In some thread I saw mention of “fish trap spam”. I’ve only ever played single player, so I haven’t encountered many of the problems I read about official servers having. If the change was indeed to cut down on spamming these traps, can someone please explain to me how this was supposed to fix that? Now I have 3 traps out instead of 1, so I’m not seeing the logic here.
I’m not angry about the change, mostly curious. My only real gripe is that I think the traps should work with no bait, but should work exponentially better WITH bait. My reason for this is that in RL when I leave my minnow trap out, I usually always get a couple of fish in it. If I put bait in it, I get lots of fish in it.
You had only 1 trap? That there is the big difference. I’ve seen people with as many as 50 traps. I have “only” 15 myself.
The traps would produce fish on their own, so with 15 traps, I can harvest a decent amount of fish after only one night of being logged off. That would give me a steady supply of oil and/or ichor, enough for my needs. Other people and other clans have higher demand for ichor and oil, so they used more traps.
This wasn’t such a big deal back when players could place fish traps inside large wells. With a bit of ingenuity and a lot of patience, you could place 14 or 15 traps inside one well. But then they changed that, so now you have to place fish traps in naturally occurring bodies of water.
And on top of that, there was a bug that made it nearly impossible to place the traps in many places that used to work before. So, naturally, people started vying to spam their fish traps in the few good spots that worked correctly.
I hope that explains why fish trap spam turned into a bigger problem than it used to be.
Ok, that makes sense, but how is this change supposed to cut down on spam? Does a trap with bait outperform a pre change trap? Are the devs counting on people to not being willing to farm bait for several traps as a means of stoppi g the spam?
The idea being that people don’t want to babysit several traps? If so, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation. I actually prefer the fish rotting in the trap if left too long because that’s more realistic but not game breaking realistic.
I spam the same number of traps. Only difference now is I need two compost boxes for each trap, so the end result is just more spam. There was nothing wrong with fish, ichor, or oil the way it was. I mean the whole point of a TRAP is that it’s passive…
In theory, it’s as Wikkyd described it. In practice, you get a video tutorial from Firespark81, teaching you to build huge piles of compost heaps to get the production back up:
I imagine that will go on until they either nerf the compost heaps to get rid of free grubs, or give people a decent way to get oil. Another player put it quite eloquently, “we don’t need no stinking fish, give us oil”:
What people like Wikkyd either fail to understand or choose to ignore is that baby-sitting your fish traps, no matter how good it might be for the game economy and balance, is boring. Mind-numbingly boring.
For some context, I’m saying that as a guy who has no qualms about spending 80-90 minutes inside the volcano just hitting boulders with a pick. Seriously, I would rather do that than sit and watch the traps and periodically transfer some fish from the traps to the fluid presses. Even mining stone has more action to it.
Someone else posted, but they wanted collecting oil and ichor to active not passive gameplay. Even if you spam traps, you have to actively farm to bait them. It is easier to get coal and ichor farming, and only farm for the oil of pressing the fish. Thus, move people away from the passive farming of 2 major resources. Plus ichor was removed from consolidant, thus making oil the only real need from the fish. Also, a purge alchemist (not checked if still with new patch) could craft oil from ` ichor and 1 bark. so oil is not hard on Exiles, Witch Doctor is steady spawn. Siptah, that is a different story. have not checked if all T4’s now give oil recipe though.
According to Firespark’s video I posted, that doesn’t work anymore. He thinks it’s a bug. I don’t know what to think.
To be honest, I’m not against that at all. I like having a reason to do things. It’s just that the “active” way to get oil is really not fun at all. Ironically, you don’t have to actively farm bait, although they might “fix” that in the future.
So the only “active” part of getting oil is babysitting your traps. I guess that’s an activity, but so is applying a cheese grater to your nethers…
I disagree. The active part is farming bait and then squishing fish. Once you know how long it takes to use up a stack of bait and then for fish to start to rot you can do all kinds of other stuff while the traps are accruing fish. No need to babysit them that I know of. I’ll readily admit I’m only familiar with SP, so official may be a while different ball game.
Bait that decays unreasonably fast to get fish that decay unreasonably fast to get maybe 90 oil after several hours of this because the output is unreasonably low, only to find out you need nearly 1000 oil to make one suit of armor.
First, consider how time consuming and boring that is just in single player. How tedious and frustrating it will be. Now consider how that affects PVP players, who will die in that armor and have it stolen, probably not long after making it, many times while simultaneously needing many backups at their home base to be able to quickly get back in the field and try to counterattack or defend themselves.
Old traps over produced easily and a change was bound to happen but I think they made a mistake with fish decay in the traps. They should remove the decay and tone down how fast you gain insects. Fish are pointless now tbh - I go get seeds for oil now. Using fish is just too annoying.
Really?
IRL, fish do not ‘decay’ in a trap - they are in water. They last until you pull em out or they starve and that takes a long time. You also do not need bait in the style of trap they modeled the fish trap for either.
IRL always losses to balance though, as it should.
As long as you don’t mind losing some fish, sure, you can go away for a while. These are the times on the official Siptah servers:
1 grub will produce 1 fish every 1 minute
1 exotic fish will decay in 45 minutes
1 savory fish will decay in 30 minutes
1 unappetizing fish will decay in 20 minutes
1 fish will be pressed into oil in 20 seconds
So if you don’t want to lose any fish, you should put up to 19 grubs into the trap and come back in no more than 19 minutes to transfer your fish to the fluid press. If you only care about not losing exotic fish, then you should go for 44 grubs and 44 minutes. Or you could be gone for a couple of hours and find that only a few things decayed.
Sounds good enough, until you realize that there’s no other crafting station that requires the same treatment.
Sure, if you cook food in the campfire or on the stove, it’ll also have a decay timer, but there are roughly three use cases for those crafting stations:
You’re mass-cooking something like gruel. You would prefer not to spoil, but the cooking process is fast, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time waiting.
You’re cooking to get a byproduct, not food. An example would be cooking fish or abysmal flesh to get ichor. You can safely leave a whole bunch of that to cook and go away. The byproduct doesn’t spoil. If some of the food spoils, it’s okay, you don’t really need all of it.
You’re cooking a batch of food for you or your thralls. You’ll probably hang around to pick it up and put it in the fridge, but you probably won’t mass-produce it. Plus, did I mention cooking is faster?
If you wanna create a set of epic heavy armor, you’ll need 775 oil. That’s a lot of bait and a lot of fish to process. Is there any good reason to make the fish rot inside traps on top of that?
I also think they want oil tied closer to armor, and less about fuel. The amount of oil one used to get negated any need for coal. By making oil “harder”, it is not precious and will force players to get coal or use excess dry wood from the dryer (my preferred fuel tbh) for fuel needs.
Before the patch not even going hard on farming, i stocked a chest full of oil. Being solo, i got all the armor i needed, then with the excess dry wood as my fuel, oil was just extra long term storage material.
The decay in the trap mirrors them starving and dying in the trap irl. If you think the timer needs balancing then im not going to argue about that. I like this particular mechanic because it’s a mirror of real life but in a way that fits in game.
I agreeabout the bait and I’ve already said that the traps should catch fish without bait, but should function better WITH bait(again mirroring real life but in a way that works in game).
I think the costs for the epic armor could use some tweaking. I’d say that since fish do indeed die and go bad if left in the trap too long that it’s a very good reason to have the mechanic in a survival game(provided the timer is set to not be game breaking).
Armor production cost and fish decaying are two separate issues/mechanics that are part of the same production chain. I think if the armor cost was more reasonable then the realism of fish decay is far less of an issue. I honestly feel like the armor costs are the far bigger issue.
