The secret forest pond and the desert oasis seem the most broken things in this game to me, right next to the crab pots. They've been in the game since forever and always brought up confusions and repetitive questions. The wiki mentions gold quality everything and their stats, in theory. In practice, I have never caught gold scorpion or sand fish and several biggest sizes don't match with what wiki is saying. Don't get me wrong, I played pretty hardcore when I first got into the game and spent about a year total only fishing and with constant +3 fishing dishes. I hate it when 100% completion is impossible because of stupid oversights.
In the secret woods I have found that if you stand on the east side of the pond in the middle and cast max distance to the small rock in the bottom of the pond you catch gold fish. I have not yet found that special spot in the oasis.
It seems to me that the likelihood of gold fish has to do with maximum casting, skill of 10 and having gotten the 4 candle scene from Grandpa. I haven't really studied it in depth though.
Okay, permit me to explain a few things about fish quality... Quality of fish has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than the distance your bobber is from the shore. The secret woods and oasis pond are both very small bodies of water, so the range that the opportunity to catch gold-star fish from these bodies of water is... extremely small, and may in fact require that you cast pixel-perfect to land it dead center of the pond, because over-casting will simply place it too close to the other side. That's the only factor involved in fish quality. Period. It has nothing to do with 'maximum casting', nothing to do with Grandpa, nothing to do with skill except insofar as higher skills give you a greater distance you can cast, nothing to do with specific perks or weather or time of day or any other such nonsense. It's exclusively based on the distance between the fish caught and the closest land. Period. There is also an RNG aspect to it, just because you CAN get a gold-star doesn't mean you WILL, but that isn't something the player can control. Also, Luck has zero impact on the fishing game other than the odds of getting a chest (and even that is less than a tenth of a percent nudge).
I tend to agree, but... That seems pretty spot on... I made one cast and got one gold star Woodskip. In the desert I tend to stand back from the water and max cast toward the area between the three "reflection" highlights on the water. I have gotten gold star fish at the mountain lake when I was only at level 2 fishing, so there is a possibility of rng really swinging the pendulum and giving you one when you don't really deserve it. Also, has there ever been any official debunking of the Lonely Stone / gold star fish myth? While the stories of gold star fish there are all over the place, I've never seen it.
It still is a burden to the player when it can simply not be. I once wanted to hunt down maximum size for all fish - and surprise! - I can't. Because it is obviously too difficult to expand said bodies of water by 3-4 tiles so the centers become full tiles as well. I called it an oversight (definition: an unintentional failure to notice or do something.). The developer is fully guilty of this. He didn't think this through and that's okay. But not doing something about it in YEARS is not. Same with crab pots. A feature forgotten before it even began. It launched broken and remained broken up to this day. And don't come to me saying that "Oh, stop whining, they are small details about the game, why do you even care about them" because that's not an argument. If you can fix something you might as well, if you choose to ignore it, you're just lazy and unpassionate. EDIT: The very same thing applies to the submarine fishing pool.
