Fishing: Water Types

Sunburnt_Penguin · February 2016

I bought some Crawlers yesterday and saw that the prices for 200 of the best baits for each water types vary so much: Crawlers are the cheapest at ~2.5k whereas Worms are the most expensive at 10k.

After reading through the fishing guides, there's no mention of any disparity across the water types in either:
A. Returns of basic fish to bait used, or
B. The chances of Perfect Roe from gutting basic fish that you've caught.

Does anyone know why the prices differ so much?

FYI - I used Foul Water and got ~85% of basic fish for my Crawlers and ~1.5% return from gutting.

Thanks

Lariana · February 2016

Prices depend on how easy it is to farm a particular bait type.

Crawlers drop from spiders, scorpions, floor-crawling critters basically. You can get insect parts by catching flying insects. Guts from frogs, rats, small animals. Worms from harvesting plants and flowers.

Out of these, worms are probably the most annoying to farm. Hence the higher prices.

Asayre · February 2016

I did not find any difference in return of basic fish for any of the normal bait used (Worms, Crawlers, Guts, Insect). The special bait (Shad, Roe, Chub, Minnow) has a higher chance, roughly double, of getting rare fish.

I didn't test whether there is a better chance of perfect roe from certain types of fish but I don't think it should matter. My gutting rate across all fish is 0.66% (25/3733) at the moment.

I believe the difference in price stems from the ease of getting the type of bait. Most people that I know who are fishing for perfect roe are also actively trying to complete the achievement. I think crawlers are cheap because you get them from killing undead which is a common grinding method.

Fruitmass · February 2016

The reason for the cost difference has to do less with the chance of catching fish or finding roe and more to do with the ease of finding the bait itself.

Crawler you can get from harvesting alchemy and tailoring nodes, killing the little centipede critters and occasionally as loot drops.

Insect parts are probably easiest. You can harvest them directly from torchbugs and butterflies (Rivenspire's lousy with em, so it's a great place to gather some)

Guts can be gained by killing small critters like rabbits, squirrels and iguanas. Not necessarily hard work but a bit tedious.

Unlike the other three basic baits worms don't have a direct way of being harvested. You have to get them by harvesting Alchemy and Tailoring nodes or as loot drops like crawlers but they don't show up frequently. Thus the high price.

Sunburnt_Penguin · February 2016

@Lariana, @Asayre & @Fruitmass

Ah okay, so the price differences is about the difficulty in farming related to the fishing achievements - that makes sense now.

I was confused because even though I knew it would be harder to farm certain bait (e.g. Guts) compared to Crawlers, the fact that there's the same effectiveness on basic fish & therefore Perfect Roe shouldn't make a difference in price. There'd simply be less Guts on the market compared Crawlers and all listed at the same price.

Thanks.