Barbed Hook

Barbed Hook

Type	Tackle
Location	Fish Shop; Crafting; Festival of Ice
Recipe	Fishing (Level 8)
Sell Price	500g

The Barbed Hook plays the minigame on the angler's behalf. Fitted to a rod, the green bar follows the fish of its own accord, drifting up or down to keep itself centred on the catch. Against a slow, lazy fish that is close to an automatic win. Against a fish that darts from one end of the window to the other it is far less impressive, and it actively fights any attempt to steer by hand. One bar each of copper, iron and gold make one, and the recipe arrives at Fishing level eight. It is the tackle that gets a nervous new angler through a difficult catch, and the tackle an expert takes off before going after a Legend.

Recipe

These are the ingredients one batch needs.

Name	Image	Amount
Copper Bar		1
Iron Bar		1
Gold Bar		1

Use

The clinging only happens while the bar is actually touching the fish. When the fish slips away the bar stops following and has to be brought back manually, so the Barbed Hook does not remove the need to play at all. What it does is hold a catch steady once contact is made, which is precisely the hard part for anyone still learning the rhythm.

Manual control still works while the hook is fitted, but it is heavy going, and the slower the fish the heavier it gets, because the automatic pull keeps dragging the bar back towards the middle. The relationship is neatly inverted: the more a fish jumps about, the easier the bar is to steer by hand, and the less the Barbed Hook is doing in the first place. That is why it is described as working best on slow, weak fish.

The practical rule that follows is to fit it for common catches and take it off for the rare ones. A Sardine or a Chub will more or less catch itself; a Mutant Carp or a Glacierfish will not, and fighting the automatic pull makes those harder rather than easier.

On an Advanced Iridium Rod a pair of Barbed Hooks clings more tightly still, which doubles down on both the strength and the weakness.

Upgrades

Fishing level eight teaches the recipe, which asks for one Copper Bar, one Iron Bar and one Gold Bar. That spread of three metals makes it the most mixed ingredient list in the tackle box, and it conveniently uses up the odd single bars left over from other projects. Willy stocks the finished piece at the Fish Shop for a thousand gold from the same level, and the Traveling Cart carries one occasionally at a steeper price. Winning the fishing contest at the Festival of Ice for the first time includes a Barbed Hook among the prizes, and fishing treasure chests turn one up now and then.

Crafting a Barbed Hook and selling it earns a modest margin over selling the three bars separately, so a surplus is never a waste. The Blacksmith profession reverses that, since it raises the value of the bars themselves, and a blacksmith farmer is better off selling the metal.

Notes

The Barbed Hook is widely considered the weakest of the metal tackles, not because the effect is bad but because the fish it helps with were never the problem. A Trap Bobber or a Cork Bobber does more for a hard catch, and those arrive two Fishing levels earlier.

It is genuinely useful in one specific situation: a long session of easy fish where the goal is quantity, such as filling a Fish Pond or clearing a quest that asks for a shoal of something common. Left to its own devices the hook lands those catches with almost no input.

A piece lasts about twenty bites, and a used one fetches less at the shop than a fresh one, so a half-spent hook is better fished out than carried back to the beach.

All Tackle and Bait

Every entry in this group, with its key details.

Name	Image	Price
Bait		-
Bait (item)		1g
Barbed Hook		500g
Challenge Bait		1g
Cork Bobber		250g
Curiosity Lure		500g
Deluxe Bait		1g
Dressed Spinner		500g
Lead Bobber		150g
Magic Bait		1g
Magnet		15g
Quality Bobber		300g
Sonar Bobber		250g
Spinner		250g
Tackle	-	-
Targeted Bait		0.1 × Fish Price
Trap Bobber		200g
Treasure Hunter		250g
Wild Bait		15g