River Fishing 0.9.0 — Patch Notes

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

Everything below is measured against 0.8.2, the last release. Hey anglers. This is the breeding patch — the one where a pond stops being a place you fish and becomes a place you keep. Every fish now carries a card with its genes on it, a tank breeds them the way Mendel said, koi come in seventeen varieties you build rather than find, and the world finally has geography: four faunal provinces cut by the seed, so a taimen and a peacock bass no longer share a river because the temperature happened to match. Underneath that: contracts from the fisherman's board, a fish finder that is an instrument, twelve new species, four lures — and the beluga, which can be landed again.

It is a big one. Skim the highlights, then read the section you fish in.

Patch Highlights

• Every fish carries its card — genes, nature, where and how it was caught. Contracts read it. The tank breeds from it.
• Breeding — roe, fry, a live aquarium, spawning windows for all 105 species, Mendelian inheritance.
• Koi are bred, not found — one fish, five colour loci, seventeen varieties; kohaku breeds true, tancho comes out of a tancho line.
• The pattern index — every carp and koi wears a marking family, and twelve of a thousand are gems.
• Geography — four faunal provinces per world; a species is absent outside its own, not rarer.
• Contracts and reputation — three jobs a day on the fisherman's board; poaching costs standing, restitution buys it back.
• The fish finder is an instrument — section, chart, sample; sounding; a chart that belongs to the sounder and lives in the world save.
• Twelve new fish, four new lures, fish oil you can drink, Terralith and BYG water named.

Fish

Twelve new species

The top and the bottom of the ladder both needed company: the beluga stood alone at level 12, and the small end had nothing that lives in a loach's kind of water.

• Added: mullet, anglerfish, black marlin, blobfish, bluefin tuna, loach, whale shark, nelma, ocean sunfish, pollock, red piranha, tiger shark — each with its own art, water and way of being caught. 93 ⇒ 105 species.
• Level 12: beluga ⇒ beluga and whale shark.
• Artwork on disk: 7.8 MB ⇒ 4.0 MB (the 93 existing sprites compressed, nothing redrawn).

Koi are bred, not found

The five koi items were five fish that happened to be red and white. Real koi are one animal with a genotype, and a breeder's whole hobby is reading it. So: one fish, five colour loci, seventeen named varieties that fall out of the combinations — and the rules a breeder would recognise. A line breeds true. Surprises come from crossing lines, not from thin air.

• Loci: W white ground, R red, B black, G lustre, T crown — a pair of alleles each, dominant written first.
• Varieties: 5 ⇒ 17. Nine come out of the water; eight — tancho, yamabuki, platinum ogon, sakura ogon, yamatonishiki, kin showa, kin hi utsuri, shiro muji — are bred and nothing else.
• Tancho is the recessive tt on a kohaku. A kohaku line carries TT and cannot throw one; a tancho line breeds it true; tancho × kohaku hides it for a generation and the F2 shows one in four.
• Kohaku × kohaku gives kohaku — the odd shiro muji where a carrier drops the red, never a dark fish, never a metallic one.
• A wild koi is pure at its ground and its lustre and a mongrel at the red and the black — the card shows the carriers (Rr, Bb), which is where a sanke line drops a bekko.
• Yamabuki, the gold koi, is a karasu with the lustre on. The lustre reaches a pond only on a wild kujaku or gin bekko — one koi in thirteen.
• Prices: tancho ×4 a plain fish, yamabuki ×3.5, by variety at every counter.
• One drawing paints all seventeen: four tint layers cut from one sprite, plus an eye layer that takes no colour, so a white koi keeps its eye.
• Old worlds: the five koi items you already have keep their items, prices and journal pages; a caught koi is drawn as its variety from the first tick it is carried.

Carp wear their genotype

Scale cover in carp is a real two-locus system, and it is one here. Three carp items ⇒ one carp with a genotype (the sazan keeps its own id: its own price, its own fight).

• Loci: K scaled / k mirror, N nude (lethal doubled) / n normal.
• Varieties: scaled K_ nn, mirror kk nn, linear K_ Nn, leather kk Nn. Mirror breeds true; leather never can — NN is a dead egg, so a leather pair loses a quarter of its clutch, which is exactly why a leather carp is worth more.
• Drawing: a carp is drawn as the variety its genotype gave it; the linear carp has its own sprite. Nothing you already caught changes item, price or journal page.

The pattern index

Two kohaku of the same weight should not be the same fish. The index is one number, 0–999, on every carp and koi, and it draws.

• Families: twelve, of uneven width — plain, drift, crown, banded, speckled, mask, marbled, veined, dappled, ghost, ember, aurora.
• On the fish: a marking in the family's shape — banded is banded, mask is a dark head — cut to each sprite, carrying the fish's own scales and shading underneath, moved a notch by the index so neighbours are cousins rather than twins. The koi's mask, bands and aurora are hand-drawn; the carps wear the same drawing re-projected onto their own bodies.
• Gems: twelve exact indices — sapphire, gold, emerald, jet, amethyst, pearl, ruby, copper, jade, amber, opal, obsidian. The whole fish one saturated colour; the counter pays ×6. One landed fish in 83 is a gem; a named one is one in a thousand.
• Heritable and never exact: a bred fish takes the mean of its parents plus a drift; a line breeds toward a family.
• Data tag riverfishing:patterned — a pack that wants another species collecting patterns adds it there.

A sazan and a carp can spawn together

A profile names the ids it will spawn with, and every cross carries a strength you read off the egg count.

• Pools: carp + sazan + koi (1.0); the two crucians (1.0); beluga + sterlet + sturgeon (0.8 — bester has been farmed on that fact since the fifties); salmon + trout + char (0.5); zander + volga zander (0.35); whitefish + nelma (0.3); the four breams (0.2, and 0.9 for bream × white bream); roach + rudd (0.35).
• Fry take the mother's species and a genome crossed from both parents — breeding a carp out of a wild sazan is a thing you can do.
• The silver crucian clones: her eggs need the male's milt to start dividing and none of his genes, so the clutch is a copy of her, whoever the father was.

Specialists

• biomes_require: a profile can demand several biome groups at once where the old list meant any one of these. Sixteen species ask for a conjunction — a taimen wants cold AND a river, an arapaima warm AND jungle — and they are the ones worth hunting for.

Water

Geography, at last

Minecraft has weather, not geography: the same swamp repeats to the world border, so a fish gated on biomes lived everywhere its climate occurred. The world is now cut into four faunal provinces by the seed.

• Provinces: palearctic, nearctic, neotropic, indomalaya — organic regions about 3,000 blocks across, fixed forever.
• A species outside its province is absent. No factor, no half rate.
• The sea is undivided, and so are the fish people carried everywhere: 37 species name no province.
• Species per province: 59 palearctic, 24 nearctic, 18 neotropic, 15 indomalaya.
• The sounder names your province on the bar and the water card; the chart paints the regions once ~1,000 blocks fit across its face.
• Two ways round it: travel — or a claimed pond, which stands outside the gate entirely.

Stocking is a brood, not a dice roll

Releasing a fish used to roll for "settled" — low single digits per fish, seventeen fish to fill a pond. Now each water keeps a book.

• To settle a species: one mature ♀ and one mature ♂ (the card says which), or thirty fry — living through one whole spawning window in water that suits them at least halfway.
• The release message is a checklist: sexes, fit, days to settle. Hostile water refuses outright; the wrong continent says so.
• Until settled the transplant is temporarily catchable off what you banked, counted by heads, and disperses if the brood never completes.
• What comes out of a stocked water: a founder — one of the fish you put in — until the brood has spawned, and their cross after it. 250 kohaku fry are 250 kohaku.
• Fry are not fish until they are: a water holding only fry gives a net nothing for twelve days; the fish they become are counted the day they mature.
• The release reads the same water the finder priced — the best column within three blocks, not the one your feet are in — so "it will thrive here" and "it will not survive here" stop being two answers about one pond.

Private ponds

• A sign within three blocks of water claims that body, up to 600 blocks — a dug pit, a village pond, never a river.
• In a claimed pond: no wild fish move in; depth, width, biome and province gates step back (a carp lives in a dug pit); your own net is legal; the wait between hauls is a third.
• The sign is a board on a post, faces whoever plants it, and its hitbox is the sign.

The pond is a farm

• A settled species with a pair in the water grows on its own once every spawning window — more with a fertile bloodline and good cover.
• A settled species changes the water: grass carp eat the weed; silver carp clear it and the sight hunters feed harder; carp muddy the bed and the salmonids leave; a settled pike keeps the small cyprinids down.
• A population has a genome: everything released is averaged into the water's bloodline — size share scales the fish, colour share the morphs, vigour share the recovery.
• A keepnet sells whole: prime fish at market, the rest at half, netted at a third.
• The sounder's sample view lists the ledger: settled species, stock, brood, bloodline, days to the next growth, upgrades in reach.

Water upgrades

Five blocks for a pond of your own, counted within 24 blocks of the water.

Nets, poaching and reputation

A rod takes the one fish that was hungry. A net takes everything, including next spring. Nets are for the pond you stocked yourself.

• Seine: 1–3 fish a minute, 64 hauls. Cast net: at most one every 15 s, 32 hauls.
• A netted fish carries a card that says NETTED — and POACHED when the water was not yours. It never loses that.
• Poaching: every fisherman within earshot saw it: reputation −5 per haul, and the water empties twice as fast.
• Reputation is a signed number. Under zero the trusted shelf shuts; at −15 the board is blank. Restitution is 5 kg of mature fish per point, released into wild water — and a poached fish put back buys no pardon.
• A net pays the ledger like a rod: a settled water from its head count, an unsettled brood from its book.

The electrofisher

• A culled species stays culled: stocking it back is refused at the bank the way hostile water refuses one, and it has no temporary population to bite off. Only the operator who removed it puts it back.

The Aquarium

It is a tank now

Right-click the aquarium and it opens.

• Slots: six fish, food, groundbait, water, result, two modules.
• Spawning: a mature ♀ and ♂ of one species (or a pair from the same pool), in the species' window, fed — bait 1 day, a jar of groundbait 2 (and a quarter more eggs), fish meal 3 (likewise), fish oil a day off the run — water not below half, three days unbroken. A missed day resets the count.
• The clutch: ~25 eggs for an ordinary hen, 40 at twice the weight; FF lays half again; two nude carriers lose a quarter.
• Incubation: take the fish out — 4 days where the climate suits the species, 8 where it does not, 4 with a warm outflow; stops below a quarter water. You watch it on the tank floor: beads, eye spots, the milky dead ones, tails, fry along the glass.
• Hatch: vigour decides — VV nine in ten, vv one in two; a snag pile +15%.
• Fry are an item: throw them into water to stock it (seven in ten survive bare water, nineteen in twenty with snags and an aerator), or lift them out with the fry trap. They become fish on their own twelve-day clock.
• Fry are drawn as the fish they will be — variety, genes and pattern — in the hand and in the tank.
• The water: a bucket is 100%; it fouls −8 a day plus −2 per fish; an aerator halves that and blows +5 back.

The tank shows its water and its modules

• Water colour reads the tank: clear blue at 100 ⇒ green murk at 50 (the line under which nothing spawns) ⇒ brown at 0, and less see-through as it fouls.
• Modules are drawn as their blocks in the back corners of the gravel — left slot left, right slot right.
• Six fish swim as six fish, in three depth lanes, big enough to see; a flatfish works the floor.

Roe and fry are goods

• Roe sells to a fisherman — sturgeon and salmon roe at three times the fish's price.
• Fry are sold by the bucket for the day's order species, and one post in two on the board's third line is a fry order — twenty, thirty or forty, paid like a contract.

Tackle & Fishing

Four new lures

• Spinnerbait — weedy, coloured water (13 species answer it). Bladebait — cold water, vertical work (11). Swimbait — the trophy end (29). Wacky worm — finesse (8).

Fish meal, fish oil, and a potion

• Fish meal: three small fish (or a bucket of fry) grind into bone meal for the fields and protein for the groundbait.
• Oily fish: herring, mackerel, salmon, pink salmon, sabrefish, eel, bluefish, bluefin tuna, pollock render down in a furnace or on a campfire — and in a brewing stand: an awkward potion under any oily fish is a Potion of Fish Oil on every loader; an empty bottle under one is the oil item on NeoForge and Forge (Fabric's API type-checks both ends as potions, so there the bottle stays a furnace job).
• Potion of Fish Oil: dolphin's grace + water breathing 1:30, regeneration 0:45, resistance 1:30, and it clears mining fatigue outright. Glowstone: second level, shorter. Redstone: 4:00. Gunpowder: throwable.

The gauges

• The cast gauge reads in metres — the same function the server throws with — on an oak-and-brass sheet, the unreachable band of an under-loaded rig hatched red.
• The hookset gauge is read on the same frame: four flat grey rectangles ⇒ the cast gauge's brass, green and orange zones, a needle.

Seasons without Serene Seasons

• The mod keeps its own calendar when Serene Seasons is absent — 24 days a season, early/mid/late, a 96-day year — so seasonal bites, spring restocking and spawning work everywhere. With Serene Seasons installed, its calendar is read as before.

Interface

Every fish carries its card

A fish you caught was three grey lines. It is a framed card now, and it is not decoration: contracts read it, the tank breeds from it, the counter prices by it.

• On the card: badges (trophy, morph, legend, prime, foul-hooked, netted, poached), value, nature, location, size class and sex, weight and length, group and lifestyle, whether it belongs in that water, who caught it, when, on what.
• Under Shift: bait, water, time, season, weather, the bed, the hole or drop-off, the genes, the pattern index.
• Nature — timid, wary, greedy, bold — is rolled at the bite and is what you felt in the fight.
• Latin names on every fish. Fish caught before this release have no card and keep the old lines.

Contracts

The first thing in the mod that takes the fish.

• The board: each fisherman posts three jobs a day; a post you took is greyed; the board says when it turns over.
• The paper: three bream from 500 g — from a river, on a float rod, at night. The fish's own card says whether it was caught on those terms, so the fish can sit in a chest for a week with the rod in another one. Fish in a keepnet count.
• Limits: two papers at a time, seven days each.
• Pay: emeralds, journal XP and reputation; at 5, 15 and 30 points the counter opens a shelf nobody else is shown.

The fish finder is an instrument

Six lines of chat ⇒ a screen, a strip and a chart.

• Right-click — the section: the bed along your aim, metre by metre, coloured by what it is made of, the fish standing where their depth is met; click a species for what the mod knows about it here, a blocked one for why it will not bite.
• Crouch + right-click — sounding: a marker cast five blocks wide finds holes and drop-offs. Fish hold on them; casting on one is a real bite bonus.
• Hold it — the strip: a sounder trace scrolls on the HUD; under it a needle to the nearest mark, or the one you picked on the chart.
• The chart: everything you have ever sounded, pan and zoom, out to sixty-four blocks a pixel — 27,000 blocks across the face — with the provinces painted under the water.
• The chart belongs to the sounder: filed under the finder's own id, in the world save. Buy a second finder and it starts blank; sell a surveyed one and you are selling the survey.
• The sample view: clarity, climate, the season's third, oxygen, cover, the ecosystem, the farm ledger, the province.
• The bottom moves the bite: cyprinids like mud and clay, predators rock and gravel, salmonids gravel — a nudge, never a gate.

The journal

• Recipes as a bench: a list of ingredient names ⇒ the crafting grid, slots where the recipe puts them, tag ingredients cycling.
• A bait's catch list is the fish themselves.
• Five new guide pages under a new shelf group, Fish farming: stocking, breeding, genes, upgrades — and Half a planet under Reading the water. Every existing page was read against the code and corrected where it had drifted (the stocking odds that no longer exist, a nod that never did, a taper rule that was backwards), then gone over in all three languages.
• Section headings on the longest pages, the same in all three languages.

The fish in the water

• Who is there: chosen by habitat fit ⇒ bite-weighted — the water shows the fish that bite; the rare ones pass through one hour in four; small fish reach the far bank as schools.
• How they move: schools keep their numbers, a fish beats and glides, a predator that notices your bait comes to look and loses interest, carp roll, salmon leap. A fish gets up to speed instead of changing it. The flat sprite swims with a wave down its body.
• In the water and in the tank a fish is drawn as its item — the extruded sprite, sized by the fish. (3D bodies pulled from the sprites exist behind /rfrod fish3d on, off by default.)

Compatibility & Tools

• Terralith and Oh The Biomes You'll Go: two hundred modded biomes have their water named — salt, fresh, swamp, and which are cherry groves by another name (a sakura grove holds koi and gets its own pond). Neither mod is required.
• 26.2 joins the supported list: four Minecraft versions, eight jars.
• /rffish give <species> [variety|random|all] [count] [pattern] (op) — a fish made the way the water makes one, card and all; all on a koi is one of each of the seventeen.
• Reading a stack's data no longer deep-copies it every time — the card is read a lot.

Bugfixes

Only what was broken in 0.8.2. Bugs that appeared and were fixed while 0.9.0 was being built are not listed.

• The beluga can be landed. A head-shake was being billed as a whole dive — forty a fight, thirteen bars of drain against a bar that holds one. Charged for dives only, and a check now plays every species through its own fight.
• The fish stopped convulsing when they sped up. The tail phase is integrated, never multiplied — at a hundred thousand ticks it was moving 1,700 radians a frame, worse the older the world.
• The crash on casting a float rod (NeoForge 1.21.1, reported three times as "the stick rod"): the line renderer drew the bobber into a buffer already closed under it. Fixed at the root; the rod pod had the same shape waiting.
• A cast could land in a lake under the ground. The scan stops at the first block that would stop the tackle falling; ice is still fallen through. Water under a roof is cast into from under the roof.
• The start of the line jumped for a frame with the rod in hand — tip freshness was measured in ticks and is measured on the wall clock.
• The rod pod hands over the right rod: a false alarm no longer outranks the fish on the next rod.
• A crank is a crank — reeling no longer swings the rod like an axe (two causes, one per side, and they stacked).
• The bench dyes the lure again. A dye was consumed and never applied since the hook picker moved the slots.

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