Hook, Line and Sinker: Sky Fishing (Patreon)

This time we're going to take a quick look one of the least mentioned parts of my favourite expansions - The Sunstalker. Specifically Sky Fishing.

Sky Fishing is a special hunt event like Mineral Gathering and Herb Gathering, and in a similar fashion to the other two events it is triggered by having a piece of gear in your grid when you start the hunt. In this case it's the Sun Lure and Hook from the Sunstalker expansion. Pictured here with the Sky Harpoon which we will also be talking about a bit further on.

The Sun Lure is built from 1 Sunshark Blubber* and 1 Scrap, and because the Blubber has no other specific use in the game there is zero reason to not build a Lure as soon as you get the right resource. The Sky Harpoon, which as you can see is a solid mid game spear in its own right, costs just 1 Sunshark Bone, 1 Scrap and 1 Salt. So this is a very cheap pair of items to build as long as you can hit the 2 specific resources you need. (The Bone is also used in the excellent Sunshark Bow and the incredible Skleaver, so that makes things a little tighter for the harpoon).

Sky Fishing gains no benefit from being placed after Overwhelming Darkness, so it should generally be as early as possible in the hunt. The mechanics is simply rolling on a table, with a +2 bonus if you also have a Sky Harpoon equipped. (You do not want to roll without a Harpoon or SotF rerolls because a 1-2 kills your survivor).

The primary rewards from Sky Fishing are these three resources.

Once a Sky Fisher has collected a Jowls and lost their nose (and replaced it with a stone one?), it is important that the next Sky Fisher is a new individual, because dying to another Jowls is not optimal.

As you can see, these fish are additional resources, which is nice. But the real power comes from catching all three and Archiving them to get the Filleting Table.

I imagine that most of you have never seen this Innovation, let alone used it. However, as you can quickly see, if this is gained early it will result in a lot of additional resources over the lifetime of a settlement. Also, because you chose when to gain the random basic resource you can time this to try and regain a resource which you want a second time after spending it. It's a nice way of increasing the odds of getting Love Juice or Hide or Scrap (for example).

The table also has one last element. If you roll a natural 10 (9 with Otherworldly Luck, which I recommend on your Sky Fisher anyway) then the Harpoon catches on one of the really big things up there in the sky, you can then get eaten (20% chance so SotF and Otherworldly Luck help) or you can gain a piece of Iron or a Fish of your choice and a trip to any space on the showdown board, including the Monster's space. This is a huge way of making hunts vs. L3 monsters a lot safer by shortening the travel time.

The following things will all support Sky Fishing well:

• Otherworldly Luck  Fighting Art (consider it on Sculpture)
• Spear Mastery (so the person holding the Sky Harpoon can work as a Trapper, there's no point training Spear Mastery on this individual because once they lose their nose they can't Sky Fish safely anymore)
• A nose
• Bandages 
• Not being a Binge Eater
• Sky Harpoon

And that's it for Sky Fishing! It's a relatively short look at things here because this event is simpler than the other two. But simple doesn't mean weak. Once you have this set up you can essentially be gaining +2 resources per hunt via the Filleting Table + Sky Fishing and sometimes you will even be skipping entire hunts, which will naturally increase your success rate a huge amount.

So next time you see that Sunshark Blubber, pack it into scrap and send it up into the sky for some fish!

*Both the Lure and the Blubber resource indicate that this is how the fully grown ancient Sunstalkers known as Suns swim in the sky. Their blubber inflates with air and becomes light enough to float.