Fishing

Equip a Fishing Rod and cast at water. There are 9 catchable things, 5 of them fish; the rest is flotsam and coin catches.

How to actually fish — hooking, playing the fight — is in Fishing gameplay.

The catch table

catchWeight is the relative weight at fishing level 0 — bigger means more often.

9

Name	Rarity	Weight	Level required	Size dice	Avg length	Trophy at	Sells for
Golden Sturgeon	★5	1	20	20d10	110 cm	150 cm	15s
River Salmon	★4	5	10	8d10	44 cm	70 cm	2s
Raw Trout	★3	14	0	6d8	27 cm	42 cm	60c
Raw Perch	★2	30	0	4d6	14 cm	22 cm	25c
Raw Minnow	★1	50	0	3d4	8 cm	12 cm	10c
Old Boot	Flotsam	6	0	9d3	18 cm	—	—
Clump of Kelp	Flotsam	5	0	6d6	21 cm	—	—
Sunken Coin Pouch	Flotsam	4	0	6d3	12 cm	—	—
Message in a Bottle	Flotsam	2	0	7d3	14 cm	—	15c

How the odds work

• Two independent pools: flotsam holds a flat 20% of the draw at every level. No amount of skill thins out the old boots.
• Skill is multiplicative: a fish’s weight grows 3% per level per point of rarity. That closes the gap on rare fish but can never invert the order — a Golden Sturgeon will never be more common than a Minnow.
• Level gates: River Salmon needs fishing level 10, Golden Sturgeon needs 20. Below that they don’t appear at all.

Size and trophies

Length is the size dice roll. Every bite also rolls a separate trophy check: a flat 20% chance hits directly, doubling the size roll too; even on a miss, the size roll can still clear that species’ trophy-size threshold on its own. Junk never becomes a trophy. Once you subtract the flat 20% of bites that are always flotsam, trophies work out to roughly one in six bites (16–17% of all bites).

Trophy status is decided the instant the fish bites and announced on the first fight beat, but species and exact size are only revealed once it’s landed. A trophy fight is tougher than an ordinary one: it only drains stamina at 80 tension or higher, its tension moves at 40% of the normal rate, and its timeout is shortened from 60 seconds to 40. Once tension has crossed 80, letting it slip back below 80 for a full second rolls a 1-in-3 chance of losing the hook on the spot. Landing one always awards a separate trophy_* fish sharing the ordinary species’ icon, at twice the weight and three times the price. See Fishing gameplay for the full fight mechanics.

Size is not stored on the item; it exists only in the catch announcement.

Is it worth the time?

The expected sell value of one catch runs about 8 copper at level 0 to about 24 copper at the level-30 cap. For comparison:

• Coin piles: 1–10 copper
• An NPC’s daily wage in this economy: 50 silver

So an hour of active fishing is roughly half a guard’s daily salary. Steady pocket money, not a money printer — that’s deliberate, and a contract test pins the per-catch expected value between 5 and 25 copper while also proving that levelling never makes you poorer and the cap never earns more than 4× level 0.

The Golden Sturgeon is the jackpot: it sells for 15s — a goblin sword’s worth — but it’s only about 1.7% of draws even at the level-30 cap.

Fish are edible, but not raw

Fish are both food and healing items:

5

Raw fish	Heals	Avg	Grills into	Grilled nutrition	Grilled price
Raw Minnow	1d3	2.0	Grilled Minnow	90	10c
Raw Perch	1d6	3.5	Grilled Perch	180	25c
Raw Trout	2d4	5.0	Grilled Trout	300	60c
River Salmon	2d6	7.0	Grilled Salmon	480	2s
Golden Sturgeon	4d6	14.0	Grilled Sturgeon	900	15s

Raw fish cause food poisoning

Raw fish give a fixed 40 nutrition regardless of species, and carry a food poisoning risk: five minutes of move speed ×0.6, attack speed ×0.6, max carry ×0.6, satiation draining 4× faster and HP regen stopped. These multiply with your current state — even Well-Fed leaves you moving at ×0.66.

Eating raw is an emergency measure. The answer is a campfire. Grilled fish carry no risk and far more nutrition.

Fish stack by species, and trophy catches stack separately from ordinary ones (trophy_* is a distinct item id).