Active Fishing attempt results in, "You should find a better spot! ..." message

[nerdtronn]

Running v3.72 (stable).  Created a new character following the New Player Guide from the wiki.  This suggests the, "I want to be a fisherman" scenario, and the "Living in the Wild" course.  This starts you out with a fishing pole.

Following the course goals, very quickly you get to the fishing goal which instructs you to fish.  Standing next to the water, facing the water, and attempting active fishing results in the message, "You should find a better spot!  From this very location you can't expect to catch any fish".

Tried moving to many locations all facing water and the same message occurs.  Must be something obvious I'm missing, but the course instructions don't say anything more specific about the fishing task.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

[ineedcords]

<snip>
Tried moving to many locations all facing water and the same message occurs.  Must be something obvious I'm missing, but the course instructions don't say anything more specific about the fishing task.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Welcome to the forums.

It certainly is not very intuitive but your character in game somehow "senses" that the spot you are in is not good for productive fishing.
Listen to 'yourself' and just go to another location and the message should disappear.
I read your message and I do understand you have already tried a few other locations, so please try some additional locations.

I believe, behind the scenes, successful fishing chance calculation is quite complex.
Here is an excerpt from the NEWS.TXT file which is distributed with the game, in which the devs disseminate detailed information on the game mechanics

Code: [Select]

(taken from subsection of NEWS.TXT for game version: 3.00 | released: Mar-15-2007)

"- fish populations and catch enchanced and made more realistic
All the fish now have attributes  for  their  environment and habitat, time  of activity, how rare or  common  they are in The UnReal World etc. This brings the  fishing  to the new level.
Your catch  is  determided  by  all  these factors. The fish can have habitats like shallow  or  deep  water, river or rapids. They can be active for example early  in the morning and late in the evening.
Some can  be  caught by net, some can't etc. The fish species remain the same as before.

Few spoilers: perch is the most common fish in the UnReal World. It lives in lakes, not too deep, and  is   usually looking for food in the morning and in the  evening. 
And if you are  after  those  big   delicious  trouts  or salmons you'd better head  to  the  rivers.  Having  some rapids in that river won't harm at  all. 
But  there  are also trouts living in the lakes here and there.""
If you see a "rapids" tile in the map, try that one. (reference = https://www.unrealworld.fi/wiki/index.php?title=Rapids )

[nerdtronn]

@ineedcords thanks for the reply!  That makes sense, I will continue searching

[nerdtronn]

@ineedcords no luck with the map I was playing, so I started a new game and tried to pick a location which looked to be near river areas (though it is hard to differentiate lakes vs. rivers on the starting location screen).  Once in game I was able to try a number of locations and this time hit a valid fishing spot fairly quickly.  Thanks again for the reply and help!

[Tinker]

Another thing to look out for is very shallow water, denoted by it lighter colour, not many fish are found there, if any, so it might bets tagged not suitable. I think if there a steep drop into the water those places are tagged as unsuitable, it can be difficult to spot these places and I am not sure if they are a problem to fish from.

Rapids are always good, without spoiling things you may love rapids in the winter, have fun trying to last that long.

[Plotinus]

Good spots for fishing say "Lake" or "River" or "Rapids" or "Sea" in the top middle, above the map, the places where the land from the other tile extends out into a water tile.