Fishing told by someone who fishes for the sake of recipe book slots: what the fishermen sell, how the four skills work and why they must be levelled together, how to pull a fish out by day and by night, the quest for fishing shots, and what the catch is exchanged for.
I will say at once that I never had the patience to stand by a river for hours and fish, though a couple of times I was dragged out to a big fishing trip where we competed in who would catch more fish, and only later did I learn that my rival was fishing with a bot. But nevertheless, since fishing was added to the game, somebody finds it interesting, and some even get stuck in it for hours.
What is fishing for? The main thing is getting the items 
Proof of Catching a Fish, which are needed for expanding the inventory, increasing the slots for trade and so on. We, as crafters, need them first of all for increasing the slots in the craft book, since you will not get far with the standard 50 slots.
And an extra prize in fishing is the craft of all sorts of accessories, some of which are quite rare. Yes, and it is also the sale, to all sorts of bunglers, of the white fish needed for some third profession quests. And there is also a heap of fish recipes of a nasty green colour, sold in all clan halls, with which you can craft items sold by the Mammon merchants, including the Mammon dyes +4 -4.
In essence, if we discard the ritual of casting the rod into the sea-ocean, fish are the same mobs, and with a special weapon (the rod) and fishing shots you beat these mobs. As soon as the fish's life bar reaches zero, the fish is considered caught and turns up in your inventory. It will have to be gutted (a double click on the fish), and depending on the colour of the fish and its name you will get some drop. Or you will not, and will hear the characteristic "pshik" meaning there was nothing in the fish. The most annoying thing is that there can be very many such duds; I once had 12 fails in a row. The items obtained are either exchanged with the fishermen for fish tickets or go into the craft of accessories or items.
What you need
Let's begin for those who know nothing about fishing at all. In order to fish you need water (any place where, if you go into the water, the red bar of breath under water appears), a rod, a lure and, optionally, fishing shots. All this can be bought from the fat men labelled Fishing Guild Member, who stand in every town, usually in the grocery shop, but sometimes in locations too (one stands in the central clearing of Hot Springs).
Fishing skills
The first thing is the menu item "learn to fish". In this item not only the fishing skills are available for learning, but also the expansion of the inventory and so on.
- Fishing is the main fishing skill. Active. With it you cast the rod into the river (not the rod itself, though that would be fun too, when a desperate little angler throws the hated tool of production into the sea) or pull it out of the water when it is clear that the fish is not biting. It has only one level, the first. It affects nothing but the beginning and the end of the fishing process.
- Fishing Expertise is passive, with 27 levels; the level of the skill determines what colour of fish you will catch. Here the colours of fish have to be mentioned. The easiest prey is caught at low levels, and that is the green fish. The drop from it is, naturally, next to nothing. The coolest fish is white and black, caught at levels from 21 to 27, with the best drop.
- Reeling is a blow at the fish while it is moving (when the fish's life bar is growing). Active, 27 levels; the strength of the blow depends on the level of the skill. Pumping is a blow at the fish when it stands still (when the fish's life bar is not moving). Active, 27 levels; the strength of the blow depends on the level of the skill.
The skills are bought for adena, not for SP, from the Fishermen's Guild members in the grocery stores. Fishing casts the line. Pumping and Reeling damage the fish, and each level makes them stronger and faster. Fishing Expertise sets the tier of fish you can catch: three levels for each colour, from green at levels 1–3 through jade, blue, yellow, orange, purple, red and white to black at levels 25–27.
- About half of the catch matches your level of Fishing Expertise, most of the rest is one tier lower and a few fish are one tier higher.
Here a wild thought may visit you: that it would be good to learn the first level of Expertise and the levels of the blows up to the very last (27th), and thrash small fish with one blow. Drive this thought away, with kicks. And all because if the level of Expertise is lower than the level of the active blows by three or more, a penalty is charged for each level of difference, and the bigger the difference, the bigger the penalty; if your Expertise is at level 1 and the skills at level 27, you will simply stroke the fish without dealing it any damage, which you will be told every time on the fishing screen.
Rods, lures and other goods
Rods, like weapons, differ by grade, from no grade to S grade. The higher the grade, the more damage you deal to the fish.
Baby Duck Rod is no grade, 
Albatross Rod D grade, 
Pelican Rod C grade, 
KingFisher Rod B grade, 
Cygnus Pole A grade, 
Triton Pole S grade. The base prices without the town tax: 30k, 100k, 400k, 1.2kk, 4kk and 10kk adena.
Lures: I will not list them all; they are divided by colours and names. The differences between colours within one subgroup are minimal, that is, 
Purple Colored Lure and 
Yellow Colored Lure will differ by a minimal chance of catching something, so the colours are not worth much attention.
- The lure Colored Lure - For Beginners should catch fish for beginners: they have less life, and more time is given to pull them out, but the drop chances are reduced, and the amount of drop is cut too.
- Colored Lure is the main lure for catching ordinary fish, with the standard drop chances and amounts of items from the fish.
- Luminous Lure is a glowing lure meant for night fishing; only with this lure can you catch the fish whose name has the words Upper Grade added, and only this fish has coloured scales and key materials for crafting rare accessories in its drop.
Prize-Winning Fishing Lure is some kind of prize lure, but it works crookedly everywhere: on some servers only chests are caught with it, on others I noticed no difference at all.- Lures.
Green Colored Lure attracts nimble fish, Yellow Colored Lure ugly ones and Purple Colored Lure fat ones; any lure fits any rod. Green Colored Lure - For Beginners and the other beginner lures show on screen which skill to press, but bring only low-quality fish.
And since chests came up, I will add what is caught at all. All fish are divided into ordinary, for beginners and upper grade (night) fish, plus you can catch chests: each colour of them comes in two kinds with the same amount of drop, but from the big chests the chance of getting it is higher. Only Fish Oil items of various kinds and fish proofs directly drop from the chests.
From the fat men fed on fresh fish you can also buy a fishing manual, which nobody needs, and all sorts of little bottles of different colours, Fisherman's Potion. They are needed to lower your fishing level. That is: you have learnt the maximum levels of the fishing skills and catch white and black fish, and you urgently need green fish scales for crafting some hat. Oops, you cannot catch green fish. In that case you buy a potion of green colour, drink it, and at once you start catching green fish. To return to the normal state you have to drink the black bottle, Fishing Potion. I will say at once that in all this time I have not seen a single server where these bottles work. However, perhaps you will be lucky.
Exchanging the catch and the quest for shots
The next menu item is the sale of unneeded items, which does not interest us at all. And further on comes the item where the things extracted from fish can be exchanged for proofs. If you are not interested in crafting accessories, you can exchange all the available items for fish tickets; if you want to craft, exchange what is not needed for craft; mostly that will be fish oil, which can also be crafted from plain up to elite, for which more tickets are given.
The last menu item is the "quests" tab. That one we need; that is, only one quest there interests us, the one for fishing shots: Quest for Fishing Shot. In it you have to beat mobs from which the items Sweet Fluid drop, and those are exchanged for fishing shots. The number and drop chance of the quest items depend on the level of the mobs and on the admins' clumsiness, so do not be surprised if only one item drops from a mob 70+. Alarm: almost always the drop of items of this quest will interfere with the drop of items of other quests, so before doing other important quests whose mobs coincide with the shot quest, it is desirable first to exchange all the fluids, cancel the shot quest and only then take the other quest.
As soon as you have knocked out at least one fluid, one more item will appear in the fisherman's quest: to exchange fluids for shots. The fisherman lists in detail all the locations and all the mobs from which fluids drop.
- Fishing shots of the rod's grade. A shot doubles the damage of a correct skill, but a wrong skill with a shot heals the fish by the same amount. They are earned with Quest for Fishing Shot and cannot be set to automatic use.
The fishing itself
Now about the fishing process itself. We buy a rod of our grade and a certain amount of lure (for a start let it be the ordinary lure), learn the skill Fishing, the first level of Expertise and the third level of Reeling and Pumping, and move to the river. We put the skills on the panel and, if we have them, add the fishing shots there too. We press the skill Fishing, and the rod is cast. A small window appears where a float rocking on the waves is seen. Yes, the lure does not go into the slot together with the rod by itself; it has to be put there with a click.
If the fish is not biting, you will hum something unintelligible under your breath for a while, then sob a little, and the rod will return to its initial position. You can cast anew. If the fish has bitten, the fishing window will say so: the fish is biting (this is for the especially gifted). A bar of blue colour will appear, and above it the number of seconds left until the fish comes off the hook.
At this moment the two active skills responsible for catching the fish come into play. We put our fingers on the keys of the skills; for me these are F1 and F3, with the fishing shots between them on F2. The shots are not automatic, that is, after each blow they have to be switched on anew. If the fish's life bar is moving, we press Reeling; if it stands still, Pumping. With the right key the fish's life decreases, with the wrong one it increases. All would be well, but the skills have a cooldown, and poking at them constantly gives nothing, so we turn on the sound in the game and listen carefully for the click of the skill's cooldown. As soon as you drive the blue bar down to zero, the fish is caught.
If the time has run out, the fishing has failed. It is not for nothing that I advise you to begin precisely with the first levels of fishing, so that you bring all the movements to automatism; after that you can raise the level to the one you need. And after that you can move on to night fishing too.
Night fishing
Night fishing (I am writing now about how it should work, but it is not a fact that on your server it will be exactly so) differs from day fishing in that it must take place only at night by game time, and the lure must be only the glowing one. The fish in night fishing is much stronger than the ordinary one, and half as much time is given to pull it out. Besides, the fish goes quite crazy: when it moves, it has to be stunned not with Reeling but with Pumping, and when it stops, not with Pumping but with Reeling, that is, everything the other way round. In night fishing I usually simply swap the skills on the panel and do not look there any more. That is what all the movements had to be brought to automatism for.
From 0:00 to 6:00 of the game clock the luminous and night lures bring better fish, and these fish cheat. When the health bar turns red, the two skills swap: Reeling for a bar that stands still, Pumping for a bar that grows.
About the settings of fishing on different servers: whatever comes into anybody's head, everything is crooked everywhere. I already wrote about the potions lowering the fishing level. On some servers night fishing is not implemented at all; somewhere it exists but works not at night, but as it happens; on one server I was told that night fishing exists but switches on only after you cast the rod at least 60 times. Somewhere there are no coloured scales in the drop from night fish; somewhere they are there, but there are no key materials for crafting rare accessories. So before taking up fishing on a new server it is desirable to ask the players how exactly fishing works here. Yes, and there are servers where night fishing works but the skills for stunning the fish do not swap. That is of course simpler for players, but much less interesting.
One more thing I forgot to mention: sometimes instead of a fish you can catch sea monsters, which will attack you immediately. If you kill them, their drop may contain all sorts of lures and shots.
What the catch is good for
A fish is opened with a right click. About half of them are empty; the rest give fish oil, scales, gems and bones, the materials of common craft. The guild member exchanges these for Proof of Catching a Fish: one proof for ordinary oil, five for greater oil, twenty-five for premium oil, four or six for scales, ten or twenty for gems, six or nine for bones.
- Expand Inventory, Expand Storage and Expand Common Craft: six more slots per level, up to 48.
- Expand Trade: one more slot of the private store per level, up to three.
- Expand Dwarven Craft, for dwarves only: six more recipes per level, up to 48.
These skills are the real prize of fishing: every character runs out of inventory and warehouse space sooner or later, and no other system adds permanent slots.