Arelith

Development Suggestions
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• Water Temperature: I'd be nice to have a means to determine water temperature in various fishing spots! This information is discreetly available via some of the fish descriptions, but the ability to get a rough estimate on cold/warm/temperate water would be nice.
• Bait and / or Fishing Bags: Fishing has a very intensive inventory management burden for those who full dive into it. A simple bag that at least could hold fishing guts, small, medium, large, and huge bait would be so precious. Potential improved crafted version using rare fish components/hooks when/if they're implemented too! I'd also recommend all the fish-parts that can be used in herbalism be allowed to be sorted in the herbalism satchels.
• New Recipes: The current design of base fish food and combined feasts is a wonderful set up to add new variety of foods. Tentacles also currently do not have a use! At the bottom I write a recommendation for extra skills and uses for current options.
• More Fishing Consumables: Intuitive consumables that benefit fishing! Things that work like barley, disposable salvage claws that get 'ruined like bait' trying to dig up garbage from the water floor, fish pellets, etc!

Changes & Balance Suggestions
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Fish Food - Skill Buffs

I break down each of the currently implemented foods and their use, as well as discussing their use in fish platters. In summary, I think some of the individual buffs towards food can be allowed to give bigger bonuses at lower skill tiers without negatively affecting balance, and slightly increase the amount of materials used in fish/feasts. The main purpose of these changes is to open up their availability of use; as most skills people either fully invest in them and these items don't work, or they don't use them and these items aren't of interest. With balance in mind, the skills with recommended adjustments are what I've considered "non-oppositional" skills, which has little impact on player-vs-player interactions. For explanation of referencing caps below: hard caps would mean after a certain modifier you receive no bonus; otherwise a soft cap provides a minimum of +1.

• Appraise / Sardine Skewers: I'd simply remove the hard cap and allow anyone to benefit from at least +1 for using this fish. For the recipe. I recommend changing it so that two gutted sardines make one sardine skewer.
• Animal Empathy / Fermented Mackerel: Animal Empathy is one of those all or nothing skills, and don't think there would be a significance impact on balance in removing the hard cap from this food. I'd also recommend altering the recipe so that two mackerel chunks turns into one food.
• Leadership / Jellied Eels: The benefit of bonus leadership only adjusts the aura affects of leadership. As this skill already has a soft cap of its own, I'd remove the hard cap like the previous skills. In addition, I would recommend increasing the number of gutted eels used in the recipe by one.
• Lore / Hearty Salmon Steak: As implemented, this food buff allows a character to make up a small skill gap in being able to use 7th, 6th, or 4th level scrolls. I believe the hard cap in particular is balanced to prevent it from becoming a permanent, recommended buff for high-tier scroll use, but an available option for people who dabble. I would recommend increasing the number of salmon filets used in the recipe by one as well.
• Sail / Shark Fin Soup: This is one of the only skills currently that can be considered an opposed roll important for player vs player. I definitely understand the need for a cap for this skill, but I think in terms of sailing in particular; I'd recommend giving an increase to the smaller tiers. The DCs for any sort of sailing can get drastically high, and sailing tends to be 'all or nothing' due to that importance.
• All - Skill Balance & Usefulness: In addition to changing the cap for the skills, as a second suggestion, I'm going to suggest buffing / removing the scaling for the fish food/platters and instead suggest a flat bonus, with a soft or hard cap. +3 flat for all fish food, or if you're below the thresh hold, +1 or +0 for soft/hard capped skills.

Redefining Fish Platters & The Future.

Literally everything down here is pure suggestion! I've been writing this post for awhile and throwing all the ideas out for discussion.


Feasts by design: Soft cap Skill + Hard cap Skill (+Hard cap Sail if T2)

T1 Feasts give 8 Hours of Well Fed, + 2 Skill Buffs for 8 Hours
T2 Feasts give 16 Hours of Well Fed, + 3 Skill Buffs for 16 Hours;
T3 (Lavish) Feast gives 24 hours of Well Fed, + All Platter Skills for 24 Hours; Small AoE + Expensive Component(s)?

Appraise, Animal Empathy, Leadership, and Search would always give +3. (None of these skills have a significant balance concern for player interaction)
Perform, Lore, Taunt, Spellcraft, and Sail would give +3 if below "30" ranks, +1 if below 50 ranks, or +0. (Skills that impact player interaction, but with hard cap do not put stress on ceiling potential)

T1 Platter Combinations Suggestions.
P1 Appraise + Lore (Sardine Skewers + Hearty Salmon Steak)
P2 Animal Empathy + Perform (Fermented Mackerel + Minnows Recipe*)
P3 Leadership + Taunt (Jellied Eels + Crab Legs Recipe*)
P4 Search + Spellcraft (Cod Liver Recipe* + Tentacles Recipe*)

T2 Feasts
Base Platter + Sharkfin Soup + Raw Fish Ingredients + Rare Fish Ingredients + Generic Fish Ingredients

T3 Fish Platter; Small AoE?
All T2 Platters + Raw Fish Ingredients + Rare Fish Ingredients

New Food Ideas~ (Mostly random suggestions on how to use existing components!)
Deep Fried Calimari (3 Tentacles, 1 Flask of Oil + Raw Ingredients) -> 1 Deep Fried Calimari (Spellcraft)
Baked Crab Cakes (3 Crab, 2 Eggs, + Raw Ingredients) -> 1 Baked Crab Cake (Taunt)
Steamed Minnow Rolls (4 Minnows, + Raw Ingredients) -> 1 Steamed Minnows (Perform)
Cod Liver and Onions (1 Cod Liver + Raw Ingredients) -> Fried Cod Liver (Search)


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Sorry for the scatterbrained post by the end of it, but plenty of things to think about!

Firstly, I can't believe I missed giving tentacles a use. What have I done!?

Water temperature, yes. Good plan. I'll see about something to help with this. Fishing bags are coming next update which is Soon™

Wonderful skill food feedback, thank you. I will do a balance pass.

I absolutely love the item suggestions at the bottom. As soon as I find fitting icons I will get to work!

Again, thank you for the wonderful feedback.

If I may make an additional comment: I've never fished in Arelith except for copper trinkets, or cooked anything, but the ship's cook has reported going around to buy kelp and people get excited when they find kelp underwater, so perhaps it should be made more common? Unless it's intentionally rare. Maybe more experienced fishers could chime in.

Kelp is definitely rare at the moment. I'm getting it buffed also.

Wave Two!

Feedback
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• New fish and additions: Wonderful! The new fish / changes offer some help with some of the scarcity of specific resources (Looking at you, Kelp!) Seeing some of the other components added and an improved value to 'small' fish is nice too!
• Increased feedback with descriptions: If items have a scripted benefit to fishing; it would be nice to either have that effect listed in the description, or offered a vague hint as to its involvement towards fishing. I think its fair to offer Fisherman Wader's a snippet about benefiting fishing speed since its mentioned on the crafting wiki, but if there are any differences between hooks and poles, (especially some of the discovered ones), It would be nice to have a clue as to how they compare.
• Hooks: I feel like the frequency of line snaps could be slightly higher. Overall, I seem to 'find' more hooks than I've lost over time. In concept I imagine hooks to be another tool you have to invest in for the benefits of fishing! I think with some hook / bait size interactions vs fish dynamics could be beneficial~ I also think its probably okay to let damask hooks have a cost of steel + mithril as their components, otherwise there is very little difference between iron and damask hooks in terms of crafting, unless there is a scripted difference.
• Treasure Fish: With the recent update overhauling their bounty, I've noticed a significant decline in the prosperity of hunting treasure fish. I definitely understand preserving the value and rarity of some of the crafting components that were dropping frequently before the update, my experience thus far feels like I've changed from opening fishy loot boxes, to a disfavored scratch off ticket. The amount of time / crafting points invested is fairly significant for dedicated fishing, and, well, I offer some statistics below!
  
  Since the tweak update, I've made about 5,000 crafting points worth of bait as of this post, which is about 25 treasure fish collected. I received one item of significance (A certain crafted item worth one gold if sold to a vendor), one rare crafted component, and the rest of the items have been what most would consider 'junk.' I express this in terms of investment of crafting points for comparative value; If investing those points elsewhere someone could have had 1250 shots with a javelin for the spoils of pirate-slaying sailing, or crafted 840 (1260, brewing bonus) cure critical potions and either used them for adventure, or vendor them for roughly 252,000 (378,000). I think these numbers might help in giving a value on what a treasure sharks estimated value of productivity should be. While I'm all for keeping the piñatas fair, the presence of worthless junk items is a huge let down in the excitement.

Currently writing up a thorough suggestion for the possibility of sea monster hunting, but I'll save that for when the concept is more fleshed out with examples.

It makes sense that the old treasure fish would suddenly feel lacklustre and often with balance passes a mechanic will start overtuned, become undertuned and then find a balance. I will revisit these again. Line snaps will be increased a bit because I do agree that they are very rare. I'll do a pass on the descriptions and hooks as well.

Thanks for the feedback. Suggestions are still closed unfortunately.