I finally reached rank 10 fishing after about 37 hours. I did not do it all in one go. I wanted to give some final thoughts on the art of fishing and include some suggestions for improvement as well as my findings as I kept track of a fairly large amount of the casting results.
For people not familiar city energy is restored on Monday and refills, it doesn't refill gradually. All city activities burn city energy to pay you Fons. If you don't have any city energy then most city activity do not result in much return. The ratio is very static, about 1k Fons per 1 city energy in every activity. Fishing is no different in that matter. However, you can still gain experience in Fishing ranks and also generate Scale Coins, which is a currency just for fishing rewards. Sometimes I call them Fin Coins by mistake. There is no limit to fishing Scale Coins as of this post. To understand some of my suggestions I was going to go over Fishing Mini-game activity briefly.
There is a:
- casting phase where you press a button or a key to cast out a line
- "fish on the hook phase" where you press a key to snare the fish to your line
- minigame where you keep the fish bar and your line combined
Your fishing rod stamina ticks down at about a rate of 1 per second regardless of your position. The fishes stamina (5/6/9/12/15) counts down only when your two bars are combined. Later fishing rods improve the line stamina and raises the cap on the weight of the fish.
After observing about 10,000 casts in 100 cast intervals I was able to see some simple patterns for percentage rates of the fish. The basic rates are estimates due to not having access to the actual data and may differ in reality:
- 60% green tier
- 40% blue tier
- note: there is also a 1:5000 chance or so to get an old tin can and old battery from blue tier. Just for fun I think. I only seen one of each of these!
- 5% to upgrade to purple tier
- 1% to upgrade to gold tier
- 1:1000 or 1:2000 chance that a gold tier upgrades to "special tier". (15 stamina)
The purple and gold/special tiers mix in to the green and blue tiers, but they are not guaranteed. In all my casts, I saw as an example, only five special tier in 10k castings. Of those special tier 3 where during the blue and green rod phase and got away. The final two happened within 200 castings, suggesting that there is not a hidden static weight to finding them, it is just a really low chance of occurrence.
The gold tier holds an experience book, which gives 1600 experience, while very useful may have a lower result than finding fish as I only found 7 books total from start to finish. Fish give an average of 19-50 experience in the green/blue tier, 90-115 in purple tier, 150-300 in gold tier and 1,100 in the special tier. I also only ever found one golden scale, worth about 800 scale coins.
The special baits, allow you to improve the odds of certain fish for daily fish market quests which are worth doing, but only use special bait if you don't have a lot of time as they tend to eat up your extra scale coins gained. Universal Bait has the best return. Consuming 500 scale coins per 100 casts and returning 1600-2200 coins.
Thoughts on Improvements:
The biggest improvement that could be made is related to the cost of the rod upgrades. While the cost on the blue rod isn't too bad the purple rod which unlocks at rank 6, you can't afford until somewhere in rank 7 due to the cost in scale coins. The same with the golden rod. I didn't have enough scale coins until around rank 9.8 even though it unlocked at rank 8.
There is also no feasible use to the improvement on stamina on the rod lines, after the purple rod. When you interact on the minigame you drain stamina from the fish for overlapping your line with the green bar, but the rod line stamina drains regardless 1 per second. If you do not have the line on the green bar, the fish doesn't drain any stamina. The blue rod has 18 which makes capturing 15 stamina special fish very difficult, but the purple rod raises it to 28, which gives you 13 seconds of miss time. The Golden Rod upgrades it to 40, which gives you 25 seconds of miss time, an eternity even for a special tier fish. This could be set this way for future tiers of fish introduced by the developers, then it would be necessary, but right now the Golden Rod is simply for improving weight gain on fish.
I had a lot of time to think about improvements so I will make them here. Feel free to add anything else you think is a good idea to improve interactions. These are all independent suggestions, they do not all need to be added.
- rank 11-20 of fishing added, improving your account chances on finding rare fish. probably the easiest improvement to implement
- add a mini-game in the casting line phase, a vertical bar where you hold down a button to line up power for casting, resutling in a slightly improved chance at rare fish at success. if not successful or player is not interested, they can click past for normal chances
- add a mini-game to the "fish on hook" phase. Right now during this phase the button just glows blue to let you know it's ready to begin the minigame. we could add two patterns where if lined up and a button pressed at the right time it adds a small chance for improved rarity.
- add a [ ] small marked bar area inside the center of the green fish bar where if you can keep the line marker inside the green [ ]center area when the game ends there is a chance to improve fish rarity, rewarding accuracy in the minigame. currently you just need to be anywhere in the green bar to win. people not interested in this mechanic can just keep it inside the green bar like before
- slight increases in rarity chance for special tier and gold tier fish, 1% and 5% respectively. Right now they are so rare that it is unreliable. Not once did I see any of the concert tickets and a few other gold tier rare items either and only one Golden Scale, which is stuck in the gold tier (12 stamina). That would put the rate around 1:5000 for the golden scale, until I do more testing.
- fish have a 24 hour duration before expiration. I understood that to mean you can fish a little ahead of time which makes sense for fishing daily market quests but the special tier have a 7 day duration before expiring. This suggests there may be a future mechanic to putting them in Aquariums but for now I don't see it in game.
- add Aquariums to put your favorite caught fish inside, if this already exists I haven't encountered it yet (low tycoon rank since I went all in on fishing). ignore this if this is in game
- If there is a mechanic for putting special tier fish into Aquariums there is no method to protect objects in your fishing inventory currently, like locking them. There is a quick sell button that does not have a way to protect anything being sold. You can either sell one at a time, or sell all fish at once. You may want to add the ability to lock special tier fish or anything you want to keep for fun some day in a future update.
That is all I can think of right now, if you have any questions let me know! I plan on adding most of this to a survey, but I thought I wanted to hear anyone else that may have gotten this far with Fishing.