A Fishing Interlude in Valheim

I knew there had to be fishing in Valheim from the moment I first laid eyes on the water.  You can see fish just swimming around in there.  And given that the seagulls, which I first thought were just atmosphere, are harvestable for feathers, those fish certainly seemed too good, too real, too physically rendered in the world to be mere decoration.

I once espoused a theory of fishing in MMOs… more than ten years ago at this point… where I suggest that fishing might not be an important feature, that a dev had time to work on it before launch was a good sign that the game was not being rushed into production.  There were some winners and losers that seemed to track to the theory… EverQuest and World of Warcraft both had fishing at launch, LOTRO, EverQuest II, and Rift all lacked it… and no EQII fans, fish harvesting doesn’t count… and so I tend to keep track of fishing in games, even outside of MMORPGs.  Pokemon had fishing from its first generation of titles as well.  Fishing isn’t exactly my brand, but I do try it in every game.

My suspicions about fishing were pretty much confirmed when I started finding fish washed up on shore that I could pick up.  The swell of the ocean is pretty well modeled and when a storm is up the water can come way up on the land.

Shiny fishes are so good, yes precious

Picking up the fish yielded raw fish meat that could be cooked.  That surely meant fishing must be a thing.

After some trying to figure it out, including attempts at bow fishing, I finally went to the wiki to get an answer.  Yes, fishing is a thing… but you have to buy the fishing pole and the bait from the trader.  It took us time to find the trader, and once we found him I put off fishing until everybody had their Megingjord belt for heavy lifting.  But once that was secured and we had some extra gold sitting around in our valuables chest, Fergorin suggested that it might be time to try out fishing.

So it was off to Haldor, who sold me the fishing pole for 350 gold and a stack of 50 bait for another 10 gold.  That bait seemed a bit pricey  at first, but with what we’ve been hauling in for crypts it is probably no big deal, though we’ll need gold for later crafting.

With that I was off to the shore to catch some fish.

A larger pole than Ron Popeil has!

The pole is essentially a 2h weapon, not an uncommon situation, that behaves a bit like the bow.  Left click gets you a targeting reticule as you press down and releasing the button casts.  You can hold it down and totally go for distance… I think it will land as far as 30 meters out… but I quickly decided that wasn’t the best idea.

It is a bit like fishing in LOTRO in that you can see a fish come up to your hook and when you see the bobber bob it is time to haul in your catch.  It has a little pulse effect even, to make it clear you have a strike.  However, unlike LOTRO, and very much in the vein of Valheim really, then the stamina bar comes into play.

Managing your stamina is very much a thing in the game, and a way to get yourself killed if you fail at it.  Too often I have run and jumped to land within striking range of a foe only to find I didn’t have enough stamina left in my bar to hit them or block their attack.

In this case, reeling in your catch brings up the stamina bar and it slowly bleeds out as you reel in the fish.  If it runs out before you land the fish, it gets away.  So you are better off with somewhat shorter casts.

The fish are here too

It also means you shouldn’t go fishing when hungry, lest you stamina bar be at its lowest ebb.

When you get the notification that you have hooked your fish, and you’ve hauled them in as close as you can, you then need to get them ashore before your stamina runs out.

Bringing a fish in close… though that doesn’t look anything like 8m out

Since there is no net to scoop them up, I just start backing up to drag them onto land, where you can then pick them up.

Gotta pick it up before the stam bar goes black

The result is 1 or 2 pieces of raw fish meat, which you can cook up over a fire.  Looking at the food chart on the wiki, cooked fish is a bit better that cooked meat or neck tail, but the effort to get it is much higher, and it isn’t nearly as good as sausage, which we have been cooking up a lot of since we got into the swamps. (I have to go out on thistle gathering runs to keep the sausage factory going.)  But, later on, you can make fish wraps, which are a much better food item.  However, you need barely from the plains for that, and we’re a long way from hanging out in the plains.  So I am not in a huge hurry to haul in a ton of fish at the moment.  The payoff at the moment isn’t so grand and there are always so many other little things to do.

But at some point fish will be more useful.  Maybe then I’ll go out on the new boat and fish for the deep water fish, which yield more meat per catch.

The new longboat parked at Potshot’s pier

I think there is enough room on that deck of a longboat to haul them in.  Until then I’ll just pick up the ones I find on shore.

Why My Alts Can Fish

Okay, a past post may have explained my odd attraction to fishing in MMORPGs.  Or maybe it didn’t.  But if there is fishing in a game, I’ll be there.

On the Shadowmoon Valley shore

But fishing really only needs one character.    I generally pick somebody to be my fisherman and send them out to fish around the world, following whatever plans the game happens to have for the vocation.

Something on the hook

In World of Warcraft though my alts end up fishing as well.

Maybe not all of them.  I draw the line at different servers and there are a couple of low level characters I rolled up for a specific reason that I have since ignored.  But alts I actually play tend to have their fishing skill raised up past 75.

The reason is Darkmoone Faire.

Behold, Darkmoon Faire

Darkmoon Faire rolls around once a month in Azeroth, starting on the first Sunday of each month and running for a week.  And every month it comes by I am there in Elwynn Forest to join in on the fun… or whatever it is that one calls the activities at the faire.

The faire has been around forever, at least in the reckoning of the years of Azeroth.  It used to pop up in different locations and its portal even made appearances outside of Shattrath in Outland, back when people used to be there.  But I was never really much for the faire back then.  It wasn’t until Cataclysm that I started visiting regularly.

It was during that time frame that the faire adopted its more regular monthly schedule, with portals outside of Stormwind and Thunder Bluff, so it was much easier to find.  And, of course, Cataclysm was also a dark time in WoW for the instance group.  We found the expansion unsatisfying and the rework of the old world distressing, so left for other pastures before too long.

Well, most of us did.  I went in on that deal where I subscribed to WoW for a year to get my copy of Diablo III, so I was stuck with paid time on the game (and Blizz wouldn’t even let me turn off auto-renewal despite having paid in advance).

I wasn’t playing a lot during that time, but every month I would roll into Darkmoon Faire with my main and then a growing number of alts.  It started as a way to slowly advance the trade skills I was otherwise not using.  With every fair there is a quest for each profession that you can run once which advances you 5 skill points.  That is not a lot, but it is something… and it is often something that can get you past a dry spot in the profession progress curve.

Of course, fishing is a profession, but I wasn’t all in on that quite yet.

Once I had made the faire a regular stop I started looking at the prize tickets that were piling up.  Each quest gives you a few and you can earn a few more by playing the carnival games.  Soon the prize tickets became as important, then even more important, than the profession skills.

Through the parallel progress of a pile of alts, each earning some tickets with every passing faire, I have been able to accumulate almost all of the heirloom armor available (as well as upgrading all I have from level 60 to 90), all of the pets, and most of the mounts.  I am currently saving up for the Darkmoon dirigible mount, which came in with patch 7.3, and which costs 1,000 prize tickets.  That might take me a while.

Since the acquisition of prize tickets became a goal, I expanded to get fishing going on my alts, since that was one of the professions for which a quest was available.  It did require me to get each alt up past the skill level of 75, into the second tier of the profession, which you have to do to be able to take the quest.  But once there each alt that visits the faire spends a few minutes down at the dock fishing up the required catch to add some additional tickets to their monthly take.

My hunter down at the end of the faire

Of course, the faire has other attractions.  Knowing the faire was coming I saved up some of my WoW Legion faction upgrade tokens.  If you ride the merry-go-round at the fair it boosts experience and faction gains by 10%.

Riding for a faction boost!

That isn’t a huge boost, but when you are sitting on a bunch of tokens it can make a difference.

Anyway, I mention this because Darkmoon Faire is here again this week and I and my alts will be showing up to visit, to boost our professional training a bit, to collect more prize tickets, to do the pet battles, and to fish.