Nightingale – Ultimate Fishing Explanatory Guide (with Tips)

This guide is meant to teach you how fish in Nightingale.

Fishing Explained

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Intro

Catching a fish in Nightingale (somewhat similar to reality), a matter of you wearing down the fish before it wears you down.

You cast the line wherever you like (as long as it’s in water), wait for a fish to bite, and then you click. Now you keep the pole mostly pointed at the fish (to reduce tension) and just follow it around and hold the button to keep reeling it in as it swims back and forth and gets closer to you.

From all appearances, the tension bar drains the fish’s health the most when it’s in the middle, so, you can speed the process up a bit by not pointing the rod directly at the fish, but keeping it off center enough so that the tension bar stays as close to the middle as you can get it.

If you don’t have enough stamina, it’s probably because you didn’t eat anything. You should be able to catch the “10” fish without a food buff, but as with most activities in this game, having a food buff is a great help because it boosts your health regen and increases your stamina.

Now, as to why one would catch fish, that’s easy… Fish-based meal buffs stack with meat-based meal buffs. With both of those and a vegetable/fruit buff you’ll find a lot of things (like swinging a weapon around) to be much easier.

…for the sake of completeness I’ll mention at the moment there only seems to be two fish per biome, one that’s 10 and one that’s 30. Also note that the little oasis that appears in the “dungeon” realms (the ones you get to through the disc portal) generally have a different set of fish than the realm you came from. I’ve yet to see rare fish or anything other than fish spawn this way (although you’ll occasionally get some essence when fishing).

How to Begin

Fishing in Nightingale is a relatively straightforward activity.

To begin, you will need:

• A fishing rod.
• A body of water.

In Early Access there is no bait requirement, but neither will you be receiving a free fishing rod from your Faerie Godfather. To get a fishing rod, you will first need to visit the Essence Trader in an Abeyance realm (in case you forgot, this means your “home realm”) and give them a handful of essence dust in exchange for the crafting patter. If you get there and don’t have enough essence dust, there’s plenty of shrubs and weeds nearby that can be picked and extracted into essence dust so get to picking. No excuses.

Why Fishing?

You may be wondering why one would fish in Nightingale without already being obsessed with fishing itself. The answer is simple: More buffs!

Nightingale is a survival game, and in this case fishing can facilitate you not merely surviving but actually thriving because the buffs you get from eating meals can stack up to (apparently) three times. The only limitation is that they be different buffs, which means you can readily have a cooked meat buff, a vegetable/fruits buff, and a fish-meal buff and together these three can more than double your stamina as well as significantly raise your health regen.

Crafting the Rod

Now that you have the motivation and the diagrams showing you how to make a fishing rod, find (or build) a simple workbench and have ready the following materials:

• One wood bundle.
• Two animal fibers.
• One bone.

As with most things Nightingale using fancier materials makes for a more effective tool, but for your first fishing rod just use whatever stuff you have handy. Wood bundles come from cutting trees or rotten logs with an axe (or leaving your hireling unsupervised with an axe for like, ten seconds), bones somewhat predictably you get from animals, but for animal fibers you will need meat and a tanning station.

Now with your new fishing rod in hand, go find a body of water. Just about any body of water will do.

Before You Go Fishing

As with most activities in Nightingale, your tool’s stats can definitely impact the activity. However, the most common mistake players make doesn’t involve their tools–it involves their diet.

I will explain. In each body of water (in the present time of Early Access) there are generally two types of fish. One which has a rank of 10, and one which has a rank of 30. Both can be caught, and easily, but not if you are starving or sleep-deprived. Either of these conditions being present will reduce your stamina to that of a newborn kitten and you will catch no fish. In fact, if those two bars on your screen aren’t at least a third full, don’t even both trying to fish–just go fix those conditions by eating something or taking a quick nap.

Beyond that I strongly recommend having one or two food buffs active when you fish, simply because that can more than double your stamina which is what makes catching fish easy.

Catching Some Fish

Now that you’ve obtained a fishing rod, have found a body of water (I trust you will not need a guide to finding open water), and are neither starving nor sleep-deprived fishing itself is relatively easy.

First, equip your fishing rod. While there are no game wardens to write you a citation, a shotgun is simply not something a proper Victorian would use for fishing.

Next, stand near your selected body of water while facing the water. You are trying to catch fish, not topiary. While it is true that you could stand in the water while fishing, be aware that many an adventurer have had their travails brought short by trenchfoot. For the sake of simplicity, just cast from the shoreline.

Now that you’ve positioned yourself appropriately, hold your back straight with your arm extended and cast your line by clicking and holding the cast button for a brief moment. The longer you hold the button the farther out you will cast the line, but ultimately this affects nothing. When you release the button your bobber will land in the water and a secret battle of wills will begin.

In a few seconds you will see that a fish is nibbling on the line. This is when you click to “set” the hook which gets the fish stuck on the line, and then you hold that same button to begin reeling in the fish. You will see the fish’s status bar appear, a “tension” bar appear, and you will see your stamina begin draining. Your goal is to wear down the fish in order to catch it before the fish wears you down by exhausting your stamina.

During the catching phase, you will mostly want your rod pointed at the fish as it swims back and forth trying to escape. This keeps the tension on the line to a minimum, but you don’t necessarily want that. What you really want to do to maximize the speed of catching is to either lead or drag the fish (by pointing the rod ahead or behind the fish) enough so that the tension bar is in the center. If the tension is higher, the line won’t break but your stamina will drain faster and when your stamina is gone, so is the fish. If the tension is too little, the fish’s stamina won’t drain and you may also fail, albeit more slowly.

Once the fish’s bar is completely empty, it will pop out of the water for you to pick it up and it may or may not include a bit of essence.

Now, just keep doing that.

Final Tips

• You don’t need any special gear to make fishing easy.
• The game tells you what to do in a bunch of places, including the actual fishing tutorial and load screen tips.
• But basically, the goal is to keep tension as close to middle as you can while reeling.
• Reeling while above the mid point is a stamina drain penalty.
• You can manage tension by keeping the rod pointed at the fish and tilting your aim up to increase and down decrease tension.

• You can also stop reeling, wait a moment and your stamina will begin regenerating.
• So if you can’t pull the fish in before running out, reel it in bursts to allow it time to regenerate between reels. Just don’t let the fish break the tension and you can keep it hooked without reeling.
• You can also build a hut and campfire to make stamina management easier while fishing.
• Just 1 foundation, 1 wall and a roof piece is enough.