We can already breed livestock and improve its quality over generations. Fish have nothing like that, even though every fish already has quality and its own roe.
Ponds also fit the setting: in medieval times carp were kept in "stew ponds" exactly for this.
The idea: you put caught fish into a pond, they multiply, and the pond yields roe and rare items. It builds on H&H's existing quality and animal breeding systems.
1. Buildings
Small Fish Pond
- Footprint: 3 x 3 tiles
- Skills: Fishing, Masonry
- Materials: Stone x50, Clay x30, Reeds x10, Board x5
- Water to fill: 200 L
- Pond grid (container): 4 x 4
- Repaired with: Clay
- Footprint: 5 x 5 tiles
- Skills: Fishing, Masonry
- Materials: Stone x150, Clay x90, Reeds x20, Block of Wood x10, Board x10, Bar of Any Metal x2
- Water to fill: 800 L
- Pond grid (container): 8 x 8
- Repaired with: Clay
General rules:
- The large pond holds 4x the space of the small one for about 3x the cost, so building bigger is worth it.
- After building, you fill the pond with water by hand: bucket, barrel, waterskin. It doesn't work until it's full.
- Right-clicking the pond opens it as a container, like a cupboard: the pond grid and a status line (food supply, water type, water quality, fish count).
- Claim permissions apply as for any other container.
2. Stocking
- Any caught fish works, as the normal item from your inventory. Drag it into the pond grid or right-click the pond with it. Its quality is kept.
- No sexes. As in real life, you can't tell the sex of most pond fish by looking at them outside spawning season, so fish farmers just stock a group. Same here: any 2 adult fish of the same species count as a breeding pair.
- Fish take their normal item size in the grid, so big fish fill a pond faster than small ones. That is the natural population limit. Current fish sizes (from the wiki):
- 1 cell: Bream, Chub, Herring, Ide, Perch, Roach, Ruffe, Tench, Smelt, Mackerel, Plaice, ...
- 2 cells: Carp, Pike, Zander, Salmon, Trout, Eel, Burbot, Cod, ...
- 3 cells: Catfish, Sturgeon.
- A small pond (16 cells) fits 5–16 fish, a large one (64 cells) 20–64.
- A fish taken out of the pond is a normal item. You can move it to another pond or butcher it.
3. Breeding
Once per in-game day, each pair of adult fish of the same species lays 1 Roe of that species into a free 1 x 1 cell. Pairs are counted like this: 2 fish = 1 pair, 5 fish = 2 pairs. Condition: both fish were fed that day. Which species spawn when is covered in section 7.
Then the player chooses:
- Take the roe: it is normal roe (food, Caviar Canapé, etc.).
- Leave the roe: after 1 in-game day it hatches into 1–3 Fry of <Species>, 1 x 1 each, only into free cells.
- Fry eat and become adult fish after 4 in-game days. An adult takes its normal size (1–3 cells), so fry only grow up if there is room. Otherwise they wait.
4. Feeding
- Feeding works like the Rabbit Hutch and Chicken Coop: right-click the pond with food, and it goes into a shared supply. The supply's quality is the average of all food put in.
- Food is the existing bait: Earthworm, Entrails, Chum Bait, Grub, ant larvae and pupae, insects and so on.
- Food quality affects offspring quality (section 5).
- Without food there is no roe, and fry stop growing. Fish don't die of hunger: a neglected pond simply stops producing.
5. Water and quality
Water type. Each fish needs its own water. A pond becomes freshwater or saltwater depending on what it was filled with (seawater makes it salt).
- Sea fish need saltwater.
- River and lake fish need freshwater.
- Cave fish are fine with lake freshwater, like river fish.
- In the wrong water fish refuse food and don't spawn until moved.
Offspring quality works like rabbits in the Rabbit Hutch: food and water quality are averaged, (WaterQ + SwillQ) / 2, and offspring drift towards it. Same here:
Code: Select all
parentQ = (Q_fish1 + Q_fish2) / 2
envQ = (avg Q of food eaten + Q_water) / 2
childQ = parentQ + (envQ - parentQ) * 0.25 // 25% pull towards conditions
childQ = childQ * random(0.95, 1.05) // small variance
if childQ > Q_pond: childQ = Q_pond + (childQ - Q_pond) / 2 // soft cap by pond quality- Roe quality = the average quality of the pair. Roe from butchering already takes the fish's quality today.
- Good food and good water raise quality over generations.
- Pond quality comes from its building materials, like other buildings, and acts as a soft cap.
- The exact numbers are not revealed to players: Enjoy the discovery.
6. Products
- Fish. Adults taken out are normal fish: butcher them for fillets, roe and so on.
- Roe. Taken straight from the pond (section 3).
- Golden Roe, rare: both an ingredient and a curiosity.
- As an ingredient: used in new high-end recipes, e.g. "Golden Caviar". The dish gives a temporary attribute buff for a few hours, scaling with quality. Which attribute is not revealed (Enjoy the discovery). The attribute could depend on the species the roe came from.
- As a curiosity: instead of cooking it, you can study it for LP.
- Elder Otolith, rare curiosity. Real fish have "ear stones" (otoliths), which medieval Europe wore as charms and used as medicine.
- Lucky Carp Scale, rare curiosity. Named after the Central European custom of keeping a carp scale in your purse for luck.
7. Seasons
- Spring: active spawning. Which species: Enjoy the discovery.
- Summer: active spawning. Which species: Enjoy the discovery.
- Autumn: active spawning. Which species: Enjoy the discovery.
- Winter: no roe. A pond can freeze. A frozen pond can't be opened, and all the fish in it die.
8. Enjoy the discovery
- Predators.
- Cave fish spawn only in a pond built underground.
- Displacement: an aggressive species slowly crowds out a calmer one. While they share a pond, the calmer species doesn't spawn.
- Special pairs: one or two particular species pairs or conditions raise the chance of Golden Roe.
