Hooked

A Stardew Valley style fishing minigame for Valheim.

Cast and wait for the bite exactly like you always have. The moment a fish takes the hook, the tug of war is replaced by a bobber bar: a green bar you lift by holding Block, a fish that darts around the track, and a catch meter that fills while the fish is inside the bar and drains while it is not. Fill it and the fish is yours. Empty it and it's gone.

Playing it

Hold Block to raise the bar, let go to drop it. Keep the fish inside the green and the meter on the right climbs. Let the fish slip out and it falls again. That's the whole game.

      [PERFECT]      lit while the run is clean, fades once the fish slips out
     +----------+
     |  #### |  |    the coin is the treasure
     |  [==] |  |    the little bar on it fills while it sits inside the green bar
     |       |##|
     | +---+ |##|    right column: how close you are to landing the fish,
     | |>< | |##|    red at the bottom of the meter through to green at the top
     | +---+ |##|
     +----------+

Roughly one hooked fish in six rolls a treasure chest, and closer to one in three once your Fishing is high. It has to sit inside the green bar in its own right to be reeled up, and its progress shows on the chest rather than in a column of its own. Catching the fish without it just means no chest.

Perfect is all or nothing: hold the fish inside the bar from the first moment it enters to the last, and you keep it. One slip, and it's gone for that fish, which is what the badge fading out is telling you. Worth chasing - it more than doubles the skill you earn and bumps the catch up a size.

New anglers get a panel next to the bar explaining the controls, and a gentler fight for the first stretch of the skill. Both taper off and disappear around Fishing 15, somewhere between ten and twenty-five fish.

What stayed Valheim

• Casting, bait, nibbling and the wait for a bite are untouched.
• Stamina still runs the fight. The rod drains while a fish is on and drains faster while you reel. Run dry and you lose the fish.
• The line still breaks if the fish runs past the rod's maximum distance, and Line Breaks turns even that off. It no longer snaps from tension, since that was the fail state for the tug of war this replaces and it meant losing fights you were plainly winning.
• A fish doing its usual escape thrash gets harder for a moment, so escapes read on the bar.
• The line only starts coming in over the last quarter of the meter, never closer than 4m, and never while the fish is out of water. Reel the whole way in and the catch flops about on the beach.
• Fish size is Valheim's quality, capped at 5. You keep the size you hooked, plus what your skill earns and a level for a perfect catch, minus whatever it shook loose while it was out of the bar.
• Nothing you land can vanish into a full inventory. The fish lands at your feet and treasure drops in front of you, both to be picked up by hand.
• A chest never hands you something you have never seen. It only pays out in materials you have already picked up at least once, and it starts offering one the moment you find your first.

The Fishing skill

Vanilla's Fishing skill is a stamina and speed discount and nothing else. It does not make fish bite sooner, does not make them bigger, and does not change what you catch. All of that is kept, and three more things are laid on top so leveling it actually feels like getting better at fishing:

The bar grows until a thrashing sinker is merely annoying, more water is in range so you wait less between casts, and a skilled angler brings fish in at their best rather than as runts.

Skill is paid on the catch rather than by the second. Harder fish pay more, which vanilla never did since it only counted seconds, and a perfect catch or a chest multiplies it. A fish that gets away still pays a share, scaled by how far up the meter you got before you lost it.

Multiplayer

The minigame is entirely local to whoever cast the rod, so it works on a client against a vanilla server and it does not care whether anyone else is running it. Nobody is turned away for not having it - they just fish the vanilla way while everyone who has it gets the minigame.

Install it on the server and the server's config wins, which is what Lock Configuration is for.

Configuration

Everything lives in BepInEx/config/Azumatt.Hooked.cfg and syncs from the server, except the interface section, which is yours alone. The knobs worth knowing:

• 2 - Minigame - bar height, how full the meter starts, fill and drain rates, gravity, and a global difficulty scale. Turn Enabled off to put fishing back to vanilla without uninstalling. Reel In From and Minimum Line Length decide how close the float comes while a fish is still on it.
• 2 - Minigame / Beginner Assist - on by default. At full strength the fish is half as difficult, the bar is 40 units taller and the meter drains at about a third the usual rate. Each of those is its own dial, so you can keep the calmer fish and turn the drain back on if that's the mix you want.
• 3 - Fish / Overrides - per fish tuning, like Fish1=60:Dart, Fish3=85. Difficulty runs 1-110 and the swim pattern is one of Mixed, Dart, Smooth, Sinker, Floater. Anything you don't list is worked out from the fish itself, so modded fish work without an entry.
• 4 - Rewards - how fast Fishing levels, what a fish that got away is still worth, and the settings that decide how big your catch ends up.
• 5 - Treasure - the odds, how many items a chest holds, and its loot table as Prefab:min:max:weight. Turn Enabled off to drop chests entirely. Three things narrow the table: progression material and trophies are refused, Blocklist adds your own prefab names, and Known Items Only keeps a chest to things you have picked up before. Rejected entries say so in the log rather than failing quietly.
• 6 - Stamina - two multipliers over the rod's own costs. Set both to 0 if you want the minigame to be the only thing that can lose you a fish.
• 7 - Interface - scale, fish icon size, which side of the screen, offsets, when the tutorial panel shows, sound and volume, and how hard things shake. None of this is server synced.

Compatibility

Once a fish is hooked, this mod owns the fight and vanilla's line pulling is skipped, so anything else that patches the same thing won't get a say. Everything before the hook is left alone. Turning Enabled off in 2 - Minigame hands the whole thing back to vanilla without uninstalling.

Not in yet

Deliberate gaps, roughly in the order they'd be worth doing:

• Tackle. Bobbers and hooks that change the physics - a taller bar, a softer bounce, a bar that drifts toward the fish, better treasure odds. Valheim has bait rather than tackle, so this would be a bait-to-effect table.
• Cast distance mattering. A long cast away from land feeding size, quality and treasure odds. The Valheim read is water depth under the float.
• Boss fish. A rare fish that wanders twice as wildly and pays several times the skill.
• Double catches. A bait that gives a chance of two fish at once.

Credits

The bobber bar is an homage to Stardew Valley's fishing minigame, rebuilt from scratch to fit Valheim's rods, stamina and skills.

UI goes through UIManager, my own library for making mod UI come out looking like the game shipped it.

For questions or comments, find me in the Hexium, Odin Plus Team Discord or in my own: