Ok so verdict from me is that it doesn’t matter if you place your traps in deep or shallow water, on foundations or not, they will stop working at some point no matter what ( at least in my current online experience).
I’m not 100% sure, but it may highly be related to the server restart.
Anyway thanks everyone for your feedback here, personnally, i’m done with fish traps…
I’m on the new TestLive build that was released 5/14. All of my fish and shellfish traps are working. I don’t know if it’s because of the update or because I built new traps. Maybe both.
Anyway, 17 traps down and they all keep working.
ok thanks mate, keep posting after your server restart if you’re playin online please.
BTW thanks for the gossamer tipp with tools it is just insane the amount of gossamers i was able to get using it… 
I’m in single player. They keep working after reloading the game. They used to break during gameplay, without logging out.
You’re quite welcome. So much gossamer!
ok tks, will see after next patch then
…
Not sure if I can pick up fish traps due to a mod or if that’s in vanilla (too lazy to check) but if you pick it up and place it back down it will fill up again.
They can’t be picked up in vanilla.
Well now they’re not.
One thing I’ve noticed about fish traps is that they must not be in the same cell as your base (I presume this is the map cell you spend most of your time in). I am playing SP. In the same cell they seem to be affected by game/server restarts.
Just yesterday, for testing, I put back 3 traps into the same cell as the base (the zone where you hear the bang-bang-bang sounds of your items being crafted) and emptied the ones a 20 seconds jog away from that line. I went to kill some stuff far away and came back less than an hour later. The traps in the same cell as the base had an average of 12 fishes, the one farther away had twice that.
If I quit and come back often, my same-cell traps hold next to nothing, while the ones outside are steadily filling up.
The best difference is when I spend a few hours at the base, crafting and building stuff. The same-cell ones barely hold anything, the ones outside are nearly completely full.
First, thanks for sharing your testing.
About the “passive” production amounts differences depending on how far is your station (traps in this case), i have noticed that too.
but honsestly i think i placed my traps in 2 different cells that are pretty far away from the cell of my base, i would say about 500 m from my base.
How big is a ingame cell for you, personnally (i might be totaly wrong about that) a cell starts when things start to load, so i would say it’s sthing like 100 meters away, maybe 150…anyway sthing between 100 and 500 meters for sure, right?
So according to your findings, if my traps are indeed located in a different cell, they should produce stuff, right? But thing is they don’t, at least once the server has been restarted i believe.
By the way, a similar issue seems to be happening with mitra fontains too on my server. they work perfectly for some time and stop working at some point.
Finally it seems the server restart could lead to some missing/disappearing building pieces/placebles (like tannery/furnace/chests…) in my case.
i might be wrong, but i trully think the server restart is messing up sthing with some items in the game.
hope all of that understandable…
have just found that a few min later:
I don’t know how big it is exactly. But it if you let something being crafted at your base, for instance some iron ore being processed, then go away, when you come back at one point you will hear a bunch of sounds like the ones you hear near your station when an item is finished being crafted, then a loud one, as if they all finished at the same time. If you are under 60 that’s when you’ll get a bunch of exp for all the items that got crafted while you were away. So at this moment, when you hear all this, you’ll know that you got into your base’s map cell. Before release that was also the point where dragged unconscious thralls where suddenly disappearing into the ground. So if you hear the crafting bang when traveling between your fish farm and your base, you’ll know that they are both in different cells.
Ok then it must be bigger than what i was thinking. Thanks
i don’t know if i have still the will to go for a new testing session and place my beloved fishtraps AGAIN lol, but will see… maybe my curiosity will win and i’ll give it a shot
Thanks again.
cheers!
This is going to sound retarded - but place a foundation in the water first.
I’ll try that approach.
I have fish (and shellfish) traps all over the map that do not function at all, so I don’t think it has much to do with being in the same chunk or cell as your main base. I have no idea what the common denominator is though… It seems so random. My traps were fine a few days ago.
Bah. So it doesn’t change anything then?
Not for me at least.
That’s too bad. Well thanks for trying it out.
No, it is me who is thanking you all for the input advices…etc.
Now it’s beyond my understanding and only devs can help/figure out that stuff.
But my 2 cents is that the server restart is the trouble maker. But guess you have already gotten that …