So being the min/maxer I am (which I realize might not be the best approach to this wonderful game, but hey, it's how I play), I've made a spreadsheet to figure out what areas make the most money during each season. I assumed each catch was gold quality and that each fish was caught equally (which isn't true). Below are the tables, summary is the TL: DR. I hope this helps anyone else. Spring: Summer: Fall: Winter: TL: DR Spring- Mountain Lake (91.4g/catch), if raining, River (133.0 g/catch) Summer - Ocean (199.1 g/catch), if raining, Ocean (183.6g/catch) Fall - Ocean (151.2g/catch), if raining, River (Town) (146.6g/catch) Winter - Mountain Lake (136.8g/catch)
Agreed, extremely fine work. Now, I'll have to get my fishing skill up to take advantage of this. I suppose it's time, in any case, since I want to finish the Community Center, and grandpa would be proud if I killed all that assorted seafood ravaging the shores and attacking defenseless....sand. <sigh>
What do the different color highlights and asterisks stand for? This is a good thing to have on hand for grinding out fish money.
Blue=available during rain only Tan= available during sun only Yellow, based on the TL;DR most profitable areas by average, one during sun one during rain. No Idea what the asterisks are.
This really doesn't take into count time of day either, though. Most of the really valuable fish are only available for a fraction of the time of some of the other fish. I know it means more work, but if you want it to be slightly more accurate it would help to divide it up not only by season but also by time - maybe have it be 6-12am, 12-6pm, and 6pm+. Just as an example for why yours currently doesn't work, you have Summer be the best bet for non-rainy days in fall, but the fish driving up the summer average (super cucumber) is only available after 6pm. The summer average for before that is only 95.25; it would make more sense to fish elsewhere until night time.
Probably accidently colored the sardines blue. The asterisks mean it's a bundle required fish. I did it for most of the seasons, but gave up later on as most of the fishes are repeated. As for the time sensitive fish, that's covered by the comment in the OP that stated one of my assumptions was that my calcs assumed equal catch rates of each fish. Which is NEVER going to happen. Timing (as you mention) is one, but player skill, character skill, rod, fish pools, fish catch difficulty, bait, and tackle ALL effect catch rates. There's no way I can predict any else's catch % of each fish if I can't even predict my own. Which I can't. For instance I went fishing in the ocean with rain in the spring on a fairly new character (4 or 5 fishing at the time with middle fishing rod with bait, fished on a fish pool for 90% of the time). I got roughly 1 silver herring, 1 gold herring, 2 silver halibuts, 4 silver sardines, 6 gold sardines, 3 gold anchovies, 4 silver anchovies, and 13 silver eels. THIRTEEN EELS. And eels are a time restricted "fish." Go figure. Made 3k that day. I think it's day 12? I doubt very much I'll make 3k all that often in the first spring, but I sure hauled it in that round. Point being, who could have predicted Eels would have been over 38% of my catch? I sure couldn't. At best you'd think maybe it'd be 20% or less (eel is 1 of 5 available fish during that day at that location; less because it is time sensitive), but nope, suckers just kept biting. So yeah, I won't be bothering with altering the math for time sensitive restrictions. The math I've already done helps predict what income you'll see, and as with all predictions, it's just a guide, it'll never be 100% correct.
Seeing things like this and the IRR spreadsheet really makes me wish I had the time and drive to try to write a "business intelligence for hobbyists" GUI for SQLite. Providing a comfortable way to doing what you're doing, but with the ability to arbitrarily slice, dice, and filter multidimensional data is a huge part of what "business intelligence" tools do. Relational databases like SQLite are based around the principle of defining multiple spreadsheet-like tables, then requesting custom views of the data they contain using relationships like "Column X in table A is the same thing as column Y in table B". For example, without a comfortable GUI, it could be something like this: Code: SELECT fish.name, prices.quality, prices.sell_price, fish.location FROM fish, prices WHERE fish.id = prices.fish_id AND fish.season = 'summer' ORDER BY fish.name, prices.sell_price DESC; (Return a table with name, quality, price, and location columns, filtered for summer fish only and sorted first by name, then by sell price from highest to lowest value. The underlying data would be split into a "fish" table and a "prices" table so you don't have to duplicate the fish information for each quality level.)
As of 1.5 the prices and fish numbers have changed, the following is if you do not have any skills boosting fish prices, but it will only get better when you do. Spring: Mountain at 63.8g on average, River if it's raining at 88.8g on average. Summer: Ocean at 128.8g on average, Ocean if it's raining at 110g on average. Fall: Mountain at 93.8g on average, River if it's raining at 97.9g on average. Winter: Mountain at 107.1g on average, River if it's raining at 94g on average.
