I am not getting a bite on any lake

[InzGames]

is it me or has an update required player to be even more patient?

So i had a break of around 4 months on the game. I come back and i cant get a catch.

I am waiting 3-5 mins in RL but no bites. And i move maybe 3 inches and cast a lien again. I have been doing this for 40 mins,travelling to diff random lakes and official lakes too just in case random lakes are broken. but nothing.

Help?

[Dragon Leftovers]

I had this problem until I realized I had the Magnet mod on my lure.

[tpalmer001]

Cast surface lures by all weeds on edge of lakes......usually 70% effective

[Desiire]

If anyone else is having trouble, try using or building a top floating lure with 50 (or thereabouts) stats and work from the shore on inwards. Start from vegetation and then to plain shallow water. Like Palmer said most of your bites will be close along the shore. There are some surface level fish that you will find just about anywhere in the water, and finally deep water fish require a sinking lure and they are typically at the lowest elevation in the drink.

So I work in this order:
>Start with a floating lure in vegetation. Vegetative fish will almost always bite
>Try the floating lure in shallow water along the shore line. Avoid casting towards deeper water on the elevation map. A really effective way is to cast ON the ground and then reel inwards until your lure just makes contact with water. I get tons of bites this way.
>use the floating lure to throw some mail mary casts in to the deeper areas. There may be top water fish that could bite.

Otherwise go for a sinking lure and try the deepest part of the pond. You really dont need a sinking lure for anything else other than this in my experience, but other anglers may have better tips that work for them too!

This is just to help you if you get stuck. It's less of a "how to get fish" post and more of a "make sure you cover all your bases" post

[NoStinkingBadgers]

Also, try asking the other fishermen / boats and at the docks if they've found any info on fish in the lake / what they caught. All those little tips should help get you started when you're making a lure. If you manage to get two tips for a fish, then as far as the factors go, you can adjust the other two back and forth. Remember that fish are tracked individually by the game engine and move around a bit - I still switch between areas using somewhat of an approach mentioned in the earlier two replies: vegetation/surface first, then shallow water and work my way toward the middle where for deep water I'll add weight and let it sink to the bottom. I am relatively lazy and use a lot of letting it sit there for quite awhile, reading online while I listen to the game music, when I'm exploring new lakes where I know nothing about the fish.
When making lures, I have a process that makes it easier:
I'll start with dull/shiny factor - that is increased by how much of parts touch the sides. Then I'll add small parts to the middle and move them around a bit - having more space between the parts increases noise. Finally, it'll be a juggling between noise and size, since of course all parts added increase the size factor.
The easiest one once all that is done is dark/light - that's just adjusting the colors of the parts that are already there. So I leave that for last.

[NoStinkingBadgers]

I found another cool strategy - if you make a lure that's pretty neutral (close to 50% in all the categories) and make it where the weight factor is just a tiny bit more than the buoyancy, it will sink very slowly. Since it takes time at all depths, when fishing in the deep spots you'll have a chance for the near surface fish and the deep water fish.

[NoStinkingBadgers]

Oh! I think I figured out exactly why you might be having that problem. For starters, before you have an exploration kit to get this info (it's a type of module you can buy at some docks that have stores), just try going to a different lake. I think the reason why you're having a hard time catching anything is a low visibility factor. That means the fish can only see your lure from close range, meaning you'll wait a lot longer for fish moving around to encounter it, after which they run the RNG to determine whether they bite.
Different lakes have different visibility factors. I was just sitting in one of the random generated lakes and hadn't looked at the visibility and wondered why the heck I was getting barely any bites. It was 0.15. Yeah, I'm not bothering with this lake. Maybe if I wanted an extreme challenge, but I don't right now.

[NoStinkingBadgers]

If the network lakes are the same for everybody, you can try going to the one with the highest visibility factor (you can see how many species of fish it has from the career tab even if you haven't caught them yet) is Ytermihan Basin at 0.91/1.00.