Thread: Big Fish and You - Patch 2.3

Originally Posted by MeisterSH

I have been trying to catch the Tuna Shark at Costa del Sol, but twice now I have missed the fish. This guide says I need 338 gathering and I am at 359. It sucks because there is only a 2 hour window and I am lucky if I even catch one HQ fish to mooch. Any ideas why that is happening? I never had a problem catching other fish before

What Jeckyl_Tesla said. If you can, try and get there two to three ingame hours before the window opens to catch your HQ sardine. Once you do, just sit and wait.

If you've already been doing that then nevermind!

If you pre-catch your HQ fish, be sure to not cast the second the time changes! There's a small lag between the timer and the game actually acknowledging the change in time. You can see this with the weather - the weather won't change at exactly 08:00, it sometimes doesn't change until 08:02. I've cast for a weather-based fish in that window and caught the fish even though the weather was no longer correct. This implies that what you can catch is locked in the moment you cast, and also that the servers sometimes experience lag causing windows to open (and close) later than they should.

So, I recommend waiting until the window's been open a couple minutes (like, until about :03 into the window) just in case when pre-catching so as not to waste the pre-caught HQ fish.

Originally Posted by MeisterSH

Thanks for the tips! I tried taking a couple accessories off so I was just above the 338 gathering and it felt like I was getting more of the fish to mooch, but I still missed another fish. I will start earlier and just keep all of my accessories on from now on.

Similar to the (long-since debunked) time-theory of Atma, because RNG is so varied and random, it's hard to tell if reducing your stats helps land fish or not. The theory was that bigger fish have less of a chance to be caught, and Perception increases the size of the fish (fish above a certain size are HQ), but all those things are unproven as far as I know.