Fishing for fun & profit

Welcome to the wonderful world of fishing! The Fishing skill has many great uses: 1. Catching fish, 2. Catching boots (Duh), 3. Special fishing nets. 4. Getting good "shipwreck" loot. 5. Message in a Bottle (MIB's or SOS). You will catch the different items depending on your skill level. Obviously the better items will come with higher skill levels. Below is a chart of what you can catch and when you will begin to catch it. You will also continue to fish up the items below your skill level (you will always catch boots!)

Min. Skill	Item
0.0	Shoes, sandals, boots..
0.0	Fish (there are 4 different kind)
25	Special fishing nets (Rare at this level. Usually you will not get nets until the 90's)
80	Prized, wondrous, highly peculiar and truly rare fish
80	Big Fish
90	Treasure map
100	Message in a Bottle

Here are the 4 types of fish, an SOS, map, boat, and, of course, boots.

To begin your fishing adventure it is best to visit a local fisherman and purchase some training from him. You will usually get 25-30 points by training. Another option when starting a new character is take 50 points of fishing while setting up the character. If you don't already have a fishing pole now would be a good time to purchase one. Currently they are only 15 gold from an NPC fisher. Fishing poles do not wear out so you don't really need to carry a spare. This will be one of the cheapest skills you will ever train. Later in your training you will need to get a boat. They are relatively inexpensive.

Fishing is a location based skill gain so you will need to keep moving. The early stages of training can be very slow. Below 65 you must be in shallow water. Shallow water is along the shore or within 14 tiles of the shore (or server line) At 65 you can move to deep water (more than 14 tiles from land) The gains are still very slow at low levels. Deep water is best after 70 or 75 points. The docks in Magincia are also considered deep water.

Many people use the 8x8 method for fishing gains. There are quite a few 8x8 guides already written so we will not be covering that today. While very productive, 8x8 is also rather boring. For fishing it is just as easy to set your boat to "slow forward" and fish, fish, fish. Unfortunately there is no real quick way to raise fishing. You simply have to keep fishing. Whole fish are heavy, you will want to use a dagger on them to cut them into fish steaks (4 per fish). You can sell the fish steaks and the foot-ware to NPC Vendors. In Magincia, at the docks, there is a cobbler who will buy the foot-ware. You can sell the fish steaks or cook them, and keep them at home.

Above 80 points you will start fishing up sea serpents, and deep sea serpents, occasionally. You would be well advised to have your character able to defeat the serpents before you get eaten alive! The serpents are not too difficult to kill. Many fishers have either magery or archery as their complimentary skill. Three energy bolts will kill most serpents, four or five for the deep sea serpent. (mind blast does well too) After you kill them be sure to use your dagger on the corpse to harvest the Horned Hides and Dragon Scales. (Always remember the hides are MUCH lighter if you use the scissors to cut them into leather pieces.)

At 80 skill points you will also start to get a chance at some of the "special" fish, and the "big" fish.

The special fish work like really weak potions: They add either +5 to intelligence, dexterity or strength, or restores 10% stamina. The stat mods last only a few seconds. The novelty in them does wear off rather quickly but I continue to eat them anyway. They get in the way otherwise. The small group of fish do make a nice house decoration. (Used in fish tanks, and ponds quite a bit)

The Big Fish can be turned into a trophy with a taxidermy kit. The kits are a tad expensive so it is usually only done with one fish. Some people mount their first big fish after GM. I mounted the first big fish I caught (as soon as I hit 80 points). When you catch a big fish it will normally drop to the ground at your feet, because of the weight. They weigh 100 stone. If you cut it with a dagger you will still only get 4 fish steaks as if it were a regular fish. The only real purpose to them is for decoration

When your skill gets around 90 you will have a better chance of fishing up the special fishing nets and the T-maps. The special fishing net can be used by anyone, regardless of their fishing skill, to spawn a number of sea creatures. Water elementals, sea serpents, deep sea serpents and krakens can appear, usually 1-4 total per net. The monsters can have treasure maps and Messages in a Bottle. Krakens also sometimes have ropes on them. The nets are in pretty high demand as a decorator item for houses. The green net is the most common, but there are numerous other colors. The color of the net has no bearing on the quantity or quality of the monsters spawned when tossing the net.

Once you reach GM you can get MIB's off the serpents corpse. The MIB's look just like any other ale bottle but are labeled Message in a Bottle. When you open the bottle it will disappear and you will have a scroll, labeled a Waterstained SOS. The SOS will have the location of a sunken ship written on it. When a fisher fishes at that location, he can recover either a level 1, 2 or 3 treasure chest, as well as some shipwreck items like paintings, bones, shells and body parts. All of the "recovered from shipwreck" items will come as pre-chest loot. You do not have to be at the exact coordinates of an MIB. Within 20 tiles of the location you can start getting pre-chest loot or the chest itself. The amount of pre-chest loot varies greatly. Sometimes I get no pre-chest loot and others I have gotten as many as 15 pieces. Once you retrieve the chest the SOS in your pack will disappear. It is easy to tell the level of the chest, level 1 has 1000 gold, level 2 has 2000, and level 3 has 3000. Some of the items in the chest can be quite valuable. The magic items that spawn tend to have some very nice modifiers on them.

To recover MIB's you've to be in "deep water". Deep water means 14 tiles away from land, or the dark-blue water on UO's radar map. (don't forget about the Magincia docks) You have to have GM Fishing to find a MIB on the serpent but only 65 points in fishing to retrieve the chest.

Since you will be fishing for the SOS you do have a chance to get another sea serpent, so keep an eye out for them. Occasionally you will also get a serpent at the same time you pull up the chest. Overloaded and attacked...the joys of fishing!

You can download this map file if you use UOAutomap. (and you should be using it) Simply unzip the .map file and put it in your UOAutomap directory. When you turn on UOAutomap go to the "Map" pulldown, then click on "Additional Settings..." You should see a small pop-up screen. Click on the "Files" tab. Now you simply check the box where it says mib. (You will also see Common, Atlas, Dungeon etc...) This file has over 500 MIB locations marked, and was painstakingly assembled by Tami of FCB (posted on the Stratics Fisher Forum) Although the MIB's do not spawn at static locations, like the Treasure Maps, this is still an extremely helpful tool. The MIB locations do vary but they tend to spawn grouped in the same areas.

Fishing poles, and training, are available from any Fisher NPC.	Boats are available from Shipwright NPC's.