Easy Fishing Guide: 0-35 and beyond By: airspirit There are a number of guides out there for fishing, and many of them are quite misguided in many ways. Most of them depend on you having a ton of cash to start with (to replace a 5K pole or more an hour), or recommend vastly inferior levelling areas. They also send you for extremely long periods of time into areas that will make you absolutely no money. I've done this personally, and I've levelled to level 34 now (ding ding) in a little over two weeks fishing 3-4 hours a day (some days more some less) with no regard for the day's element, moon phase, ANYTHING. Well, lets get down to brass tacks. First off, you need around $30K to start. This will save you a ton of money in the long run and catapult you forward. Go down to the AH and buy yourself full fishing gear. IF YOU DON'T REEL THE FISH IN YOU MAKE NO MONEY AND YOU GET LESS SKILL. This is a no brainer. If you can't afford it, then start farming like crazy until you can. If you don't have this gear in the beginning you are gimping your performance just as much as a BLM/WAR gimps themselves. Just do it. Second, grab yourself around 10-12 stacks of insect balls, a sabiki rig, and 10-12 yew or bamboo rods. The paste will cost 300 a stack, the rig costs around 2K each, and the yew and bamboo rods cost 1-150 each. You should be able to get full fishing gear for around 12-15K. For now, just stick that rig in your safe and forget about it: if you use it, you'll lose it. Starting out, head up to S'andoria. Screw Windhurst anyway: big carp and rusty items break rods, and both of those problems are found in Windy. Hie your arse down to the Knight Well in W. Ronfaure and start fishing for moat carps. "But I'm only level 0!!!" Hell, with full fishing gear you're now level 4, so don't worry about it. Start fishing with your balls and yew and pull those suckers up. You will only catch moat carp down here, and rusties will break your poles. By the time you break all of your poles, you will have gained a few levels of skill. If you're lucky, you'll be around level 4-5, and you'll have around 4 stacks of moat carps. Sell these for 3-4K a stack and you just paid for a good deal of your fishing gear. So, now that you're level 4-5, get yourself a composite rod. These will cost 9-12K depending on your server. This is when you pull out your sabiki rig. Put any leftover poles/bait/fish in your safe and get yourself down to Mhuara. With your comp/sabiki you'll be catching Bastore Sardines, Yellow Globes, Kelp (toss this crap ... or keep it if you want the 17 gil per), rusties (meh), and silver rings (1K each at the AH!). I've caught 12 silver rings in one four hour fishing trip. You'll also typically catch 5-6 stacks of sardines and 2 stacks of yellow globes and gain a couple of points of skill. This is a great powerlevelling place. Sell the globes in Bastok AH and the sardines in Windhurst AH to take advantage of the guilds. Keep doing this all the way through level 14-15. Screw moat carps for now ... only go back to those (after level 5 use comp/insect balls at the knight well) when you need bottomfeeding money. After 14-15, it is time to catch some salmon. Get yourself three fly lures (yes: three) and go to E. Ronfaure with your composite rod and lures and head to the little bridge to the SC of the map E of the lower zone entrance to W. Ronfaure. If you stand on that bridge and look south, you'll see a couple of schools of fish sprites. Stand your fishin' arse between the two and start casting. You will NEVER break your rod here, but you WILL break your line occassionally. This is why you have spare lures ... you'll lose one every 2-3 hours typically. This is the one place in this guide that you will make crap money and most likely LOSE money: the salmon and trout you catch only sell for around 50 each to vendors, though this lets you sell the stockpile of other fish and rings you've been building up to keep yourself solvent. Levelling should be pretty fast here. Once you hit 20, you're done with this place. Some people say stay, but the levelling is so slow it is unreal. You have a couple of choices here: you can fish for catfish, or you can fish for carps. The catfish are slow early on, so my personal preference is to catch more carps. Head over to N. Gustaberg via Port Bastok and park yourself on the bridge over that big arse river in the north (not the little one down by the town). Face the waterfall and start casting away with your composite and insect balls. You will only catch tricolored carps and gold carps here and you'll never break your rod (nowhere in this guide will break your composite rod). Levelling is pretty rapid here, and the tri's are worth 100 each and the golds 600. Keep at this place until 24. This is where you will come to the first real bad stretch in your fishing career: Head back to the knight well and start fishing with a sinking minnow on your composite. I'd bring three of these, though, because there is something big, mean, and nasty in that hole that'll break your rod and tell you you don't have enough skill to pull it up. This is where you get to slog through the next three levels of hell ... these bite slow (even though this is the fastest catfish spot in the game) and you will probably only catch a dozen or two in a four hour powerfishing session. Keep at it, though, and you'll eventually hit 27. At this point, you have two choices: head over to the W/E Saru cliffs and fish with the rest of fishingdom, or head to S Gustaberg and level faster. Grab yourself 6 stacks of sliced sardines (or make them yourself ... a lvl 4 cook can make these pretty reliably) and stand out by the lighthouse fishing. You get Z Bass, Ogre Eels, and Gold Lobsters. This isn't particularly FAST levelling, but it's faster than the other cliffs because of the addition of the Z Bass to the lineup. Once you hit 30, you will get to migrate again ... and if you were lucky, you made a little money selling the Lobsters to the guild. There are three places you can go here: the sea cliffs (be it in Saru or Gusta), La Theine, or Jugner. The cliffs will make you absolutely no money for quite a while. "But if that was the case, why are all the bots parked there day and night?" Notice that they have Lu Shang rods 9/10 times? You already know the answer from fishing in S Gusta: you get an insane amount of "too small" catch losses due to your composite pole. Because of this, you will probably catch just enough fish to cover the cost of your sliced sardines (you won't catch crap with either of the minnows) if you're lucky. There is a better option: turtles. Head to La Theine if you want safer fishing or Jugner if you want the occasional 30+ monster coming up your line to eat you with your composite rod and FROG LURES (4K each at the AH only ... high level goldsmithing and alchemy synthesis), and start fishing. I would recommend La Theine personally: you seem to get more turtles there than in Jugner Lake since Jugner is mostly carp and bass. These turtles will level you insanely fast and because you're using lures you only have bait cost if one breaks your line. Added bonus: they sell for 700 each to the vendors, and you also can fish up rusty caps worth over 2000 each. I'm currently over 34 in fishing and the skill gains are still going stong on these. I haven't lost a lure yet (hint: these bastards are rare, so grab a few if you see them ... it took me three days of hunting every AH worldwide before I found 3 of them and I bought them all), and I'm making around 10-15K per hour fishing these things up in La Theine with only minor risk (being a 44 RDM, I can nuke the hell out of the occasional mob I pull up) and getting crazy skill ... I'm going to stay here as long as possible. EDIT: Try Jugner if you have little luck in La Theine. I've got some reports that it is better there for some. Give it a whirl if you're frustrated. Continued: at level 38 I headed into South Qufim. If you can handle the mobs here, this is a wonderful place to fish with a composite pole and minnow, since you will catch twice as many bluefish per hour as the Sarubaruta cliffs and therefore will skill faster. If you use a shrimp lure you will also catch stacks of herring as well that sell for 180 each and can be sold in stacks (I imagine) for good money to cooking crafters (or use it yourself ... if you haven't started cooking you better, because you will need to make at least insect balls while going for your Lu Shang the normal way). The downside is that since Qufim is a noob pit, you will deal with many people harassing you (the constant R jOo @ b0+??? nonsense), so be warned. After comparing two hours of Qufim to two hours of the Saru cliffs, they both seem to have an equal amount of losers hanging out by them. On a better note, the GMs don't seem to have any problems giving out temporary bans to them for harassing you, so it may be a good thing to report them before you blacklist them. I'm currently up to level 40 now and still pushing strong. So far while levelling up through 34 I've made around 300K in PROFIT after spending probably 100K in gear and bait total. Things only get better from here, though, when you can grab your Lu Shang (I'm going to hate this quest) and pull up 1500+ gil fish by the truckload. I hope you all find this helpful, and for god's sake: leave the fishermen around you alone. Many of us are powerfishing and aren't there to socialize, especially the higher level ones. When each cast can net you upwards of 500 gil, they're focused on getting as many casts in as possible, not the cost of cheeseburgers at your local McDonald's or how cute your guinea pig is when you stick it in the microwave. On this note comes a recommendation: you will notice a large and growing contingent of bot hunters that will harass you because you have a fishing pole. The following macro can help if you get the "r j00 @ b0+?" messages: /tell You are an annoying noob, welcome to my blacklist! /wait 5000 /blist add Noobs harassing honest fishermen make baby Jesus cry. Summary: 1-5: moat carps, bamboo or yew/insect balls, Knight Well 5-15: sardines/globes, composite/sabiki rig, Mhuara 15-20: salmon/trout, composite/fly lure, E. Ronfaure 20-24: carps, composite/insect balls, N. Gustaberg 24-27: catfish, composite/sinking minnow, Knight Well 27-30: eel/bass/lobster, composite/sliced sardine, S. Gustaberg 30-38: red terrapin, composite/frog lure, La Theine 38-42+: bluetail, composite/minnow or shrimp lure, S. Qufim Good luck all.