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Welcome to The Fishing Guild
A tutorial to fishing for FFXI
By: Chebasaz on the Ragnarok Server
03/03/2004

-Contents-

Overview
The Basics
The Tools
The Locations
The Catches
The Dangers
The Rewards
Tricks of the Trade
Other Links to the Specifics

 

Overview

Greetings, and welcome to the wonderful world of fishing in FFXI. I can't speak for everyone here, but when I first saw the section in the strategy guide labeled "The Fishing Guild" I thought to myself "Oh great, well there's something I surely won't be doing".

This line of reasoning was further reinforced after watching the 50 or so people standing around town just tossing their lines into the water over, and over, and over again. Gee, what fun! While those lamers were wasting time, I got onto the fun stuff namely introducing as many monsters to my sword as possible.

There came a time however when I started needing some new armor and gear. (It's never a good thing when the enemy starts laughing as you approach) Fire crystals were selling well, mostly due to all those wierdos crafting out there. I must have sold about 30k worth of fire crystals before it occured to me to wonder how those wierdos got the money to buy all of my crystals. I mean, all they do is sit around staring at spinning crystals all day! I started asking around and for every "Goldsmithing" or "Alchemy" answer I received, I must have gotten about ten answers of "What, are you stupid? Fishing!"

Fishing? Err okay. So after I logged that night I started searching around for everything I could find out about….fishing. The following guide is what I've been able to put together from around three months of searching and piecing together bits and pieces from different guides, message forums, rumors, facts, and the occasional daydream. There will be links to some of those sites and forums at the end of the guide. On to the main course!

The Basics

Ah, the basics. This section alone could take a few pages. I'm going to do my best to summarize as much as possible. Game mechanics is just going to explain (Hopefully clearly) how the server comes into play while fishing.

Game Mechanics

Fisherman A (Let's just say he's a handsome Galkan Ninja named Chebasaz) decides to do some fishing. Chebasaz finds a suitable place to fish, puts some bait on his hook and casts his line. For the purpose of this explanation we're going to say he's fishing for the all-powerful Moat Carp in Windhurst Woods, and he's currently at a fishing skill of 5. His pole is a glass fiber rod, and he's using some Insect Balls */chuckle* as bait.

As his line sits in the water, the server takes into account all manner of things. It looks at the time of the day in-game, looks at the phase of the moon, looks at the weather, looks at the bait, looks at that cute mithra running by.. Err scratch that last one, just making sure you're paying attention!

Fish bite more often on a Full and New Moon. You can check the status of the moon cycle by typing in /clock on in your chat screen. If it's raining or windy this will also cause the fish to bite more. Also fish bite more at night than during the day, but the best times is Dawn and Dusk. So following all of that logic, the absolute best time to catch fish would be during the Full Moon, during a double rain storm, at Dawn

After looking at all of the above mentioned things, the server decides whether or not you're going to get a bite, and what that bite is going to be. Of course Chebasaz is still clueless at this point, he's still waiting for something to… Ah a bite! Now comes the fun part, the server knows what's on the end of that line. It could be a Moat Carp, it could be a Rusty Bucket, it could even be a Gold Carp. We're going to say it's a Moat Carp on this one. While Chebasaz is dancing around like a little girl, the server takes a look at his skill (Currently a 5, a bit low but workable) then takes a look at his rod. Why the rod you ask? Well I'm going to tell you if you'd shaddup for a second! What's with all the questions? Jeez!

The server assigns a weight and size to every fish that you catch. It doesn't matter if it's a Bastore Sardine, or a Rusty Subligar, it's got a weight and size to it. You'll start noticing these sizes when you fish for the bigger fish, such as the Monke-Onke or Bhefhel Marlin. They're usually located in the bottom part of the fish description. The smaller fish (The ones that can stack) don't have a visible weight/size, but they have one nonetheless. When Chebasaz finally gets around to trying to reel in his fish, the server checks the Moat Carp size and weight against the size/weight capabilities of the glass fiber rod he's using. If the glass fiber rod can support that size and weight, then the server then checks to see if Chebasaz's skill will allow him to catch the fish. Otherwise, if the server checks the rod and sees that the weight/size of this particular Moat Carp is higher than the Rod's max size/weight limit; the rod is going to break. Nasty snap sound follows, you lose your bait, the fish, and you get a nice shiny new "Broken Rod" in your inventory. We'll discuss later on how to fix those or how to get rid of them.

Now here's something alot of people don't seem to realize. The server checks to see if you get a skill increase once you get a bite, not once you catch the fish. Obviously we all would like to catch every fish that bites, however it's not really needed in order to get the skill increases. As long as you get the bite, the hard part's over. Once you get enough of those skill increases then the catching of the fish will soon follow.

Borrowing our handsome Ninja Chebasaz again, here's an example- Let's say that Chebasaz gets a bite, but the server decides that his fishing skill (It's at a 5 remember) isn't enough to pull in that Moat Carp on the end of his line. The battle of Galkan vs. Fish ends up with the fish winning and Chebasaz gets a "You lost your catch!" message. Now the server does another check. The server looks at the fish's maximum skill cap (For Moat Carp it's 11) and then looks at Chebasaz's current skill level (Which is at 5). After a few other totally random calculations from what I can tell, it either decides to award a skill increase or not. Since Chebasaz is pretty depressed right now that he lost his catch, we're going to go ahead and give him a "0.2" increase. Chebasaz will continue to be able to receive skill increases from the Moat Carp until he hits skill level 11. At that time he'll still be able to catch them (And catch them well) but he won't get any higher without moving on to another kind of fish.

As long as we're talking about getting high, *In fishing skill, get your mind out of the gutter!*, what are the benefits of the higher levels you ask? Well, besides being able to catch more of those fish, and having a better chance of them biting in the first place, a higher skill also effects quite a few other things. The delay in between casts gets smaller for starters. For a beginning fisherman, you have "about" a 10 second pause in between each cast from the time you put your rod away until you can cast again. For every 10 skill levels you receive, you can take 1 second off of that pause. So for instance if Chebasaz was now skill level 20, it would only take him 8 seconds to be able to cast again. (10 seconds - 2 seconds for skill level = 8 seconds)

The Tools

Alright, a quick breakdown of the rods and baits available out there for your fishing pleasure. Look over the lists and then we'll go into more detail further on down the way.

Rods for Small Fish
Bamboo
Willow
Mithran
Glass Fiber
Carbon
FastWater
Yew
Tarutaru
Lu Shang
Composite

Rods for Larger Fish
Clothespole
Mithran
Lu Shang
Composite

Now I can already see the mob with the pitchforks and torches screaming "Wait a second! You put Lu Shang and Mithran on both lists you loser!" Yep, sure did.. The reason being is that some of the "Big" rods, such as Composite, can catch smaller fish perfectly well depending on what fish you're going after. On the flip side of things, the Lu Shang Rod, which is theoretically classed as a "Small" fishing rod is perfectly capable of pulling in most large fish as well.

Now the only danger is that if you're using a "Big" rod to catch small fish you might get the occasional "Whatever you hooked is too small for this rod" if that individual fish's weight/size is too low. (Remember we talked about the weight/size?) Visiting the flip side once again, if you're using a "Small" rod to catch big fish, you run the risk of one of those fish's size/weight being so high that it either breaks your line, or breaks your whole rod! And to dispell a common myth, the Lu Shang rod CAN BE BROKEN. Once again we'll go over how to fix those later on in the Tricks of the Trade section.

On to the Bait and Lures, which we're going to break into two seperate parts named.. "Bait" and "Lures" The coincidence is just scary isn't it?

Bait
Crayfish Ball
Insect Ball
Lugworm
Little Worm
Peeled Shrimp
Peeled Crayfish
Sardine Ball
MeatBall
Shell Bug
Sliced Sardine
Sliced Cod
Slice of Bluetail
Trout Ball

Lures
Frog Lure
Worm Lure
Minnow
Sinking Minnow
Fly Lure
Sabiki Rig
Shrimp Lure
Rogue Rig

Now I'm not going to list here every type of fish and what kind of bait/lure it likes best. There's other sites and guides out there for that, and I'll provide links to them at the end. What I do want to do here is touch on a few misconceptions and maybe share some things you didn't know about the lures/bait.

First of all, the difference between bait and lures. Not a tough one here, a lure you can use over and over again; at least until the line or rod breaks. (Weight and size remember?) Bait you buy usually in stacks of 12 and you use one piece of bait for every bite, not every cast.

The Sabiki Rig - Great for starting fisherman and for those that have a certain type of saltwater fish they want to farm. Let me say that again with the important part in caps- Great for starting fisherman and for those that have a certain type of SALTWATER fish they want to farm. It's a saltwater lure, although the idea of catching three moat carp in a row did have me trying it too.

Rogue Rig - This is a big one. If you were like me, you're just looking at it in the auction house.. Wondering what in the world you catch with the thing in order to make it cost 20k+. I mean, do you pull up bags of gil with the thing or what? The Rogue Rig is meant for mainly one purpose. It's an item catcher. It excels on catching rusty/other items. It can catch fish as well, don't get me wrong; but it's main purpose is for items. Why on earth would you actually want to catch rusty items? Well, Rusty Caps go for 2k to the vendor. Other quests require you to catch certain items (Cap quest in Windy for example). Now before you rush out an lay down 20k+ on one of these things, every single thread I've read says that you need to be 40+ in skill before these start working for you well.

Insect Balls - Makes me chuckle everytime I type that out. These are your bread and butter on moat carp. Yeah they bite on worms and worm lures too, but the bite/catch rate is almost doubled with these. We'll go over why that's important later on, but wanted to touch on this since it drives me nuts to get a "Why are you catching 10 times the fish I am?" /tell in game only to learn they're using worms because they're cheap.

The Locations

I got an Email in my Spam mailbox the other day that said "Location, Location, Location is a lie!" Well, maybe in whatever pyramid-scheme-world that guy was trying to sell me on, but in fishing it's still the almighty truth. Once you start going after certain fish it's going to be important to know where those fish like to hang out. For instance the Nebimonite fish. Suckers go for 12k a stack on Ragnarok. They're used in Alchemy in order to make Black Ink which is used for Ninjitsu tools and a few other things. Now if I wanted to go get my Ninja self some, (in order to make some tools to flip out and kill everyone with), I'd have to know that I could get them from the Ferry in between Selbina and Mharua.

There's going to be a link at the bottom of this guide to one of the best sites I've found out here for this. It's a Japanese site, but the owner did it extremely well for us poor English folks to understand. It's pretty self explanatory so this is going to be probably the shortest section in the guide.

The Catches

There's always a catch, didn't anyone ever tell you that? This section is just going to lay out the areas that I myself used in order to level up. This isn't going for money, that's two sections down. This is just the fastest way that I've found in order to progress through the skill point treadmill.

1-11 This one's easy, windhurst all the way. You're going to need to be here anyway for the fisherman guild and the advanced support, so you might as well just start here You can start off on moat carp if you like, though I suggest grabbing you a glass fiber rod and worms and letting it rip in Port Windhurst's docks. This will let you get to at least 9 on Bastore Sardines/Quus/Cobalt Jellyfish/Kelp. Stay away from the Sabiki lure until you are able to afford a rod that won't break and make you lose your lure (Composte/Mithran should be safe here) Once you get to 7'sh or so you can swap to Moat Carp, glass fiber or mithran and insect balls. Save these things! We'll go over why in the Rewards section. Don't forget to take your test at 9'sh in skill.

11-18'sh I personally went to Selbina and fished for Quus (Skill cap of 19) and Greedies. Glass fiber and worms or Composite and Sabiki rig will do you fine here. You can knock out the first Selbina quest here for the Fat Greedie at the same time so it worked out well for me. Head back to Windhurst once you hit 18 to take your next skill test (Chevral Trout needed for this one, I just bought mine) and then head right back to San d' Oria.

19-27 Go ahead and grab you a composite rod if you haven't yet. Mithran will break if you try and use it here and those suckers are expensive to be replacing. What we're going for here is actually outside of San. In East Ronfaur there's a couple of streams by the front gates of San. We're going after Chevral Salmon and Shining Trout. Buy you about four or five Fly Lures and start casting. It's pretty fast skill ups here.

27-28'sh Go ahead and grab the next point at Port San d' Oria docks. Just use a sinking minnow and your composite rod to grab a few Giant Catfish. You're going to need them for your next test anyway, and it's an easy 1 point.

28'sh-40'sh Back to Windhurst! Take your test and then go set up camp along with the other 800 JP fishing bots in East Saru cliffs. You're going to be ocean fishing here so bring a composite rod and a whole bunch of sliced sardines. Gold Lobsters/Eels/Bladefish/Bastore Breams/ tons of stuff here. Will take awhile but you'll get the points and make a decent profit here.

40-51 Hey, hey we're the Monke's! *Cough* Ahem.. Okay, here's the deal with this one. Skill points are going to slow down extremely, can't be helped but you can at least minimize the damage. From this point on you're going to need to start eyeing that Lu Shang Rod Quest. You know…. The one you have to turn in 10,000 moat carp to the brothers in Port San d' Oria. Monke-Onke's are what we're going after here, in east Saru there's a lake to the north of the Port Windhurst gate. Tons of Monkes there, plus tons of moat carp. Just start fishing there and saving all those moat carp you catch. Throw them in the bank, load down your mules, whatever it takes until you can get back to San and turn them in. During this time you're going to be getting some skill increases off the Monke's. By the time you hit 51 you should have put a pretty serious dent in the quest towards your goal of 10k moat carp.

51-60+ This is where I'm currently at myself. 56 and still fishing off the cliffs in Saru. Breames/BladeFish still give me skill ups so it's working for me. Anytime I run short of money or need a change of pace, windy and the lake is there to let me fish for Moat Carp.

The Dangers

Life would be boring without a little bit of danger wouldn't it? The danger of fishing in the wild (Outside town zones) is that you can sometimes hook a monster instead of a fish. Now everywhere that I've listed so far is safe, I've fished there for literally weeks at a time and never once caught anything besides fish and rusty items. However if you decide to go testing the waters at other places, don't be surprised if you catch something with some pretty sharp teeth. The levels of the monster primarily depend on the area that you're fishing in. Most of the time it corresponds with the levels of other monsters in that area, but sometimes it does not. Just a word of warning.

Now sometimes you'll be actually trying to catch these monsters. Some of the quests out there require you to hook and kill these monsters in order to get an item they drop for the quest. Other times, provided you have the party for it, you will be trying to hook and pull aboard such monsters as the Kraken and Sea Horrors just for exp/item purposes.

In the Tricks of the Trade section we'll touch on how to minimize the risk of these encounters, which is a good thing if you're in an area that's a bit too high for your current job level.

The Rewards

Now with all this boredom and danger, there's got to be a light at the end of the tunnel right? Well there is, and it's light reflecting off of the hundreds of thousands of gil that's able to be made by fishing. Going to go over some of the top sellers here-

Moat Carp - Well duh! Absolutely amazes me that people that have been fishing for weeks still don't know why these sell so well. Remember the moat carp quest for the Lu Shang Rod? You have tons of Japanese players out there with more money then they know what to do with, and no Lu Shang Rod. Why fish for the moat carp when there's all of us newbie Americans willing to do it for them? So they buy these things up at a phenomenal rate. Across all servers the price seems to be stabilized at 4k per stack. Since it's such a low fish skill-wise there's tons of people selling them. DO NOT SELL THEM FOR LESS THAN 4K TRYING TO MAKE A QUICK SELL. Just have the patience to wait for a few hours and it WILL sell at 4k. I guarantee you it'll sell. There's no way on earth it won't sell since the demand is always, always, ALWAYS higher than the supply for these.

Nebimonite - As I mentioned before, big sellers here. Bit hard to get, probably why they sell for so much. 10-15k across most servers for a stack, and used to make Black Ink for the Ninjitsu tools.

Breame's/Bladefish/ect all sell to the vendors for 600-1k depending on fame level in that town.

Tricks of The Trade

This section is just going to go over some of the tricks that people have used in the past for all manner of things.

How to not catch a monster on the ferry from Mharua to Selbina -

Easy one here, a monster when caught appears just behind you. It's an actual "Spawning" of that monster from the server. Since that's the case, you can stand on the stairs leading from the main deck of the ferry to the upper deck and fish all day without catching any monsters. The monster doesn't have room to spawn since each step is so tiny.

How to not catch a monster in other places -

Using that same logic as above, the trick to not catching a monster in other areas is to find something close enough to the water you can put your back to; but still have room to fish. If you find a rock for instance that you can put your back to while still able to fish in front of you, the monster will not have room to spawn again. Hence saving you from the hassle of having to fight him at all.

Personal thoughts on when to pull in a catch -

I just basically watched the JP players on this one. Even though half of them are bots, most of them do pull in the catch in between the third and fourth character animation of the rod going back and forth. It works extremely well for me when catching moat carp, though of course it's your call on when you personally do it.

Catching rusties for profit-

I came across this one on Allakhazam, and although the original poster was blasted as a phony, I still can't see any fault with the guy's logic. The server of FFXI has a built in "Anti-bot" code. If you stay at the same place and keep fishing over and over again for around 150 casts, you'll start catching nothing but rusties. The longer you stay there, the more rusties you'll catch. Pretty soon you'll catch nothing BUT rusties. The game's way of trying to combat all of the JP fishing bots. Of course the JP bots are now just zoning or logging out and that negates that server check. The guy on Allakhazam basically tried to use the server check against itself. He says he bought a rogue rig, and stayed in the same spot for hours.. Because of the server check, he started catching literally tons of Rusty Caps. (2k to vendor remember?) Filled up his inventory with them and walked away with over 100k in rusty items.

Gobby Bag Quests-

Can't even stress how important it is to do these things if you're going to be fishing.. Yeah they cost alot to do, but each one boosts your carrying rate up by 5. Do all four and that's a maximum personal inventory of 50 and that's alot of room for bait and fish. It'll be worth it in the long run, and you can use those moat carp to get the money for them in the first place.

Woodworking and Alchemy-

Ah, all those broken poles in your inventory getting you down? Well here's what you need in order to fix them.

Glass Fiber Rod - 22 in Alchemy and a Light Crystal will let you repair it. 29 is the cap for this one, though I have never lost a broken rod on a failure.

Mithran Rod - 83 in Woodworking and a Light Crystal

Lu Shang Rod - 80 in Woodworking and a Light Crystal, I've seen reports of high 80's/low 90's in Alchemy also being able to repair, but of course a little hard for me to test out for myself.

Fastwater - 56 in Woodworking and Light Crystal

Other Links to the Specifics

Here's some links to actual tables of fish and needed skill, and other various things of interest. Props go to the people that put each of these together for us all. You're going to have to copy and paste theses, mainly because some of them (Gamefaq) doesn't allow straight links, and also because I'm much too lazy to fight with UBB and HTML

http://db.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/final_fantasy_xi_fishing.txt

A pretty decent FAQ on the needed skills for each fish type. Was translated by Babelfish so it's a bit rough, but a good quick reference.

http://www.fishermanrods.net/database_e.cfm?genre=0&fish_id=010

An outstanding site done by a Japanese player. It's been partially translated into English but all the important stuff is there and understandable. You can check whether or not your pole will break based on the type of fish and where you're planning on fishing.

http://www.fishermanrods.net/ss_e.cfm

Same site as the above one, but a different part that took me awhile to find. This is a map section that basically lists all the types of fish that can be caught. Drop down menu's and easy to read indicators.. With the link above it this will pretty much handle everything you need to know.

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=24

Of course then there's Allakhazam's. This is the trading guild forums, and still a great place to pick up on new ideas or to get answers to questions that you may have.

http://mysterytour.web.infoseek.co.jp/mt/eng/

The end-all-be-all site as far as I'm concerned when it comes to FFXI. This has everything you could ever need about everything, but it's got a link to the fishermanrod database on the bottom too. *So there's my excuse for putting it here*