piers at the beach and along river banks. If I just threw a hook and line in and nothing else my results would be 0 (zero) for the whole day.

[SherlockWatson]

I definitely get at least twice as many fish when using just a lure and more than that if I use bait. If I don't use either I will only catch a couple of fish in several hours vs. 2-3 per hr with lure. I noticed a difference in catching fish without right away after the update.

[Gary Childress]

Originally posted by nextgengranny:

> Now that bait and lures have been introduced, shouldn't going without either pretty much always yield nothing?

No. Apart from requiring lures being tiresome beyond belief, IRL, many fish don't require lures to catch. And while I agree that catching fish w/o using bait is unrealistic, requiring it would effectively limit fishing to coastal regions...not to mention making it even less of a paying proposition than it already is.

The coast is great for fishing because you can usually find a few beached fish to cut up for bait. Lures would be better for fresh water fishing. You can make them at a work bench with a single piece of metal if you wish. Or perhaps putting already completed lures in the world (maybe in a drawer in an ice fishing hut) would be nice too. I just think catching fish without anything kind of spoils things a bit.

I fished a bit as a kid and even back then I don't remember ever getting anything without bait or else a lure. I'd real my line in to see if there was any on it from time to time. Sure enough, if my line had been sitting idle for a long while, it was because the bait fell off and there was no bait. I've never heard of people fishing without either bait or a lure, other than try to snag bait fish on the top of the water off a pier with a treble hook.

[Shady 8 Rounds]

I usually just send them someone else's picture..... oh wait, that's catfishing. Please, take my wife.

[konstantinoskountousias]

the real problem is that your clothes get frozen even if you sit next to a 80C fire... lure is good but i ate all my acorns...lol

[iwasa]

I don't really use lures with New Fishing (ice holes to fish). You have to use fishing tackle as well as a lure, so I would guess if you lose the fishing tackle you also lose the lure, and the lure does not offer enough advantage or improvement over plain fishing tackle to be worth the one scrap per lure cost.

I am also finding that bait only provides an advantage when whitefish can be caught for it ensures each whitefish will be 700 calorie content or greater. All other fish - trout, bass, and salmon - don't seem to affected by the presence of bait in any obvious way.

[phobos2077]

Fishing feels really pointless now compared to any other methods of procuring food. The biggest offender is shear time investment required to catch anything vs potential calories gained. Often you come out with a net negative calories, it's insane. And that is with skill level 2 and using both lure and bait.

No reason to fish in the game rn when leveling cooking to 5 and eating wolves that seem to eat snow and multiply like rabbits - is much easier.

(I'm referring to the way difficulty levels decrease deer/rabbit population but increase wolf/bear, which doesn't make any sense and not even fun to play that way)

[Gary Childress]

Originally posted by stinkin badges:

I'm thinking that leveling is a lot more important than lures or bait. I was playing voyager and tried lures at least. Lures seemed a waste of time.I guess you are supposed to catch more rare (and bigger) fish, but really, you just need fish. Piles of fish.

That's what I don't understand. Sometimes game designers will add new items to a game and then create no advantage for having them. Ylands has been notorious for that too. If bait and lures are going to be introduced to the game, then fishing without them should be noticeably more difficult. However, I haven't noticed too much difference in using bait or lures and not using bait or lures. It makes no sense. Why add bait and lures at all? It's like they want to add more flavor to the game but it ends up just being pointless because they don't make it advantageous to produce the new items. Some of the frontier cooking recipes seem more or less a waste of resources also, other than the heat bonus from hot food.

[iwasa]

Right now, the effects of using bait and lures seems rather limited and the results not worth the cost. A bit of rethinking and maybe tuning of New Fishing might be in order.

The fact that, for inland locations, such as the river in Pleasant Valley, what were possible New Fishing locations (green indicators on suitable ice) have become completely unusable (only red indicators on suitable ice). Whether that was deliberate or just a mistake I don't know but if the devs had to check EVERY location (with each update) to ensure that there was green indicators somewhere on each patch that would be labor intensive and a waste of their time.

An alternative would be to make ALL suitable ice (red or green) workable fishing spots and make a collateral requirement for red zoned spots, but not green zoned spots, of the use of bait and/or lures (bare lures an option since getting bait in these circumstances would be pretty impossible if presence of bait to be able to actually fish was imposed).

Maybe New Fishing will get some changes in the hopefully near future.

[Gary Childress]

Originally posted by nextgengranny:

@Gary, I agree that fishing w/o bait is unrealistic, but for bait to be required, we'd have to be able to harvest more than just fish to obtain it. If my base is inland, I don't want to have to go to the coast just to fish. :winter2019surprisedsnowman: ^^

Also, the only coastal region I care for is CH; I used to play it a lot, & fish there a lot. Unfortunately, I now also experience saving bugs there a lot; I had a nice run going there that I shelved for just that reason. So for me, for now, the coast is out.

When lures were first introduced, I experimented w/ them, but ultimately put them aside due to the cost of one scrap per lure being too rich for my blood. ^^ If we could craft lures in lots of three, using one scrap metal per lot, that would seem more reasonable to me; & finding lures would be a nice addition. But I still wouldn't them to be required.

Maybe you're misunderstanding me. I didn't mean that we should catch no fish without bait or lures, however, as it stands now it's way too easy to catch fish without either. It completely negates the whole point in having bait or lures. If they could at least scale it back to maybe a couple fish per day without lures or bait, then I would be happy. That way a person can spend at least one day accumulating bait by catching a couple fish.

Also increasing the number of pieces of bait fish produce when harvested and increasing the number of lures created out of the use of one metal scrap would be nice too.

Right now, as far as I can tell, they have all these cool mechanics like lures and bait and only an idiot would mess with using them because fish bite almost as readily without them in my experiences. It makes more sense to save your metal for tool repair and save fish for eating instead of cutting them up for bait.

That's all I'm saying.