7 items
About this mod
Go A-Fishin't. Get up-to-the-minute, accurate predictions of bubble spots, fish catches, and jellies, and speed up time while waiting for bites.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
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Translations
- Mandarin
- Mirrors
Get ready for frustration-free fishing! A Fishing Sea (say it quickly) has all the tools you need to make fishing fun, fast, consistent, and still 100% fair and vanilla-friendly.
Pop-culture references notwithstanding, A Fishing Sea (AFS) is a mod for players who like fishing - or at least, don't mind it too much - but are tired of all the waiting, day-restarts, and prayers to the RNG gods. It soothes the pain by making a very subtle change to the fishing system, where instead of potential catches changing every single frame, the fish "respawn" at consistent intervals and after specific events, like catching one.
In a
Other bells and whistles include information and forecasts about splash spots (AKA fishing bubbles), seeded-random (jelly) countdowns, and a virtual "fast-forward" while waiting for fish to bite.
If vanilla fishing is 50% luck, 40% waiting and 10% skill and planning, then fishing with AFS is more like 20% luck, 80% skill and planning, and 0% waiting. See the "Features" section for more in-depth explanations.
A Fishing Sea follows the standard installation procedure for most mods:
- Install SMAPI and set up your game for mods, per the Modding: Player’s Guide instructions.
- Install Stardew UI.
- Download the main file from the Files tab.
- Open the .zip file and extract the FishinC folder into your Stardew Valley\Mods folder.
- Launch the game!
To enable the mod's features, press the configured hotkey (default: Shift+F); you'll see a notification that says "Fishing overlays enabled". Which overlays you can see will depend on your rules (progression settings). To change these settings, use the mod's config menu - see "Configuration" below.
Note: This is an abbreviated guide. For a full guide, see the GitHub Readme.
Fish Predictions
The big catch of AFS is a feature that enables you to see which fish is present on each tile around you at any given moment. This isn't a possibility or an estimation, it's the real thing - as accurate as the sonar bobber when you're reeling one in. And in fact, the normal difficulty requires you to have a sonar bobber to see them, although you change this in the difficulty settings.
Predictions update immediately when the fish are respawned. Respawns happen:
- When you catch a fish;
- When you lose a fish (fail the minigame);
- When you cancel a cast, or cast onto dry land, if the difficulty (easy/normal) allows it;
- When some amount of time (default: 20 minutes) passes without having played the minigame.
What this means for you is that you don't have to keep playing the fishing minigame over and over again on low-value fish, trash and algae in order to get to that higher-value fish, rare fish, quest item, crafting item, etc., and use up all your good bait and tackle in the process. Instead, you can spend a little energy or time to trigger a respawn. This is useful in all situations but is especially useful for jellies and other "seeded-random" fish - see a few sections down.
Splash Info/Forecasts
Splash spots (fishing bubbles) make fish bite 4x faster. But will you get there in time to make it worthwhile? And if you need to stop fishing for a moment anyway, such as to clear your inventory, should you go back to where you were or find a new spot for the rest of the day?
There's no logical reason not to have this information available, since it's all predetermined: if you restart the day, the bubbles (or frenzies) will appear in exactly the same places, at exactly the same times, and for exactly the same durations. AFS takes the trial-and-error out of it and shows you the duration of the current splash, or the time and location of the next one.
Pictured above: current splash info (left), upcoming splash info (right).
Jelly Predictions
The jellies added in 1.6 are a fun little occasional treat from fishing; a way to add some extra variety and surprise to your fishing days. Or would have been, if they hadn't made the dubious decision to lock one of the most important early-game crafting recipes/progression items behind them.
Spoiler:
Show
(I'm talking about the Fish Smoker, of course, which requires 1 of each jelly to craft.)
These items are so difficult to collect because (a) their availability depends on the number of fish you've previously caught, and (b) they are still random, with fairly low chance, even if you pass that check. The net result is a real-world chance of 1-2%, not the nominal probability of 10%. You will catch a mountain of trash before catching a single jelly - until now, with this simple tool, which tells you how many more fish you must catch before the next jelly is possible:
Of course, having this countdown reach 0 still does not guarantee one on your next catch. To truly target a jelly, you'll need to combine this with fish predictions and fish respawns.
This is a major choke-point in the early-game progression and AFS intentionally doesn't make it trivially easy - just more consistent. At normal difficulty, you'll still need to invest in the gear required to see the countdown - namely, a sonar bobber and a rod that can equip it - as well as whatever luck buffs you can scrounge, and either allocate plenty of time to wait out the respawns or bring plenty of snacks to do dummy casts.
Time Scale
Do you hate sitting around and wasting precious minutes of your life waiting for a bite, but feel like "instant bite" mods are too much of a blatant game-breaking cheat? If you're like me, and answered "yes", then AFS has a solution for you.
Time scaling in AFS bumps up the game speed and related speeds like NPC speed, between the time you cast your line and the time a fish actually bites. When a fish bites, it automatically slows again so you have time to react and hook it. This won't upset game balance, because the number of in-game minutes between bites doesn't change; however, the number of real seconds you have to wait (which adds up to many minutes and hours over several days and games) is drastically reduced. Plus, it's fun to watch:
Pictured above: 5x time scale.
Most aspects of A Fishing Sea are configurable. You can either access the configuration through GMCM, or press Ctrl + F7 at any time in the game to bring up the mod settings:
The settings here should be self-explanatory, and all have tooltips with more detailed explanations. If that still is not enough, please refer to the documentation on GitHub.
Quick summary of the difficulty/progression settings:
- Carp makes everything available right away. Good for players who don't really like fishing and see it as an obstacle on the way to the game's good parts.
- Catfish is tuned so that experienced players can get access to the less-powerful features (e.g. splash info) after a few in-game days of fishing, and the more-powerful features (full predictions) around mid-to-late Spring - just when you start to need it the most, but only if you're playing well and investing in the right gear. It's the setting I recommend for most players, and prefer myself as a not-very-serious challenge player.
- Legend makes most features unobtainable until quite late in the game, long after they could provide any opportunity to "sequence-break". If you want to play as balanced as possible, don't want any advantages in the early-mid game, but want a more efficient way to collect gifts, cooking ingredients, etc. in the grind for Perfection or some other challenge goal, then this is the setting for you.
- Custom lets you choose whatever specific options you like. Want to keep splash info, but disable all fish predictions? Go nuts.
Short answer: it's complicated.
To summarize that content, A Fishing Sea should be compatible with mods that:
- Change fish spawn data, including adding new fish, new locations, or new/different conditions, and virtually all Content Patcher mods. Examples include More New Fish, Ridgeside Village, and Fishing Made Easy Suite.
- Change aspects of the fishing minigame without replacing the entire minigame, e.g. Eidee Easy Fishing and Skip Fishing Minigame.
- Provide fishing information based entirely on the location/spawn data, like Almanac.
If it's not in one of the above categories, then it might not be compatible. If it has the word "overhaul" in it, it's probably 100% incompatible. Note that even if a mod is in one of the above categories - even if it is named explicitly - that does not mean I have tested it personally or can guarantee future compatibility. The bullet points above are based on knowledge of what those mods do, not extensive testing. I'll be relying (as usual) on any bug reports to reveal any unexpected incompatibilities; however, please only report incompatibilities found in the "should be compatible" categories above.
Mods that you definitely should not try to use with AFS are Visible Fish and Fishing Info Overlays. The former is just a more random/probabilistic version of what AFS makes predictable, and the latter does simulated fishing at a very high frequency, which aside from being notoriously laggy, will not see the correct results anyway due to the way AFS modifies the fishing RNG.
If you are a mod author wanting to fix a compatibility issue on either my end or yours, please take a look at the variety of patching options built into the mod, and if those aren't sufficient, feel free to get in touch on GitHub or Discord. If you provide an API and/or asset-based patching system, then I am (probably) willing to do an integration of some kind.
Feel free to either:
- Create a GitHub issue; when doing so, please follow bug-reporting etiquette. Check first for similar reports, and make sure to include all relevant details about your issue, especially including clear repro steps and/or SMAPI log.
- Or, ping me on the SV Discord if I happen to be around. Discord is best if you have a quick question, but I make no promises re: availability for in-depth troubleshooting. (DMs will be ignored.)
Responses to Nexus comments aren't guaranteed. The best way to get ahold of me is via the channels mentioned above..
