Yes, I never put points into fishing, but in skills that are hard to train, which generally means fighting skills... The only times I have had trouble with making a shelter are the ones where my character is exhausted (due to starting the building too late), stops building, falls asleep, wakes up to the rain, continues on the shelter only to more or less immediately stop again, fall asleep... It takes time when only equipped with a crummy stone knife and having an injured arm, though...
I'm not fond of fishing for a few reasons:
- Fish doesn't stack well. Even in the coldest winter the same species ceases to stack after a short while, making drying/smoking use much more cord than it should. Smoking is generally silly, since you can't expect to get much of any stacking at all. I'd really like smoking fish to allow you to use branches through their eyes rather than cord (as can be done in real life).
- Fish doesn't yield cuts, and when you only catch one fish in a day you want to eat it, not sacrifice it, and it's a real waste to sacrifice a salmon if you happen to catch two (though you can sacrifice the remainder when making the vanilla thin soup).
- Neither vanilla nor the Njerp Cooking Mod contains any appetizing fish recipes. I guess I could try to invent some bouillabaise type recipe for a thick, nourishing soup, though, but so far I've been too lazy.
- Fishing is time consuming when not using a net, and when using one you get tied down by a need to pick the net up again in a timely manner (it's not really worse than tanning large hides, but more frequent). Nets also get worn out.