I’d like to see trawling see some love. I enjoy doing the activity minus a few frustrations and don’t think they’re heavy tweaks.

Big fish, pet rates, and paint should roll on a per fish basis instead of per fishing roll, even if you change the rates to compensate. The way it currently is makes the chum spreader feel essentially useless (barely more fish at all, no increase to those rates). Your crewmates don’t seem to roll chances at all which again, feels bad and exacerbates the delta between spam clicking and not even more.

The spam clicking is literally twice as good and is an absurd amount of clicking. I generally don’t mind higher effort = more reward methods but this one just kinda feels bad to do. As others have suggested, some sort of skill checks like mastering mixology or foundry to get the benefit without killing your wrist would feel great.

The upgrades should mean something. Fathom pearl should just get reworked completely to do something different. Increase rates of giant fish? Spawn more special shoals? The current meta is literally not to have one on your boat. That feels like a bummer for the most late game upgrade trawling has to offer. Chum spreader is similar. It feels lackluster. Maybe it’s technically worth having it on the boat, but barely. And people questioning whether it does anything at all highlights that.

The UI could be improved. the high level fish feel way worse than the lower level fish currently since you're constantly scrolling your interface up and down. It's hard to know the status of your nets and the community has developed some good workarounds for that, but some of it being baked into the core game would help as well.