by chipster901

Seeing as a lot of people are still relatively confused or still spreading incorrect information, I’m writing this guide for those seriously looking to get their mounts/titles/special fish for canvases.

• This guide is not for those who aren’t willing to study and plan ahead. If you TL;DR this guide, then you might as well hope someone calls out the right bait for you. Aiming for the title requires knowledge and luck, whereas the mount requires just luck and a bit of knowledge.
• You are literally walking into a floating RNG casino. While not everything listed here is technically not required, it is extremely helpful to know what you’re getting into. Knowledge eases the RNG needed, so please study up.

This guide will not tell you absolutely everything you need to know, but will provide excellent examples and why they matter.

Resources

• This excellent spreadsheet by S’yahn Tia. Be sure to give him your thanks because it is insanely well done!
• The Fishcord. If you have any questions, be sure to ask in here too!
• Guide for special titles. This guide will not go in-depth for titles, as it is a different ball game from normal Ocean Fishing.

General tips to prepare

• Look at the upcoming voyage and plan your bait ahead of time
• Bring food and Hi-cordials/cordials
• Cast a line on the docks before going on the voyage, this prevents the “Fish sense something amiss” message.
• Be sure to have a clean inventory beforehand for all the useless fish you catch
• Be prepared to fail because you’re literally walking into a floating RNG casino

Tips for fishing on the boat

• Mooch 1 works on HQ fish only while Mooch 2 works on NQ fish only
• Patience 1/2 are completely useless unless you are going for Intuition Fish
• When capped on GP during downtime, use Chum to not waste GP
• Surface Slap expires when you use Hook, not based on whether or not you catch a fish

Terminology and useful knowledge

• Intuition and Spectral Currents are COMPLETELY unrelated.
• Spectral Currents are ONLY caused by catching a spectral fish. Quality does not matter, however it is a random chance on whether or not your spectral fish will cause the fabled Spectral Current.
• Intuition DOES snapshot. If your buff expires and no message is displayed, you have hooked the Intuition Fish.
• Time and weather DO matter. Please review the route beforehand.
• There is a hard chance you will fail hooking a !!! regardless of your gathering stat. Unfortunately, you just lost a spectral fish from RNG.

Before you angrily type a reply that tries to disprove how Spectral currents spawn, do keep in mind that this theory is backed up with a (now) large data set. If you don’t believe it, then that’s your prerogative.

Required Skills/Stats for high score runs

*Is helpful for catching Intuition Fish, but not helpful for high score runs.

** Is so helpful, it might as well be required

• The reason why Patience is useless is because you want to have as much GP possible before Spectral Current Pops. Spending GP to get HQ fish is a lot less effective and efficient than Double-Hooking fish. Even though Mooch II has a cool-down, using Patience instead in niche cases will still not be worth it. Feel free to play around with it though.
• Release is useless because you want to always be casting your line. Release/Chum have animations to them, and when you’re catching the same fish multiple times, you can lose a considerable amount of casts.
• Fish Eyes/Snagging are useless because they simply do not have any function in Ocean Fishing.

Points needed for obtaining…

Strategy

The only way you will only be able to score high is if you study and have good luck. It also helps a lot if you understand the routes beforehand, as capitalizing on certain opportunities will help immensely. Luck is an important factor, as you can get the mount from an unoptimized run.

What you should do before Spectral Current

Everyone should fish for the spectral fish. It’s that simple. As stated above, the only way to spawn a Spectral Current is to hook a Spectral Fish. Unfortunately, there is a good chance that your fish will not spawn the Spectral Current, or you will completely miss the hook. With Spectrals, weather/time do not matter. Though, it is more favorable to have terrible weather; as it reduces variety of fish you can obtain, and thus increase your chance of getting a spectral.

As fishing for Spectral Fish isn’t anything special, this means that the only baits (if you’re going for a high score) you should be using are as follows:

What you should do when Spectral Current spawns

This is the bread and butter of high scoring runs. You need at least one Spectral Current to have a chance, though obviously it is more favorable to have more than one.

This is where you need to use the spreadsheet and plan beforehand. Knowledge is power, and hopefully eases how much RNG you need.

• Should you just blindly double hook !!s and !!!s? No. This is because even though they are good in around 3/4 of the locations, what truly matters is the time of day. The time affects which fish you can get during spectrals.
• By determining what you need to hook, you may land up to 888 points in a single DH. (Highest NQ DH possible: Nimble Dancer, 2×444 points each)

The general idea is to have capped GP and whenever you see a potentially valuable hook, you use DH on it. Ideally you should be aiming for 3 DH per spectral window (hi-cordials help a lot here).

Do baits matter?

Baits matter. Thankfully the valuable fish that can be double-hooked use the same bait as any other fish. Please refer to the spreadsheet above to determine what to DH, as it would clutter this post with more and more tables.

What about the SUPER SPECIAL BLUE FISH?

First, let me share some very important info:

To get Intuition in Spectral Current, you can use the special bait for the Blue Fish. Because you don’t have to swap baits once you get Intuition, this allows you to have 2 casts (3 at most).

Even though these special fish are worth the most, I do not recommend fishing for them for a couple of reasons.

• You cannot use IC/DH on them. They are worth 500 points (1000 points HQ) each.
• By fishing for them, you are forgoing fish that can be DH’d, essentially being worth more.
• When using bait for Blue Fish, you are limiting your fish pool to a very poor selection. They are the fish worth the least amount of points and the fish used for Intuition.

Though, if you are still interested in them, here is a table with the information you’ll need to catch them:

All of the bait can be obtained from the vendors in the major cities. Except for Heavy Steel Jig, which is crafted.

What about the titles from obtaining X amount of Y?

This requires two things:

• A coordinated party that knows exactly what is going on in the fishing route.
• Specific route for whatever achievement you are aiming for

While this guide will not go in-depth about it, this other guide will.

Conclusion

Even with all of this knowledge that you’ve (hopefully) read through, you can still get bad luck and not get any of the good fish. I repeated many times to study up, as it will make obtaining your goals significantly easier. Just be patient, study up, and you’ll get that mount/title eventually.

Good luck with your runs!

Additional Reference Guide by Zaed_Tia

I just went through the spreadsheet and made a little reference guide for planning high value routes, and which baits to use in spectral currents for each zone/time combination.

To use these tables, go to the table for your current zone, check the collumn for what time it is, and you will see a bait type to use, and how many exclaimation marks you’re looking for to use double hook on. the ‘Max Double Hook Value’ row shows the best score you can get via double hooking in this way, and how many fish you can catch.

EG. If you’re in Galadion Bay, at sunset, you should use Plump Worms during the spectral currents, and try to double hook any !!! bites you see. This can get you 4 fish worth 213 points each (213×4)

This is my first time making tables on reddit btw, hope I formatted this right…

Galadion Bay

Rhotano Sea

Northern Strait

Southern Strait

Route Value (calculated by adding together the max DH value for each stop along the route)

Northern Straight Route (Southern Straight -> Galadion Bay -> Northern Straight)

Rhotano Sea Route (Galadion Bay -> Southern Straight -> Rhotano Sea)

So from this it seems that Rhotano Sea Routes which depart at day have the best ‘potential’ for high scores during spectral currents, while ones leaving at night have by far the worst.

EDIT: Just got my shark mount following this, on a Rhotano route ship leaving at sunset, got 2 rainbows and ended with a score of 13766. Hope this post can help some other people out :)