This article is about an older version of DF.
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The fishing industry, like farming and the meat industry, creates both food and raw materials that can be used in workshops (i.e. shells). When starting out in a fish-rich area, fishing can be an excellent way to quickly fill up your food barrels as it requires very little set-up for your dwarves.
Obtaining Fish
There are a couple of ways of obtaining fish.
Fishing
Requires: A fisherdwarf and a body of water with fish in it.
Fishing is going to be your primary way of collecting fish for processing. Unlike hunting or trapping, dwarves need no special equipment to catch fish. They just pull them straight out of the water. It is important to find a good spot for fishing and designate it as a fishing zone. If you don't, your dwarves will keep going to whatever body of water please them, and potentially waste valuable time catching nothing in the swamps.
For more information, see the main Fishing article.
Embark and Trading
You can buy processed fish at embark and from traders. However, since it has already been processed, this fish is really more of a food item. Turtles, mussels and oysters bought at embark or from traders cannot be used to generate shells.
Cleaning
Requires: A fishery, a fish cleaner, and raw fish that has been caught by a fisherdwarf.
Once you have caught some fish, they need to be cleaned at a Fishery by a dwarf with the Fish cleaning labor. This process will take "raw" fish and yield "prepared" fish. It may also yield a shell from certain creatures that can be used by your craftsdwarves to embellish items (as of v0.31.03, crafting items out of shells was broken). Both raw and cleaned fish are stored in food stocks and rot quickly, so make sure to put them in barrels or use them to prepare food in the kitchen.
Also note that if your fisherdwarves have both Fishing and Fish cleaning labors active, they will always choose fishing first, greatly increasing the chances of your food rotting away before it is processed. It is most efficient to have twice as many dwarves assigned to fish cleaning as to fishing, since your fisherdwarves can catch things very quickly, but cleaning can take a long time. Once the fishing industry has matured even more, it is definitely worthwhile to build multiple fisheries to handle all the fish you haul in.
Fish cleaning feeds into the Food industry and into crafts in the case of shells.
Fish Dissecting
Requires: A fish dissector, a fishery and a live fish that has been caught by a fisherdwarf.
Certain live fish can also be dissected to get extracts from them. These extracts can be traded or used for cooking.
Fish Hunting
There are bigger fish in the sea than can be captured using the fishing labor. Many, like sharks and merfolk, have to be captured and/or killed using traps or weapons and are butchered instead of cleaned at the fishery. See the Meat industry for more on handling larger prey fish.
Industry Flowchart
Bugs
- If you designate a fishing zone in an underground pool, fishers will never give up fishing there even when there aren't any fish to catch. Bug:1854
- Stocks of fish in the water is not renewable Bug:2780
See also
