How viable is pescatarian?

[MagpieOAO]

New to the game and feels like I'm treading water, largely due to a weird issue with firing my clay bowls :s

I was blessed though and able to actually make them before starving to death and eat the soup that had been taunting me for a couple days. But I've largely collected most of the berry bushes and crops within about a day's round walk (to locations and back) and it seems they'll take the better part of a month to grow veggies, berries weekly, and I see there's no fishing pole and I've hunted about 3 fish but none of them dropped meat. 

So it seems like I'm going to have to hunt =/ 

Especially if it seems some items might require fat to seal things. Or I've seen a bit about bees, is it possible to use beeswax as an alternative? Is there a fish oil drop? I guess I'm hoping for more fishing to make this viable haha. Thanks!

[Lollard]

In vanilla, fish are easy to kill but have a high chance of not dropping anything at all. If you install a mod like Primitive Survival then it's more than viable.

And yes, you can use beeswax to seal crocks, but there's no fish oil.

[LoveWyrm]

I only go for fish in the direst of dire circumstances. Usually I just use the speed boost from the starvation damage ticks to find a bush or some rhyzomes (cattail and tule roots) to cook up, or a random bunny to spear than play the fish lottery.

 

They swim around, the water is not so good for ranged attacks, they sink, you can push the corpse around trying to carve it up, it makes your character wet, and most of the time you don't get anything except a few bones...and if you do get meat, it's not that much satiation.

 

I mean, it works...but to me, it's miserable. Silly stumpy block hands... apparently gutting a fish is so delicate a work that the player race can't pull it off most of the time.

They're fish. Fish are so easy to eat that coastal cities IRL usually thrived very well.

[V1ncent]

As @Lollard and @LoveWyrm said, fish is not that feasibile option as per cost ratio, they do not even spawn that much considering the vast water area. If you go hunt, better off starting with hare and practicing for boar. Believe me, boar is the best target: they give fat to seal the crock and construction for mechanism lately, they are full of red meat which each gives 280 roasted and more in meals, and most importantly, they hit not that hard and do not constantly go panicking when you are nearby so you can land several ranged spear hits on a lazy boar before it reacts.

As for beewax, yes, they can be an alternate for sealing crock, but mostly used for candles and later assembling lanterns. You'd better save the wild bee hive to duplicate your own bee swarm hives, rather than break the hives to get a little amount of beecomb, though.

Another food option, if applicable, is foraging mushrooms. Theay generally spawn in swarm or plain with high rainfall(for the ground variant) and forest(tree variant). Though short in satient compared with real vagetables from farming, they spawn in vast and can be eaten raw with same satient as most berries(80 I think).

Other rare but possible choice is walnut, though I have never found large amount of wanut trees around default spawn area, they seem failed in competition with oak and pine, two bad the seraph is not a squirrel to consume all those nuts.

Edited May 6, 2025 by V1ncent

[dakko]

On 5/5/2025 at 4:48 AM, MagpieOAO said:

So it seems like I'm going to have to hunt =/ 

Is it the fighting aspect of hunting that you don't like, or were you hoping to play as a vegetarian?

Tip: Rabbits are attracted to crops. If you plant something and dig a trench around it (must be minimum 2 blocks deep) they may fall into the trench and you can club them to death (crafting grid, I think a club requires a knife and a block of wood). eta: you needn't water the crop, just it being planted is enough -- or at least that used to be the case; I've not done this in a while.

Tip: You could go into creative mode until you get more comfortable with hunting. The animals will not react to you, which gives you a chance to develop some skill in spear throwing.

If you're hoping to play as a vegetarian, you could change the number of days it takes for berries to mature. The time was recently increased quite a bit, but you could set it to the former time with this command (hit "t" to open the chat box, and paste it there):

/worldconfigcreate float cropGrowthRateMul 2

The value of 2 takes it to the old rate of 4 days to bloom and 4 days to ripen. Valid values are 0.1 to 10.

I hope this helps!

Edited May 6, 2025 by dakko

[Michael Gates]

Fish pretty much suck. Honestly wolves are a better food source. Get good at digging the standard pit trap (3x5x2 deep) and pulling wolves into it. Two per day is just about enough to live on, if you eat some of the fat lumps. Remember to mark your pits on the map and come back every, dunno, couple months; you tend to get rabbits.

A regular pit trap near crops will also grab the bunnies that might want to eat your turnips; animals run around randomly enough that they always end up falling into whatever pit is nearby.

Really the solution to "my farm isn't grown yet and I don't have food" is to range more widely. You need to look at everything within a thousand or two squares of your house ANYWAY-- bees, surface mineral deposits, the various tree types, building up seeds for ENOUGH farm (should be about 64 squares to keep you alive through winter, maybe another 32 for more flax). You'll be able to find enough berries and wild crops if you just cover enough area.