Fish Odds 1.6 (Looking for Feedback)

[Giant Octopodes]

Greetings!

In 1.5 I used Blade's fish odds sheet because I was lazy and it was available. In 1.6 the introduction of the Jellies impacts probabilities enough for me to want to revisit the topic and have a good resource. So without further ado here's the very much so WIP Sheet:

FishOddsPub1.6.1

docs.google.com

It doesn't even have a cover sheet yet, much less Ginger Island, the Mines, the Sewers, Secret Woods, the Witch's Swamp, and so forth. It needs headers bolded and / or underlined and to be gussied up in general. It's also missing a lot of the functionality I plan to eventually add in terms of global config settings and some other stuff I'll avoid promising in case I don't deliver on it :-)

But, in its current form it's usable for what it is, so I wanted to get it out there so I can get feedback on the overall layout, what it's doing, etc. The idea being you set in the dropdowns what your season, weather, fishing level, water depth, # of quality bobbers, and whether or not you're using the training rod. For each fish, you can also set how often you catch it, and, if you do catch it, how often it's a perfect catch (so if you have 50% / 50% you're indicating you catch it half the time, but half of those times it's a perfect catch, or 25% of the times overall). It'll show you what the percentage is of the fish for the various hours (600 is from 6:00 to 7:00, 2400 is from midnight to 1am, etc), as well as what your expected income per cast looks like, how many fish are available, and so forth.

Questions are welcome so I can build out the info which is worth including in a cover / intro sheet, and feedback on what would make it better is certainly welcome as well. Note that you will need to make a copy to edit anything, including the dropdowns. And once you've copied it to avoid breaking anything only modify the dropdowns, choosing from one of the available values.

Thanks!

 

[FilthyGorilla]

Definitely include the different baits that affect bite chance and curiosity lure as I think the people actually wondering about specific bite chances are the ones already trying to optimize them.

There are also a few interesting mechanics especially with jellies which make them straight up impossible to catch under certain circumstances and quite forceable if you know what you're doing

 

[Giant Octopodes]

Definitely include the different baits that affect bite chance and curiosity lure as I think the people actually wondering about specific bite chances are the ones already trying to optimize them.

There are also a few interesting mechanics especially with jellies which make them straight up impossible to catch under certain circumstances and quite forceable if you know what you're doing

Magic Bait is easily implemented due to the way it works. Basically I just need to wrap the checks for weather, season etc in a giant "or" statement with the other option being magic bait is selected.

The Curiosity Lure and the Targeted Bait I would love to include, but have no idea how to do so at this time. The Curiosity Lure I couldn't find the actual mechanics behind it, if you can point me to what they are and how I can validate it in the game files I'd appreciate it. The Targeted Lure, it's complicated because it not only enhances the spawn multiplier (easily done) but it also does the whole '3 selections to pick from, loop twice' thing.

With the existing mechanics, I can on the spot calculate relative percentages with the math from the wiki, which essentially boils down to (the chance you catch it x ((the average fail rate of the other fish)^the number of fish before it in the queue), averaged for the different number of fish possible before it in the queue, from 0 to all of the other fish. It's asking 'how likely is it that that all fish before it fail to get caught, and then this one gets caught', and since it's equally likely it'll be at any given queue position you can just average it.

Now, that's obviously not perfectly accurate, using the average of the other fish's failure rates isn't technically appropriate and isn't mathematically equivalent to calculating the probabilities for each fish individually and summing the probabilities appropriately. But the difference between the theoretical total failure rates (the trash percentage) and the sum derived from this approximation has been close, like at most 2% or so apart, to where any given fish I have no cause to believe is off by more than a percent.

If you account for the effect of targeted bait, that approximation method flies out the window completely. And the math necessary to actually determine the likelihoods, I don't know how to implement into a Google Sheet. If anyone knows how to do it, I'd welcome it and would love to incorporate it, because I agree it would be super fascinating to see how you could leverage different strategies with it to force specific results.

The sheet is updated by the way, still very much a WIP just updated it with the progress thus far, including Ginger Island locations and the start of a cover sheet. Tons still to do but it's already useful as is. For example I had no idea that the Secret Woods was such an excellent fishing location while it's raining, it's actually better than the town or forest river in spring, and better than the ocean in summer.

 

[FilthyGorilla]

The Curiosity Lure and the Targeted Bait I would love to include, but have no idea how to do so at this time. The Curiosity Lure I couldn't find the actual mechanics behind it, if you can point me to what they are and how I can validate it in the game files I'd appreciate it. The Targeted Lure, it's complicated because it not only enhances the spawn multiplier (easily done) but it also does the whole '3 selections to pick from, loop twice' thing.

I can probably go check the code or find where I've dug the specific mechanics for the curiousity lure up before for some legend/lava eel fishing calcs before

With the existing mechanics, I can on the spot calculate relative percentages with the math from the wiki, which essentially boils down to (the chance you catch it x ((the average fail rate of the other fish)^the number of fish before it in the queue), averaged for the different number of fish possible before it in the queue, from 0 to all of the other fish. It's asking 'how likely is it that that all fish before it fail to get caught, and then this one gets caught', and since it's equally likely it'll be at any given queue position you can just average it.

Now, that's obviously not perfectly accurate, using the average of the other fish's failure rates isn't technically appropriate and isn't mathematically equivalent to calculating the probabilities for each fish individually and summing the probabilities appropriately. But the difference between the theoretical total failure rates (the trash percentage) and the sum derived from this approximation has been close, like at most 2% or so apart, to where any given fish I have no cause to believe is off by more than a percent.

If you account for the effect of targeted bait, that approximation method flies out the window completely. And the math necessary to actually determine the likelihoods, I don't know how to implement into a Google Sheet. If anyone knows how to do it, I'd welcome it and would love to incorporate it, because I agree it would be super fascinating to see how you could leverage different strategies with it to force specific results.

That's fair, there's a lot to ask with the pretty wide set of interaction conflict between everything added in 1.6 (and the new fundamental fishing changes in the update too)

The sheet is updated by the way, still very much a WIP just updated it with the progress thus far, including Ginger Island locations and the start of a cover sheet. Tons still to do but it's already useful as is. For example I had no idea that the Secret Woods was such an excellent fishing location while it's raining, it's actually better than the town or forest river in spring, and better than the ocean in summer.

Do note that on paper doesn't always equate to practical use. Not only is the secret woods farther away from Willy's where you can directly sell and buy fish/fishing related items, it's also a small pond for relatively high difficulty fish, leading to lower quality on average and therefore proportionally less money relative to a quality 'mean' (assuming you were calculating with one).

 

[Giant Octopodes]

Do note that on paper doesn't always equate to practical use. Not only is the secret woods farther away from Willy's where you can directly sell and buy fish/fishing related items, it's also a small pond for relatively high difficulty fish, leading to lower quality on average and therefore proportionally less money relative to a quality 'mean' (assuming you were calculating with one).

Right but that's why I built it this way - you can see at exactly what skill level it stops being advantageous, and judge for yourself if it's worth it. Note that the ocean has its own difficult fish in summer, including the octopus (!), super cucumber, and tuna. Though despite Tuna being 70 vs the Catfish being 75 it's far easier. Regardless, if you have a 50% or worse success rate for catfish (and presumptively the super cucumber, with the octopus being out of the question), the secret woods is worse than the beach. If conversely you have a 75% success rate for the catfish and super cucumber, the secret woods is better.

And since the max depth is lower, it's at fishing 10 specifically (and above) where it shines. Fishing 9 vs 10 has no impact on the beach assuming you're at max depth, it's all gold star stuff anyway. Fishing 9 in the secret woods you've got a 95% silver / 5% gold quality split on non-perfect catches, vs at 10 it's 10% silver / 90% gold. So you'll want to wait until you're 10, or bring sea jellies or trout soup or something if at 9, as it's a more than 20% income difference. And it's worth noting that while you are dealing with more variable quality of fish here, potentially getting a gold / silver / iridium for each, there's only 4 fish you encounter total (one of which is the river jelly) while the beach has 10, making inventory constraints and an inability to sell immediately less of a concern.

In this case it's a paper designed to let you evaluate practical use :-)

 

[Giant Octopodes]

Ok I've been thinking a lot about targeted bait. I think I know how to do it, at a minimum for calculating the odds of the fish being targeted itself. So the way I figure it, success requires two things:
1) There is still a spot in the "bucket" of 3 when it gets to the fish being targeted in the queue
2) It passes the check (with the enhanced spawn rate multiplier)

So basically, you can separate out the chances it passes on the first "round" and the chances it passes on the second "round". For the first round, if it's in positions 1, 2, or 3, guaranteed it gets to make the check. If it's in positions 4 onwards, it makes the check if and only if there have been at most 2 successes so far once it gets to that queue position.

This is then basically an if statement combined with a binomial distribution, we can use the average success rate of other fish AO, the spawn multiplier of the targeted fish SM, the queue size QS, and the queue position QP. And for a given QP it's (if((QP<=3),1,Binom.Dist(2,QP,AO,True))*SM), and we can do a sequence of possible QPs and take the average given all queue positions are equally likely. For the second go round we have effectively the same thing, but given we've cycled through the full queue and we have to multiply it by the failure rate FR of the fish being targeted since it only matters if it failed the first time around. So it's (if(((QP+QS-2)>=3),1,Binom.Dist(2,(QP+QS-2),AO,True))*SM*FR). And we can just add those probabilities together before taking the average, so I think it's basically
=Average((if(Sequence(QS)<=3,1,Binom.Dist(2,Sequence(QS),AO,True))*SM)+(FR*SM*(if((sequence(QS)+(QS-2))<=3),1,Binom.Dist(2,(Sequence(QS)+(QS-2)),AO,True))))

I'm testing it with experimental data to see if it lines up, but I'm curious if anyone can validate if my logic and methodology are sound at a minimum. Figuring out the non-targeted fish is also a bear, given that they can pass their test and still get tossed if the targeted fish gets in the bucket. So whatever I'm doing with them it starts with determining the odds the targeted fish is not caught and going from there. And, I'll need to include sorting out the odds that you never get to 3 passes and catch trash even though it passed the check. But before I even worry about that, two things I need to confirm are:
1) can the same fish pass the checks twice, or does it need to be totally independent fish?
2) If the targeted fish gets on the list but 3 items in total do not get into that bucket, is the targeted fish still caught?

Assistance with those answers, validating the logic on the calculation involved, or how to calculate the odds for non-targeted fish, or whatever else, would certainly be greatly appreciated.