Fishing

[AmoebaMan 7]

Suggestion: in Vanilla MC, fishing simply yields an item which flies out of the water at you. Instead, catching should actually grab the fish entity and fling it out of the water to land on the ground next to you, where you could then proceed to kill it with a single punch. Fish could also be killed in the water with punches, but this would probably be nearly impossible, due to their diminutive size and the repurposing of the same fleeing mechanic that ocelots use.

Fish obviously should also suffocate in air, like squids.

Oh, and please let us catch squids.

[Vaelkyri 26]

Just throwing this out there, IRL the best way to to catch crayfish (fresh and saltwater) is with rotten meat.

Maybe some kind of fishtrap crafted with sticks+ yarn in a 3x3 and baited with rotten flsh/raw meat that can be placed in water ?

[Bihlbo 29]

I really like the images you found/made for the bait and fish. Excellent, easy to understand, and simple. Though probably too high-res for the textures I'm using.

Also, if there's a fishing revamp, please: NETS. I fall asleep when fishing in Minecraft; I want something that doesn't require me to stare at a bobber attentively, as if it were actually interesting or exciting.

[Strait Raider 10]

From the depths of 2013, I resurrect thee, thread!

 

Coming from the East Coast, I'm (obviously) from a fishing family. However we don't go diving for squid and hit them with swords, and we almost never use rod and tackle. What we do use for various species, off the top of my head is:

 

Crab, lobster - traps

Clams - digging

Oysters - raked off the bottom

Herring - Gill net

Gaspereau, Eels - Diversion to cage

Smelts - Box net through ice

Mackerel - Handlining

 

I know there's some work being done on improving fishing rods, so this will probably be pretty low priority if it's ever considered, but it would be great if we could get some new methods for fishing. While rod and tackle has been around for at least 8000 years or so it doesn't seem to be the first method we had, certainly isn't the best, and judging by current "primitive" fishing cultures doesn't seem to be our go-to fishing solution. I know I'm paraphrasing a lot of what has been said here already, but it would be great to be able to spear-fish, 

 

Just bandying some thoughts around for how some of this might be done.

 

Simplest thing would probably be spearfishing, practiced in many, many cultures and basically how we already hunt squid in-game. If fish don't alert until swimming characters are quite close they could be melee'd. Or if they alert at greater distances they could be hunted with thrown javelins. Or as a more complicated mechanic they could add a dedicated fish-spear weapon with a reach of two tiles or so, very low damage and no knockback. (making it useless as a combat weapon)

 

Weir blocks could be "woven" from a 3x3 grid of sticks and be placed like fences but use Dunk's awesome new object-in-water magic that he can do to make a visually appealing fish diversion. With this we could make simple weirs, diversions, and cages to corral fish into spearing-distance. If we wanted to be fancy, perhaps crafting a circle of weir blocks could make a one-way weir block, but I'm not sure if it is feasible to do one-way blocks in Minecraft.

 

Come to think of it, a woven stick fence would be a more stone-age appropriate alternative to the vanilla-style post-and-rail fences...

 

Weir blocks in a U-shape could perhaps be crafted into traps/pots for bottom-dwelling crabs/lobsters/crayfish, but I imagine that would require a LOT of special coding to allow live capture trapping of only certain animals, and allowing traps to be baited.

 

Net blocks could perhaps be woven out of 3x3 yarn and placed to create gill nets, which would be placed like weirs to catch fish that swum into it. Might need a durability component to avoid being overpowered. (Nets need to be frequently mended, even with modern materials)

 

Perhaps nets could then be crafted with stones at each corner of a 3x3 grid to make cast nets, tools which could capture fish in a small area in which it is thrown. Probably requires quite a lot of special coding though, when rod and tackle and potentially spearfishing or weirs already exist.

[AllenWL 186]

Simplest thing would probably be spearfishing, practiced in many, many cultures and basically how we already hunt squid in-game. If fish don't alert until swimming characters are quite close they could be melee'd. Or if they alert at greater distances they could be hunted with thrown javelins. Or as a more complicated mechanic they could add a dedicated fish-spear weapon with a reach of two tiles or so, very low damage and no knockback. (making it useless as a combat weapon)

For spear fishing, we could make it so every time you throw a javelin into a water source(could be flowing too, I guess but I feel this would be better) block, there is a chance of the javelin Turing into a 'javelin with fish' item that will float to the surface of the water, and you can craft it into a fish and get the javelin back, and the javelin can get damaged.