How to set up fishing on a RedM server: waters, bait, difficulty and the economy

Fishing is the activity a RedM server can never have too much of. It works solo, it works at 3am with four players online, it gives new characters an honest way to earn, and it fills the economy with a good that varies in value. It is also easy to get wrong: a fishing script that is a progress bar and a random item is something players try once. This guide covers what makes fishing worth coming back to, how to set it up, and how to tune the difficulty and prices for your server. The mechanics described are the ones in Poggy Fishing ($69.99), because that is what we run.

What makes fishing worth playing

• Skill, not waiting. The player should be doing something during the catch. A fight that can be lost is what makes a big fish feel earned.
• Place matters. Different waters hold different fish, so there is a reason to ride to the bayou instead of fishing the creek behind town.
• Time matters. Fish that only bite at night or in the morning give regulars something to plan around.
• Gear matters. Bait that changes what bites, and a better rod, give players something to buy and a reason to keep going.
• Something rare. A legendary fish, or a pearl in the loot, is the story told in Discord that brings the next player in.

How a catch works in Poggy Fishing

1. Equip the rod from the inventory. The HUD shows the water and its fish.
2. Cast with the left mouse button. Nearby players see the splash.
3. Get a bite. On the normal rod, a tug game: tapping E raises interest but adds tension, interest 100 hooks the fish, tension 100 snaps the line.
4. Fight it. Skillchecks fill the progress bar; misses take it away and make the next round faster. On the normal rod four misses snap the line.
5. Keep it or throw it back. A kept fish goes to the inventory with a random weight and a roll on the bonus loot table.

The Pro Rod plays differently: no tug game, but during the fight the fish pulls left, right or forward and the player counters with the mouse. It favours larger and legendary fish and rolls loot twice, at the cost of a harder fight. Two rods means a beginner's rod and something to work towards.

Waters, hours and seasons

28 fish live across 34 waters: lakes, rivers, the bayou, creeks, ponds and the sea, each with its own list. The four legendary fish each live in one place: lake sturgeon in Flat Iron Lake, rainbow trout in O'Creagh's Run, muskellunge in Owanjila and channel catfish in Bayou Nwa. Many fish keep hours: bullhead feed at night, chain pickerel in the morning.

At every server start a random 80% of the fish are in season, and out-of-season fish cannot be caught. That keeps the catch changing between restarts, so the best spot this week is not the best spot forever. /rerollseasons picks a new set without a restart, which is useful for an event. The water list is built into the script; fish, baits and everything else are yours to change.

Bait: the part that feeds your economy

Each bait has a bonus that widens the skillcheck zone, a set of target fish that are three times as likely to bite, and a chance of being lost when a fish escapes. A snapped line always loses it.

Fishing with no bait works, but slowly, and legendary fish never bite without it. That makes bait a consumable players keep buying: stock it in a general store or a player-owned shop and fishing becomes a steady customer. It also gives crafting a job: Poggy Crafting (Free)'s sample recipes turn bread into bread bait. The dragonfly lure turns up in the loot table rarely, so it becomes something players trade.

Tuning the difficulty

A fish's price sets its difficulty, so the valuable fish are the hard ones by design:

Change a tier's feel in Config.SkillCheck, the tug game in Config.Interest, the Pro Rod in Config.ProRod, and the wait for a bite with Config.BiteTimeMin and Config.BiteTimeMax (3 to 20 seconds by default). Every setting can be changed in game with /poggy, which also has two built-in guides: tuning baits and what bites, and making fishing easier or harder. Change one thing at a time and fish for an evening before changing the next.

Pricing fish for your economy

Fishing is a faucet: money comes into the economy with every fish sold to an NPC. Size it against your jobs, not in isolation.

• Work out an hour. Fish for an hour at a middling spot with ordinary bait and add up what you would earn. That should be a little below what a steady job pays, because fishing is relaxing and needs no one else online.
• Let the rare fish carry the excitement. Keep common fish cheap and let the expert and legendary fish pay well. A legendary catch should be an event, not a salary.
• Let players be the buyers. A player-owned shop in Poggy Markets ($99) can buy fish from anglers and sell them on, which turns fish into trade between players instead of money from nowhere. Fish vary by species, weight and rarity, which is exactly what a player market prices well.
• Count the loot. Every kept fish rolls one bonus item from a weighted table, twice on the Pro Rod: bait, pearls, a golden nugget, rarely an uncut diamond or the dragonfly lure. A weight is not a percentage; an item's odds are its weight divided by the total. If pearls flood your economy, lower their weights.

How to build a RedM server economy covers faucets and sinks in more depth.

Collections: the Fishing Journal

The Poggy Fishing Journal, which comes with Poggy Fishing, is an illustrated book item: a map of every water, which fish live where and which are in season, the hours each bites, lore for every species, and the player's own records of discoveries, catch counts and best weights. A new discovery shows a toast; a new best weight shows a gold personal-record message. Catches are recorded only while the player carries the journal, so hand it out your way: a shop, a starter kit, a reward. With the journal installed, Config.HideUndiscoveredFish hides fish from the HUD until the player has caught them in that water, which turns 28 fish into something to complete.

Setting it up

1. Install Poggy Core (Free), the free Poggy Skillcheck (Free) and oxmysql, then ensure poggy_fishing after them, and ensure poggy_fishing_journal after that if you use it.
2. Copy the icons from docs/item_images/ into your inventory's image folder (vorp_inventory/html/img/items/ on VORP).
3. On VORP, restart: the rods, baits, fish and loot are added to the items table for you, and items you already have are never changed. On RSG Core or QBCore RedM, add them to items.lua by hand; the script prints one yellow line naming anything missing. How to add items shows the format.
4. Decide how players get a rod and bait: sell them in a shop, or put a rod in the starter kit.
5. Let admins reroll seasons: add_ace group.admin command.rerollseasons allow.

When fishing does not work

"Nothing seems to be biting here"

No fish in this water is available now: the wrong hour, out of season, or a bait whose size weights rule out every fish here. Try another bait, another time, or reroll the seasons.

Using the rod does nothing

poggy_core and poggy_skillcheck must start before poggy_fishing.

The HUD shows no fish icons

The icons were not copied into the inventory's image folder. With undiscovered fish hidden, a fish also only shows after it has been caught in that water.