having hard time not starving, especially when it comes to fishing

[bardmask]

ive come back after a long time away from this game, and i dont remember it being this hard. ive been through countless characters,clans,skill levels,locations and i still cant seem to get food fast enough to not starve. as soon as im in game i zoom out to find a village or water and after moving 2 tiles my hunger bar is full. ive tried every water tile location,did all sacrafices before fishing,including throwing my pole in the water.ive droped everything and fished nude since carrying stuff is such an effort to stand still to do something. ive used fishing pole with and without bait, spear, net, lippo, low skill high skill(not max, couldnt get that) and all ive ever caught was one single roach from a lake tile. my traps dont catch anything in time, if im lucky and i spawn close enough to a village or settlement i can trade all but the clothes on my back for what food they have, but they only take a limited amount of same things, so i cant just make a bunch of boards and farm them for food(especially from ones that keep reindeer in pins).
i dont have or get enough food to do active hunting since traveling more than 2 overworld tiles makes my hunger bar full.ive seen 1 squirrel, countless different birds, heard one fox, and even if i surround the whole overworld area with traps they never catch anything in time, except once i got a grouse, but couldnt cook it in time before i died.i heard they nerfed fishing a few versions ago, but i didnt expect it to be this bad, im playing the free version on the website, didnt want to pay if i didnt like all the new updates.
unless im oblivious to some trick or something(did a lot of googling and seems its somewhat a common issue with fishing) im just going to dig up an old version before they nerfed the fishing. ill miss out on all the new features and items, but if it means i can enjoy the game somewhat casually then fine.

[JP_Finn]

Fishing was adjusted, not nerfed. You can still get excessive amount of fish from “Ahti”.
If you try to spear or club fish not during spawning season, you’re going to starve.
If you try to survive on rod fishing solely, with below expert mastery, you’ll be lean. Or starve.
If you’re master fisher, you’ll be well fed.
Even at 40+ fishing; using 2-3 nets: you’ll get more fish you and a dog can eat.

Some bait is useless (don’t waste time using cooked AND spoiled foods. I don’t have code access, but since fishing hooks and baiting were implemented: I don’t think any of my characters have ever caught a fish with that type of bait. Spoiled raw meat or fish, yes. Cooked, unspoiled meat and fish: yes. Raw vegetables: yes. Fresh bread: yes. Mushrooms: no. Berries: close to none, less than bare hook I feel like.

Trapping about your stomping grounds should bag plenty of birds. Just remember to sacrifice uncooked cut; that should keep the game birds coming.
Light lever traps, or loop snares: both work great for birds. If you don’t have berries, place traps close to bushes (or non-identified plants) you’ll catch some birds.
Once you get berries: use those to attract birds. Use turnips, broad beans, or bog beans to attract hares to those same traps.

“Tense fishing lines and busy game paths!”

[Plotinus]

I have a character who is a master fisher and has tested out different baits. These are the averages he experienced:

No bait: 0.03 kg/ fishing attempt (100 trials)
Berries: 0.43 kg/ fishing attempt (56 trials)
Mushroom: 0.48 kg / fishing attempt ( 100 trials)
leaves: 0.52 kg/ fishing attempt (28 trials)
flowers: 0.62 kg/ fishing attempt ( 100 trials)
roots: 0.64 kg / fishing attempt (50 trials)
raw fish: 1.48 kg / fishing attempt (100 trials)
raw meat: 1.94 kg/ fishing attempt ( 100 trials)

I plan to do more trials with him but it's winter right now.

[Plotinus]

A less-skilled fisherman should get smaller results, but the proportions should be about the same: raw meat and fish best, no bait is worse, vegetation is better than nothing.

with low skilled characters, I pick whatever vegetation i can, even if it's not fully ripe, and fish with these leaves and flowers until I get roaches and perches. I use the roaches as bait raw and cook the perches because a cooked perch can be used as bait more times than a raw one. I let myself starve while I'm doing this until I have about 5kg of fish, then I start eating -- always leaving about 1kg of fish to get more fish with and continue fishing until i'm abundantly fed and have about 5kg left, then I start doing other things.

I also recommend doing some trapping early on and checking the traps each day and resetting them to gain skill points, making some pit traps with a trap fence too early on

[Plotinus]

i should say that i started this character in 3.70 when the fishing changes were introduced and i've continued him through the version upgrades -- if there have been tweaks to fishing since then, my spreadsheet won't capture that, but I don't think there have been.

[McKwack]

Some bait is useless (don’t waste time using cooked AND spoiled foods. I don’t have code access, but since fishing hooks and baiting were implemented: I don’t think any of my characters have ever caught a fish with that type of bait. Spoiled raw meat or fish, yes. Cooked, unspoiled meat and fish: yes. Raw vegetables: yes. Fresh bread: yes. Mushrooms: no. Berries: close to none, less than bare hook I feel like.

“Tense fishing lines and busy game paths!”

I've been using your mod to craft/cut baits, Finn, ever since the change to the fishing mechanic.

I'd say I've been having various degrees of success with the baits - needs more testing. Even tried to use the cut fish baits to trap Lynxes, but no luck so far.. Not sure whether it's because those darn cats simply don't like raw fish, or because of something else.. 

Curiously, once I accidentally eat one of the cut bait.. and my character just gobbled it down, noting that it's 'Delicious!!!', as though it's some sort of sushi.. 

PS mod to cook bait is here, in case you already forgot about your own mod. Need a little bit of re-work to make it work with the latest version, but it's working as intended.

[Plotinus]

I haven't made a formal study of fish as trap bait but anecdotally, I didn't have any luck attracting carnivores with it to traps when trap baiting was first introduced, so I stopped using it (which means that if this was a bug which was fixed in a later version without being mentioned in the changelog, I wouldn't have noticed it. But most bug fixes are mentioned in the changelog so I think fish simply doesn't work or doesn't work very well). Cooked food also doesn't work for trap bait, but it does work pretty well for fish bait.

[JP_Finn]

I've been using your mod to craft/cut baits, Finn, ever since the change to the fishing mechanic.

I'd say I've been having various degrees of success with the baits - needs more testing. Even tried to use the cut fish baits to trap Lynxes, but no luck so far.. Not sure whether it's because those darn cats simply don't like raw fish, or because of something else.. 

Curiously, once I accidentally eat one of the cut bait.. and my character just gobbled it down, noting that it's 'Delicious!!!', as though it's some sort of sushi.. 

PS mod to cook bait is here, in case you already forgot about your own mod. Need a little bit of re-work to make it work with the latest version, but it's working as intended.

I need to doublecheck, but pretty sure the fish bait mod generates the bait pieces as raw perch. Is the mod from my thread or from BAC? I think Brygun moved it from diy_glossary to cookery and that I believe makes the bait cooked.

[Pastah]

If you want to NEVER starve, start with "I want to be a fisherman" scenario where you have high fishing skill. You'll easily catch like 3-6 fish every 1-2 days. It also requires no bait.

[McKwack]

I've been using your mod to craft/cut baits, Finn, ever since the change to the fishing mechanic.

I'd say I've been having various degrees of success with the baits - needs more testing. Even tried to use the cut fish baits to trap Lynxes, but no luck so far.. Not sure whether it's because those darn cats simply don't like raw fish, or because of something else.. 

Curiously, once I accidentally eat one of the cut bait.. and my character just gobbled it down, noting that it's 'Delicious!!!', as though it's some sort of sushi.. 

PS mod to cook bait is here, in case you already forgot about your own mod. Need a little bit of re-work to make it work with the latest version, but it's working as intended.

I need to doublecheck, but pretty sure the fish bait mod generates the bait pieces as raw perch. Is the mod from my thread or from BAC? I think Brygun moved it from diy_glossary to cookery and that I believe makes the bait cooked.

From your thread.
I copied-pasted-and-edited a little bit to suit current versions (and yes, I put it under cookery as well, for some reason it wasn't working when I put it under glossary).
I haven't used BAC ever since it broke my game post game update as usual..

[JP_Finn]

@McKwack, okies; I’ll check the functionality on my end in next few days (eye doc, prep for 4th of July, celebrate The  4th…)
I had some issues getting it work right, and pretty sure it can’t do what I meant it to do in diy_cookery. Don’t recall seeing anything on news.txt to change item creation/modding.

—— stand-by ——

[McKwack]

@JP_Finn, thanks Finn.
If you want, I could provide you with the mod I made to your mods (pun intended).