Fishing thoughts/suggestions

[Demjou]

I've spent the past month and a half hunting down at least one of each rare fish for Journal completion, and as a result, I've spent more time then I probably should have thinking about this particular side activity, and what about it is genuinely frustrating or in need of adjustments.

For the most part, fishing is a relatively chill, relaxing downtime thing in game, something I can easily do when I want to watch a stream, read a story, or just sit back and chat with people. Out of currently 13 rare fish, 10 of them were fairly simple grinds, getting them in at most 40 bait. 3 of them, however, were not.

Every fish aside from the Gutfish Eel, has either a single rare, or in the case of the Portal Fish, two rares that are each available in mutually exclusive areas. In addition to this, in order to catch rare fish, you MUST be using the appropriate bait, which, aside from the Gutfish eel's bait, are fairly simple to either farm up the materials for, or are actual pieces of equipment that act as bait.

Each bait is also thematically tied between fish and ingredients somewhat, being either items that make sense for the area the fish is in, such as the Radfish Bait making use of Canned peas, which can be used with radfish filet to make a radiation reducing stew, and Hydrochloric Acid, which is an ingredient in Pentetic Syringes, another radiation reducing item.

Again, the exception to this is the Gutfish eel bait, made up of 1 night essence, an easily farmed item, and 2 snag vine seeds, an item that you can get 4 of per portal reset. If you want more then 4 per reset, your only option is farming the snag vines and salvaging them, hoping for 2 seeds from a salvage instead of 1. The items themselves are only really linked to the Eel in that both are needed to open the portal to Canaan, but that feels like a bit of a stretch in comparison to the other baits.

As for the Gutfish rares, it's currently the only one that has 3 rare fish, all available in the same location, with one rare being available at all times, and the other two being available depending on the time of day, a behavior otherwise only seen in the Moon Fish, which also has areas it's available at all times however.

All of these things combined make the gutfish a particularly frustrating thing for those who aim for completion, something that could become more so should the game get Achievements based around completing Fish Log or the Journal in general.

My personal experience is that I had finished with all other rares in the span of about 2 weeks, where as the gutfish took nearly a month by itself, simply due to the requirements of the bait and the constant overlap of competing rares. By the time I had caught the Auric, I'd caught roughly a dozen and a half of the other two, some of which were the night rare at decidedly not night times.

In light of this, I'd like to suggest either trying to avoid using bait ingredients that are so hard locked behind time/effort, or at least ensuring that said ingredients need a minimum quantity. Gutfish bait would have been significantly less frustrating if it had been 1 snag vine seed and 2 night essence, for example.

An alternative would be to split up rares through out the area, rather then keeping them all locked together. Again, using gutfish as an example, you could split them up between the pier they're already fished from, the waterwheel house that leads up to the swamp, and either the dead end near the entrance to Canaan, or the waters off of the Barn.

A final suggestion is to give a hint to the player once you've caught the base fish if the rare fish is only available at a specific time. The fishing log would be a good spot for this.

250 gutfish later, my journey is complete for now, and I can only hope that others do not have to experience the same.