Are crab pots awful or am I using them wrong?

So question,

I am trying to figure out what use crab pots have in the game. I used about 25 of them and it seems like I am only pulling in about 1500g with the mariner skill. Is it the mariner skill is awful (AKA I want garbage to refine) or is there a certain place to use them?

I tried the ocean, mountain, and village and all seemed around 1200-1500. I just don't see why I wouldn't take fishing instead of the trapper line. Unless fishing is just too much of a pain?

I documented all my findings in a video if you are interested in what my pots contained (Not sure if that was part of the issue since I know crabs sell for more).

 

Fishing can be troublesome at first and/or without the easier fishing mod.

Taking the perk that makes the crab pot not pick up trash does help. Also. there is little point (other than space) to put them in lakes AND river. As both are freshwater. Not saying not to (especially later in game), but there are two types of catches (three if trash/junk considered a type) Freshwater and ocean.

 

They need a buff, maybe having Mariner as it is and Luremaster giving a % to get fishes (the easiest of determined place)

 

So what your saying is taking the perk was pretty much useless? That's a bummer.

 

From what most folks say, overall crab pots perks are pretty useless which is a shame cause I think they could fare to be a lot neater. Maybe not a major powerhouse feature, but it'd be nice if the options werent such a waste that there is no real reason to go for crab pots. :I

 

Garlic + Snail: Escargot. Good energy and health boosts, and +2 Fishing.
Lobster + Milk: Lobster Bisque. Good energy and health boosts, and +3 Fishing.

Several other more complex recipes, too. Plus, the garbage you dredge up can in some cases produce cloth, refined quartz, coal, and iron ore.

Not to mention that your Fishing skill improves using crab pots with no effort on your part beyond collecting the contents and putting bait out. Just my opinion, but it seems to me that crap pots are pretty well balanced as-is.

 

Trash in crab pots, in my opinion, can be nearly as valuable as the the other things you can catch. Using the recycler on the cds/glasses gives you quartz which, apart from being a valuable material in a couple pieces of crucial farm equipment, sell for 50g each, which actually sells more than gold periwinkles/mussels, silver oysters, and as much as regular clams/cockles. Soggy newspaper gets you torches usually (worth 15g for 3) but rarely can get you a bolt of cloth (470g)! Driftwood can also get you multiples of coal or quartz, and trash can occasionally drop iron. One of these days I really should do a true comparison...

The real point of crab pots is to give you slow, but steady fishing xp while avoiding having to play the fishing game too much

 

Someone once pointed out that the Mining farm has a river through the middle of it, and taking the lv10 Fishing skill to make Crab Pots unable to catch trash, then lining the river with crab pots seems to give a decent amount of money.

 

Did my comparison:

I have 400 pots, about half in freshwater, the other half in saltwater. I harvested every day for a week (yes, using a mod) and processed the trash in the recyclers, as well as refining iron ore into bars. ignoring the 50% boost from having angler on this character I made around 92k off of the fish, and from the processed trash I made over 37k.


You might think I'll eat my own words now but I still defend Luremaster over Mariner. Getting quartz from the mine is a slow way to go, meaning w/o trash you cant mass produce quality sprinklers or ligtning rods, and certainly cant take advantage of crystal floor/path decorations, unless you are really willing to use a crystalarium to replicate quartz.

 

Like most things in Stardew, a little bit of crabbing is more valuable for raw materials instead of selling for profit.

Quality fertilizer costs 150g, or can be crafted with sap and fish. You will never reel in enough fish for the recipe but potting can give a dozen each day for a few minutes of effort. The value of selling a periwinkle and sap is 24 or so gold, so by crafting the fertilizer you save over a hundred gold a pop.

 

I actually just did a test on crab pots. If you want the full results and analysis it is here. It is very long, you have been warned. (But, I did break it into spoiler sections if you want specifics.) Anyway due to the other post's length I can summarize the important bits here.

First, Ocean always has a more profitable average than River regardless of perk. (About an extra 4g per crab pot.) You can fit about 250 comfortably here (maybe 300 if you cram them) so unless you do more crab fishing than that, best stick to the ocean.

Second, the average value of your daily crab pot catch is roughly 50g (being a mariner), if you are baiting them yourself with bug meat then your daily average is about 55g. Therefore seeing an average 1200-1500g over 25 is about right.

Third, as some of the others have pointed out, mariner despite the allure of not catching trash is a waste of perk. (So is Luremaster if you were considering that, its even worse than mariner.) Angler is, by far, superior changing that daily average I mentioned to about 60g (65g if you supply your own bait.) You will need to process your trash though. Speaking of, I saw a mention that driftwood can give refined quartz. I'm not sure that is true, I refined 1423 pieces during my test and not one came out quartz. So either, I found a bug or quartz is so low of a drop it isn't worth counting on. (Chance of Cloth on the other hand makes a big difference in daily profitability. Which for those curious is about 10% when you refine Newspaper.) If your perk choice bothers you there is a fix from CA himself here. Take caution however, as save editing can cause problems so back up your file and use at your own risk.

Next, I would argue that crab pots aren't worthless or in need of a buff by themselves. That isn't to say that the perks aren't garbage or that they don't need reworking, because they do. But, the crab pot and it's catch list is fine. These become available to the player at level 3 and completely negate the need to gain experience from playing the fishing mini game. (Level 3 is also very early game to be getting 50g+ from anything daily.) They only require the player bait them once a day and collect the resulting catch the next. (Overall, minimal effort.) Yet, in a single square of space they produce between 50-65g daily. (Year round.) For comparative purposes that is better than any single unrefined crop, except maybe Ancient Fruit. (depending on your perk choice) Obviously, it is much harder to use 500 crab pots than plant 500 crops but, my point is space by space it is very competitive.

I won't go into my suggestions for perk changes here since I already put them in that first post I linked. (They are in a spoiler if you just want to see those.) Plus, they have a somewhat long explanation. So if you want to discuss perks changes, head over to that thread. In the mean time, I hope that I was able to help clarify a bit on crab pots. I know that before the test, I for one severely underestimated them. (I have Angler though.) No, it isn't Wine 2.0 but, when it comes to mining, foraging, and fishing it holds up well. It is also nice to be able to estimate the daily profit from them now, so I can calculate how many I need to make a certain annual goal. One of my set ups uses 100 and fruit trees to make my annual income goal. At just 100 in the ocean I get 728,000g annually. Not bad, I think I can even downgrade since fruit covers quite a bit of the goal. (If you want to see the explanation behind the set up, that is here under Elliott. There are other set ups there too if you are bored and have free time.)

 

Not really. Why wouldn't you be entitled to enjoy the way you play the game, as opposed to way somebody else does? Unless you're minmaxing, it isn't about the best way to the top. it's about enjoying the view.

 

There are two reasons I think Luremaster ends up as worse. First, the idea of not baiting the traps sounds good and under normal circumstances would increase your earnings by 5g over the other perks. However, bug meat is just too easy to get in the mines. It would take hundreds of crab pots to outrun bug meat gathering. (I can easily reach over 100 in a day with a burglar's ring. Even more so now that the sewers house bugs.) Second, not baiting the trap is too detrimental to quick gathering. As long as I have bait in my hand I can hold down the right mouse button and run up and down my crab pot areas without fear of removing the crab pots. This is impossible with luremaster since the player will grab the pot right after the catch. Sure you can click one by one or replace traps but, both of those things take longer. Of course, this is irrelevant anyway since Angler is far better than both perks. (As they are now.)

But this is the real point. Objectively speaking all crab pot perks are worse than line fishing perks. But, it is up to the player to decide how they want to play. That said, there is a limit to how far different two options can be before this is no longer true. Artisan is a great example of this. Minmaxing or not it is too important to ignore. It is equivalent to asking the player do you want 100g or 500g? You could pick 100g but then are literally throwing away money. Were they closer to say 100g + fun or 120g and there is a fair trade off. Players should never question their pick due to overwhelming disadvantage to another perk, that is a failure of balance. Its the fact that this happens that several of the perks, fishing or otherwise, have been called into question. My point is, the very fact Ras worries about eating his words shows a disbalance in the perk choices. (And, Ras is right. You are doing yourself a disservice by removing trash, but at the same time you are also hurting yourself by not baiting the traps. Seems like a dumb choice of perks if the deciding factor is which hurts me less.)

 

This implies that there are no other factors involved, and the only one worth looking at is this drilled-down comparison between two prices. I'd suggest, again, there is more involved, because people are looking for different things out of the game, and play it differently.

So somebody might concentrate exclusively on crops, and prefer Agriculturalist to Artisan. Someone else might prefer cutting sharply back on crops, and focus on animal farming--or even neglect both, and work the fishing angle exclusively. You or I might say, "X gives you a much better return--much, much better," but they're roleplaying, or tried the most financially remunerative way before and are tired of it, or just don't care and prefer their path. More power to them. Hell, even if they only want to sit back and raise potatoes in spring, tomatoes in summer, and beets in autumn, it's their choice. Their way to enjoy SDV. There's no right or wrong way to play the game, unless one applies a single predetermined value system to the way everybody plays it.

That's all I'm saying. I don't question the minmaxers, or the people who ignore money altogether. Nor can I criticize BarbarianRas' choice of Luremaster over Pirate. (I think that's what they meant, instead of Marriner, which is on the path to Luremaster.) I find Pirate personally a lot better,for reasons you've carefully laid out. But that doesn't make it better. What we have is only a personal preference. To discuss it exclusively in terms of cash return ignores the value weighting someone else places on various activities.

As someone once punned, vive la difference...!

 

Didn't expect this to start such a large discussion. I can see crab pots being beneficial if you hate fishing and want fertilizer.

 

I know I keep a set of 5 crab-pots on my farm tiny pond along with 2 bait-makers and 1 recycle machine. Mostly because I find it convenient as part of my daily routine so gather up the fish and save them in a chest to make nice end fertilizer and then just put any trash into the recycle machine. It's not really breaking the door off the hinges, but I usually end up with around 50-80 high quality fertilizers each month which is like....fertilizers I don't have to buy.

For me, I find crab pots useful and at this stage in the game likely more than paid back the investment I put in them. But I wouldn't really have a desire to go strong on crab pots for the same reason I don't go strong on hops farming in that I just don't find the harvesting of things that require every day harvest all that fun. having to run along and empty/fill every crab pot would drive me nuts. X_x

 

In my current game, I have six crab pots by the mine entrance. That's it. They've really only got one purpose: escargot. Tons of snails + tons of garlic. My Fishing skill's up to 9, and soon will hit 10. I'm going after the legendaries, and I haven't invested yet in animals--so this synergy with the escargot fishing bonus works out well. Pots are a simple, quick task performed every day. Otherwise, my focus is on high-return crops with kegs and preserve jars, and mining (it's the hilltop setup).

 

Zidane I have a question, I would post in your old post, but since this one is new It would be a better visage.
You made tests with crab pots on river and ocean, but what about our farm grounds? They have the same catch % than the other places? (I read that the river farm have both salt and fresh water) I read a lot of complaints of people saying that they only get trash.

 

For the record, I do not begrudge anyone who fishes for rp/playstyle reasons. It's up to you what you find enjoyable but as crab pots are already low interaction I think the perks ascociated with them really important and, compared to the other fishing path, the crab pot perks are really not that good. In the test I did I had the Angler perk (+;50% sell price to fish) which contributed an extra 40k+, which was a bit more than I made off processed trash

 

I'm afraid I only tested using the standard farm. (And not on the farm grounds due to the limited space. Would be much longer to reach 10,000 catches with only 50 per day.) To test on the other one I would need to build up to a point that I can safely ignore the farm for 50 days while I focus on testing. This would mean a lot of money and resources saved up, not to mention starting a new file from scratch. I can say that with crab pots you CAN catch any fresh water fish on the standard farm. So, the complaints are likely in regards to line fishing. Additionally, I would bet that the trash roll still comes up 37.5% on the farm like it does in both the river and ocean. Beyond that however, I do not know, I am sorry. Perhaps someone with a well off fishing farm could run the test again using a dummy file. (while backing up the first, as I did.)

I think you misunderstand. People are free to pick what they want. My point is that the game should be balanced so that it never comes to that. Someone is not wrong for making a choice of how to play, the game is wrong to force people to make people choice between money or not money. When what should happen is all options are equally valuable but, obtain the wealth in different ways.