New Farmables: Fish
You’re lounging in your slumlord colony, raking in gifts from your tenant farm, when your digital stomach starts growling. Sushi sounds good. But you just fed your hunt table all nine of your raw fish and you can’t magick up more yet. So you fly to the nearest ocean planet and kill fish forever because RNGsus has forsaken you and nothing you kill wants to drop meat.
Sound familiar? Well no more.
Buy a Fish Egg from Terramart and place it in a body of water. Soon after, a fully grown (and randomly generated – collect them all!) large fish will hatch. Soon after this fish will generate small fish to populate your lake/moat, which may be killed to drop raw fish. And, in keeping with farm animals, your farm-raised fish will always drop meat when killed. And, if you don’t kill them, the small fish will persist allowing you to populate natural-looking lakes.
Version 1.1 Notice
Fixed the relocation issue. The large fish is now fully relocateable!
READ THE LIMITATIONS SECTION
First and foremost, there’s a reason that you never find small and large fish in biomes other than ocean-style planets, and even then only after a certain depth. The scripting for fish movement is very primitive, and fish can and will escape from bodies of water and walk on dry land. This is a vanilla issue with immersion detection (or to be specific, lack thereof).
The only way to avoid this is to leave an "air gap" at the top of any body of water that houses fish. If you’re not using any terrain slope mods (like Natural Slopes), open up a background block at least one block below ground level on each side of your body of water so that water will drain to below that point. If you’re using a sloping terrain mod, have the open background be two below ground level (like in this mod’s title image). This will prevent fish from escaping whenever a micro-change to the water’s surface occurs (which is often, especially on rainy planets).
Second, the egg must be placed in a liquid environment (no anchor, so you can adjust the large fish’s initial position) and the large fish will only spawn more fish when in a liquid environment. Why? Because it’s a fish.
Finally, the large fish will only spawn new fish as long as there are less than 10 small fish nearby. This is to help prevent spawn overload and associated slowdowns. If the egg is placed in a large enough body of water, small wish will wander and allow more spawns until the large fish can’t swim without being near 10 small fish. However, killing the small fish and bringing nearby population below 10 will restart the spawns.
Is this uninstall safe?
This mod spawns a monster with a unique ID, just like any other monster mod. And, just like any other monster mod, if you uninstall this mod with these fish roaming a planet, there’s a pretty good chance that planet is toast when the game tries to load a unique ID that no longer exists. Same goes for your ship if you farm on your ship. It seems to be safe, destroying the fish rather than crashing you to ship or wiping your ship (I’ve accidentally destroyed my fish while patching and my planets survive). However, there are two easy ways to prep your save for unsubscribing:
- The expensive route – Grab a Relocator and suck up as many large fish created by this mod as it can hold, then delete the Relocator. This should clear storage. Repeat this process until you’ve gotten rid of all of the large fish, then kill all of the small fish, you monster.
- The technical and free way – Grab a Relocator and suck up as many large fish created by this mod as it can hold, then fly to a planet that you don’t mind losing (a completely unexplored planet is preferable). Dump the fish on this planet. Repeat the process until you’ve transferred every large fish, make a note of the planet’s coordinates, then save and exit Starbound. Navigate to your ..storageuniverse folder, and delete the file associated with the fish dump planet. Load your save again, return to where you were farming fish, and kill every single small fish, again, you monster.
After following either step, you should be perfectly safe to uninstall this mod.
This is too much hassle for fish.
That’s not a question. But if you want a land-based alternative that functions like vanilla farmables, here’s some chickens that might interest you.
Mod mak my gaem crash (end of post)
If you want help, be it with an issue actually originating from this mod or anything else, you must include a pastebin link to your complete starbound.log from the session that had an issue. Comments that demand help, only include a log snippet, or do not include a log at all will be ignored and/or deleted. And please, by all that’s decent, spellcheck your messages. If English isn’t your first language, I can understand machine (Google) translation better than I can spelling guesses.
Can’t you fix the fish wander issue?
Me personally? Not a chance. My Lua skill is just slightly better than my spriting talent, which means it’s still non-existent. Chaika has been taking a look at it and might make another attempt, but it’s looking like it might require overhauling vanilla Lua, something that should be avoided at all costs.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
