I have caught almost every single fish in Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV). I’m only missing a handful of regular fish from the latest patch, as well as some spear fish from Dawntrail. Yes, this includes ocean fish; I’ve caught them all, spectral and not, across both routes.

Let me back up and take you on a journey through this niche community so you can full appreciate how unhinged this is.

Fishing in FFXIV is not like fishing in most games. Catching most of the fish in the game is straightforward; you rock up, you apply the correct bait, you catch the fish. However, some of them are more complicated than that.

Some fish will only show up at certain times of an in-game day. With an in-game day lasting 70 minutes, you’ll still have a decent amount of chances to catch the fish in question, as it’s always just over an hour before you get another shot. Each in-game hour lasts two minutes and 55 seconds, so for example, a fish which is up for two hours (which is pretty common) will be available for five minutes and 50 seconds at a time.

Some fish will only show up in certain weather conditions. This is random, but thankfully, players have created handy tools which will show you future weather conditions. Weather changes every eight hours of in-game time, which is 23 minutes and 20 seconds of real time.

Some fish will only show up in certain weather conditions that have been preceded by another, specific weather condition/s. Some weather conditions can be quite rare, so this criteria leads to some fish being down for long periods of time.

When weather combines with a time requirement, fish can start becoming unavailable for days at a time. Not in-game days; I’m talking real-world days. And of course, it can be at any time, so some of those availabilities will be when you’re not free. You might be sleeping, at work, studying, at a birthday party… anything.

Some fish require you have intuition active, which you gain by catching certain other fish at the same fishing hole. You know you’ve got it because a little message will pop up and a blue symbol will appear on your screen. When a fish requires intuition, it will not bite unless you have it, even if you show up in the correct time and weather conditions. Once you’ve got intuition, you’ll retain for a set amount of time, during which the fish you’re after now has a chance to bite. The length of intuition varies between 12 seconds to a full weather window of 23 minutes and 20 seconds, depending on the fish.

To keep track of it all, a player maintains the Fish Tracker App, which shows you which fish are currently available and allows you to mark fish as caught once you land them. It also shows when fish are next available. You can filter by a few different categories to display the fish you want to see. You can also click to see the next 10 windows for a given fish. Below are the next available windows for one of the most notorious (which also stretches the definition of “fish”):

It’s not uncommon for people to set alarms for rare fish windows. Some even set them if the fish is available in the middle of the night, which is… too much for me. I’ll just wait for next time. But if I’m home and not otherwise busy? I’ll definitely set an alarm 15 minutes out to give myself time to finish what I’m doing and prep for the fish. I’ll usually check what’s coming up, too, so I can log out near the next fish I plan to go for.

Fish have all of these prerequisites… and we are told none of them by the development team.

The only piece of information we have when new fish release is the location for each one, but we’re not told that. We only know because there are weirdos out there who have spent an inordinate amount of time catching every single fish, who can then open the fishing log and see where their ticks have disappeared.

People are able to find out pretty quickly if a fish has an intuition message. And… that’s it. We don’t know the time of day, we don’t know the weather, we don’t know the preceding weather, we don’t know the bait.

To figure out the conditions for each fish, the community comes together.

Fishers gather on a Discord server called Fisherman’s Horizon, or, more simply, Fishcord. There is a spreadsheet for each new fish, with a table of all the possible weather conditions and baits usable at that spot. People who are willing to help will sign up to be testers, meaning we’re happy to be notified whenever there’s an important testing window coming up. Initially, we’ll be notified by the spreadsheet chief when any rare weather windows will be up soon. Once we’ve narrowed down the conditions for a fish (because someone got a bite or catch), the notifications end up being for all viable windows. We’ll fish in a window till someone catches it or we’ve fished enough to be able to confidently rule it out.

Because we have no idea which weather conditions or bait we need to be fishing with, we just… brute force it. Lots of people will be fishing at lots of different times, using different bait, and report in with the information once they stop fishing. If a given weather condition, time of day, and bait type has 20 reports, we can safely rule it out. You can see one of my reports from August below:

Fishing for partial windows is fine; you just make sure the reported fishing time is accurate.

There’s one piece of information people often leave out of their reports. Can you guess which one that is?

People start to lose it a little when testing drags on for a while. The hardest fish release every two years, shortly before the next expansion. We’ll be due for the next set of those early to mid next year. In the last batch of super hard ones, I was amused to watch this happen live (Icepikes are a common bycatch for this ass hole):

I love fishing because I find it so relaxing. Even when I fail to catch a fish, I don’t mind because it just means I’ll have another opportunity to unwind and cast a virtual line. It also takes me to places in the game I never would have otherwise seen, like the trans pride crystal cave in Il Mheg.

I enjoy working through lists, and this has been a huge list I’ve steadily ticked off over several years. There’s a part of me that wishes there was more so I can keep fishing, but it’s also so satisfying cracking open my fishing log and seeing all the ticks.

And it lets me do this with other people. Unlike most spreadsheet-related activities, fishing in FFXIV has an incredible community around it.

The Community

The people who fish are generally an awesome bunch of people. I’ve been lurking for a while and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone be an ass hole. There’s a lot of people who come in and ask questions, and whoever’s around will just answer it, no matter how basic the question, no condescension.

It’s also so… gratifying, knowing there are a bunch of people all around the world casting a line at the same time as you. Sometimes when I report at the end of a window and watch everyone else’s reports roll in, I lean back and appreciate that all these other people I don’t know are working towards the same goal as I am. Players are spread across different worlds within the game, which means we could be in the same place but not see each other. So to be fishing alone and then see a dozen or more other people were in the same spot at the same time… There’s something special about it. It’s also fun when I see someone else at a fishing hole and then see their name pop up in Fishcord.

Some of the core people involved in testing are stats nerds, so you sometimes see some incredible distribution curves and other graphs show up in the testing channel, alongside technical discussions. I love how hard people go for this.

The last testing period was mostly over in August, but there was one rare weather condition that didn’t appear until mid-September. So a number of us all met on the same world and carried out a successful test where we could all see each other. I had it in my calendar.

I’m looking forward to the next set. We don’t know exactly when it will drop, but I think it’ll be fourish months after the last ones in early August, so… early December, more or less?

I hope you enjoyed this window into a niche gaming community you probably never knew existed!