Fishing

A player with a fishing pole pulls fish out of the water. The Fishing skill decides what comes out and grows with use; the fish of a place run out and come back with time.

How to fish

Double click a fishing pole, carried or lying within reach. You read “What water do you want to fish in?” and get a cursor.
Pick water within 4 tiles, in sight.
Your character casts, the water splashes a moment later, and 8 seconds after the cast comes the result.

You must still be within 4 tiles of the water when the 8 seconds are over, and you fish one water at a time: a second double click meanwhile answers “You are already fishing.”

You read	Why
`You can't fish while riding!`	You are on a mount: get off first
`You need water to fish in!`	What you picked is not water: dry land, an item or someone
`You need to be closer to the water to fish!`	The water is more than 4 tiles away or out of sight, or you walked away before the result
`The fish don't seem to be biting here.`	The place has no fish left: try elsewhere, or come back later
`You fish a while, but fail to catch anything.`	The try failed, or nothing came out
`You do not have room in your backpack for a fish.`	Your backpack cannot take the catch, which is lost: the fish is gone from the place all the same

What comes out

The try is rolled on the Fishing skill between 0 and 100, so the chance to pull something out is the skill itself, and the skill may rise at every try. When the try passes:

What	Chance	At skill 0	At skill 100
A piece of footwear: boots, sandals, shoes or thigh boots	(105 − skill) / 525	20%	about 1%
Nothing, when no footwear came	(200 − skill) / 400	40% of the tries	about 25%
A fish, one of four	the rest

The catch goes into the backpack. The pole does not wear out.

The fish of a place

Each map is cut in areas of 8 by 8 tiles. An area holds 5 to 15 fish, drawn the first time someone fishes there. A catch takes one, also when the backpack has no room for it; a failed try and “nothing” take none. The area is full again, all at once, 10 to 20 minutes after the first catch from it.

The areas are kept in memory: after a restart every place is full. The numbers are in harvest.toml.

Change the rules

The rules are in scripts/items/fishing_pole.lua: the range, the seconds, what comes out and how often. See Shipped scripts. A template fishes with script_id = "fishing_pole".

Existing roots

A root made before fishing existed needs two things. Run mgctl init, which adds data/harvest.toml and the script; without the file the poles say the fish are not biting. Then give the two fishing poles the script: mgctl init never replaces a template file you may have changed, so add script_id = "fishing_pole" to fishing_pole and fishing_pole_2 in templates/items/skills/tools/fishing.toml, or copy that file from the distribution.

Not yet

Magic fish and big fish, deep water and what comes from it (special nets, messages in a bottle, sea serpents), cutting a fish into steaks and bait.