River Fishing 0.8.2 — the giants can be fought, the groundbait can be made

Minecraft 1.20.1 (Fabric & Forge) · 1.21.1 (Fabric & NeoForge) · 26.1.2 (Fabric & NeoForge) · 26.2 (Fabric & NeoForge).

Everything here came out of what you reported after 0.8.1, and two of them were things nobody could have found by playing well — only by reading a log or doing the arithmetic.

Base groundbait can be crafted again on 26.x

Reported as issue #15, from the log:

Couldn't parse data file 'riverfishing:groundbait_powder'
DataResult.Error['List is too short: 0, expected range [1-9]']

Minecraft 1.21.2 replaced the ingredient object with the id itself, so {"item": "minecraft:dirt"} stopped parsing. Both files still spoke the old dialect: they were ported from the 1.21.1 branch verbatim, months after the other thirty-seven were converted. The codec dropped what it could not read, the empty list failed the size check, and the recipe simply did not exist.

Base Groundbait and Groundbait Soil could not be crafted on 26.1.2 or 26.2 at all, since 0.8.0. The base is the item every mix is built on, so the headline feature of that release was buyable from the fisherman and unmakeable by hand. Nothing crashed, which is why it went a release and a half unnoticed.

The divers stop running out the clock

Reported twice, from opposite ends of the same wall: "did anyone test landing a beluga? two hours and we never got even a small one — its thirteen dives take the whole fight", and "the problem isn't the 600 kg one, even a small one runs 185 seconds and then it's gone."

Both were the fight timing out, and there were two causes.

A dive cost twice what it was meant to. The drain shipped in 0.5.0 as a flat rate per tick, in the same commit that made a dive 60–109 ticks long — about a third of the land bar per dive. The rod overhaul then lengthened every run by 2.2×, and never revisited that line:

The bar holds 1.00. A dive now costs a fixed share of it however long it runs, so the next time a run length moves, this stays put.

And the fish never tired. The fatigue clock grows with mass forever while the fight timeout is capped at 170 seconds, so past a certain size the two stop meeting. A 90 kg beluga ended a full fight 0.11 spent; a 600 kg one, 0.03. Fatigue is what shortens a run, thins the runs out and lifts your gain — none of it ever arrived, so the fight ran at first-minute density until the clock killed it. All seven diving species were in that state.

The clock is now capped at a share of the fish's own fight. Where it already fitted it still decides — sixty-five of the ninety-three species keep their numbers to the tick, and nothing under about three kilos moved at all.

The six giants are no longer legendary

Arapaima, beluga, bull shark, frilled shark, goliath grouper and piraiba were given a legendary specimen when they landed in 0.8.0. That was never intended, and they go back to being very large ordinary fish. The original eight are untouched.

Seeds compost, and the maggot farm eats properly

Corn, pea and barley seeds now compost — which also feeds the worm farm, because that block asks the composter what counts as organic matter rather than keeping a list of its own.

The maggot farm takes carrion, not one item. It used to accept rotten flesh and nothing else; it now reads a tag — rotten flesh, spider eye, and raw beef, pork, chicken, mutton and rabbit. Cooked food and fish stay out: it is a carrion box, not a larder. Being a tag, a modpack can add spoiled meat from another mod without touching the block.

The catastrophic snap stops naming the fish

The 0.3 % break hands out an advancement called It Was DEFINITELY Huge — the oldest lie in angling, and it only works while nobody can check. The message was checking: it printed the weight of the fish that got away, and losing a rig to a ten gram fish does not read as a joke, it reads as a bug in the line. It says nothing now. The break itself is unchanged.

Bug reports, catches and arguments about groundbait: discord.gg/Kk2nKvsuRh