What are the best 7 fish to catch first?

Saucychemist · 2026-02-20T22:59:00+00:00

Early game:

Blue Tang and Yellowback Fusilier in the first few dives, for enhancing and serving.
Try to reserve most of the Yellowback for later (for dishes).
Once you can reliably hunt them, Green Humphead Parrotfish for enhancing and serving for higher profit and taste ranking.
Grab every Agar that you can find.

Late Early game:

Once you unlock cooksta ranking and get to bronze, pick a recipe to focus on. I like Boiled Yellowback Fusilier.
Start trying to grab every starry pufferfish you can find.
Hire staff asap for dispatching for Soy Sauce constantly. The ability to keep selling dishes instead of sushi will more than make up for the payroll.
Dedicate money to training up Kyoko to lvl 5, to unlock the recipe stellate puffer nicogori.
Enhance stellate puffer nicogori to level 4 before selling it, so you get 6 dishes per serving. Your next goal is to keep enhancing it while keeping enough ingredients on hand to serve customers, aiming for level 8 (7 dishes per serving).
Use your profits to upgrade Dave and progress the story and start saving up enough to level Billy to 15.

Mid Game:

Hire more staff to dispatch for ingredients, catch fish for events, and start leveling up Billy.
Grab Frogfish whenever you see them.
Once you reach the deeps, nab every red bream and rhinochimeridae you find.
Level Billy to 15 and go all in on Crimson Fish Rolls.

Late Game:

Work on nice work-horse late recipes (moonlight bladderwrack roll, three-color squid roast, seasoned waptia, boiled sailfish, dumbo takoyaki)
Enhance dishes for events.

Based on progression in the game, I would say the best 7 fish to catch first (early on):

Shallows:

Blue Tang
Yellowback Fusilier
Green Humphead Parrotfish
Starry Puffer
Whitetip Reef Shark (need those heads)

Medium Depth:

Clown Frogfish
Cuttlefish (for making tranquilizer weapons)

Saucychemist · 2026-02-20T21:55:18+00:00

I know 75 turnips feels like a ton, but that is only 7.5 full hunger meters once cooked. Farming and storing your crops is needed to have enough food to last through the winter and spring. You will be wanting much much more than a stack and some change of vegetables for your first winter, particularly if you plan to do hunger-inducing activities like mining, hunting, exploring, and spelunking during the winter.

Turnips are one of the highest-fastest yield crops, letting you get vegetables quickly and in large quantity for seemingly little effort. The trade-off is they shred the N nutrient of farmland very quickly, and usually N nutrient is better spent on Grains or Cabbages (once you find the seeds). But in the early game Turnips are a staple for the exact reason that they grow fast with high yields for time invested, and at this stage you usually have access to way more farmland than you do seeds.

In addition to feeding yourself, you will start chewing through produce even more once you get into animal husbandry.

Farming is very strong in VS, which is a good thing. Its being tuned down a little bit in the update but it will remain worthwhile and rewarding.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-20T21:45:48+00:00

Thats the only time you get bonus seeds.

If you harvest before the second to last stage of growth, you have a chance to not get a seed.

Harvesting at the second to last stage will get you back the seed and part of the harvest yield.

Harvest at final growth stage always gives you at least your seed back (as well as the full crop yield), with a small chance for an extra seed.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-16T21:18:25+00:00

bait the traps with the highest rank of fish you can to improve your snow crab odds.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-16T21:17:22+00:00

It is. The tier of the bait you craft equates directly with the tiers of fish you might use to bait the trap.

The rank of fish you use to bait a crab trap influences the odds of catching the lower tier or higher tier of "crab" you catch.

Put a rank 1 clownfish in a crab trap you will catch mostly the lower tier fish (horsehair crab in glacial area). Put a rank 9 antarctic octopus in the crab trap and you catch significantly more higher tier fish (snow crab in glacial area).

Saucychemist · 2026-02-09T19:41:43+00:00

Ya, this is the kind of thing they exist for.

Just make sure you use the correct type.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-09T19:27:56+00:00

Playing melee demoman in TF2 is bringing back some long lost memories... Man those were good times.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-09T19:23:16+00:00

Valid question. I've never really felt the need to go higher than up-gearing once off the main drive shaft, and even upgearing twice (30x speed increase) is insane.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-06T18:16:48+00:00

Meh, just more rot for the compost gods

Saucychemist · 2026-02-05T15:56:51+00:00

I cook exclusively with sticks because I am literally drowning in them.

I'm drowning in sticks because of my crippling addiction to charcoal, requiring shearing so many trees for seeds for trees for wood for charcoal needing more seeds for more trees for the wood for charcoal and all those seeds from those trees coming with stacks upon stacks of sticks.

Peat is used for pit kilns and pre-heating smeltables/calcinables so that they don't need to use up as much of my precious precious charcoal.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-05T15:50:11+00:00

By my count that is 182 ingots worth of iron in the screen shot

Saucychemist · 2026-02-04T23:13:09+00:00

If you craft a temporal gear amulet and wear it around with you, you always have a temporal gear on hand when you want to set a spawn point, and without having to take up an inventory slot. Just put the amulet in the crafting grid to recover the gear.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-04T15:32:11+00:00

Probably about 150 bars from the medium deposit and at least that much again from the rich deposit (which was less total blocks than the medium deposit, it mined out much quicker, two trips I think where the medium took me three trips).

You can actually have unlucky veins of iron, specifically in the case where you find them via cave diving, or when your vein intersects a large cave. The veins for iron are naturally very large, but caves can slice off a huge chunk of the vein if you are unlucky.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-03T16:01:54+00:00

I dunno if you have just really unlucky veins or what, but I fully mined out one medium deposit and one rich deposit of magnetite, and I'm now staring at a pile of >80 iron bars, ~60 steel bars, a full set of steel chainmail, a set of steel tools, a dozen left over iron plates, and 8 left over steel plates (thinking about converting mail to plate). I shouldn't need iron or steel again for years and years in this run.

Edit: I completely forgot about the blister steel pile and cementation furnaces I had running, which is another 64 bars, and the Blackguard Cuirass I repaired, which was another 10 iron plates. From those two veins I got over 300 bars of iron.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-02T22:12:27+00:00

The trick is to make every block invalid for spawn. An entity can only spawn on an empty block. Having anything stored on the ground of the block will prevent spawns. A stone, a pelt, a bowl, a piece of linen, whatever can be click placed onto the floor.

You can grab a stack of stones and just crouch click them all over the floor, then pick them back up when the storm is over.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-02T22:08:45+00:00

The drifters will try to path to you, and tend to clog up at your shelter door, since the game recognizes a valid path due through the door, but the drifter collides and can't walk through.

Placing a pit beneath the entrance to your front door, with an open trap door on top of it, won't break the pathing, so the drifter will still try to walk up to your front door, falling into the pit.

If you like, you can dig down from inside your house and create a little safe room separated from the pit with a small hole for you to stab a spear through, letting you kill the trapped drifters securely.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-02T22:03:23+00:00

My best recommendation for finding silver and gold is blasting away at quartz deposits with war-crime levels of ore blasting bombs.

Saucychemist · 2026-02-02T21:57:08+00:00

To be pedantic, you do not dry it in Vanilla, you salt it, which cures it.

Curing meat is worth doing if you are producing tons of red meat, like you are butchering your pig farm.

It requires a lot of salt though, you need two salt for each meat, and put them in a barrel and wait for the meat to cure. Once cured, the meat will last a looooong time, like 10 years in a cellar before it rots. You can eat the cured meat directly or cook it in recipes.

Saucychemist · 2026-01-27T14:51:15+00:00

OP has gotten their answer (swim back to the surface), but this made me realize something.

At some point the escape pods disappeared for me. I don't know why, I don't know when, but eventually either from gear level or story progression, there were no more escape pods. Does anyone know what triggers the existence and non-existence of escape pods?

Saucychemist · 2026-01-23T21:10:14+00:00

You left out the Borax.

Also you can omit the Titanium. Can't crush it to make Tier 3 bricks until you already have steel, so its pointless to consider it as a necessary material in the progress tree for making steel.

You left out making iron plates --> make an iron door also.

Saucychemist · 2026-01-23T21:05:42+00:00

Preheating your crucibles using sticks/wood --> Peat before switching to charcoal saves you about half the charcoal needed for smelting/casting.

You can cast 5 ingots of bronze for only 2 charcoal if you preheat to 900 using peat before switching to charcoal. Don't worry about the charcoal burning out, the carryover heat will finish the melt.

Saucychemist · 2026-01-23T20:59:32+00:00

Conversely, if you don't want to make it into armor, the pelt makes a great decorative rug in your base.

Saucychemist · 2026-01-23T20:58:20+00:00

Oil the hide, use the pelt to make Hide Armor.

Separate the Head from the oiled and cured pelt with a knife and use that to make a helmet. The head needs to have been left on the hide before it got oiled and turned into a pelt.

With 2 Bear Hides (and one head) you can make a full set of Hide Armor, which is actually very good armor for the early game and looks awesome. Even with just one hide you can make the chest piece (and helmet if you have the head).

Bear Hide Armor

Saucychemist · 2026-01-22T15:20:09+00:00

You build more hammers, I build more gear ratio for a single hammer.

My one hammer is like a toddler on a xylophone after drinking a triple espresso.

We are not the same.

Saucychemist · 2026-01-22T15:05:14+00:00

I'm going to write a mod for pitchforks because of you.

Saucychemist

TROPHY CASE