Fishing Like a Pro 1-100 by Pepen

Introduction

My name is Pepen and I've got quite a bit of experience with fishing in FFXI over the game's lifespan. This guide will be a WIP for the coming days/weeks. This is my personal route that I've always taken when leveling fishing and I believe it to be quite efficient and good at generating skill and gil over the long journey to from 0-100.

• Great-Blue This is a long running JP fishing resource that's been translated to English over the years. From my usage of it I have found it to be fairly accurate with it's information so I wanted to leave a link to it here for easy of access to the information.

Fishing Tips

• You can start fishing at any level with any job and it does not contribute to the shared 40 skill distribution between other crafts which means there is NO reason to have a "fishing mule"

• You're going to want to buy the level 1 fisher's 4 piece set as soon as possible, it's major contributor to your early success and will allow you access better fishing spots earlier than without it.

• While you can catch fish more than 20 skills above your current skill level, you are much more likely to get skill ups if the skill cap of the fish is within 15 skills of your own level.

• The fishing system is quite simple to understand, when you land a fish you'll see a stamina bar appear above your character's head along with silver and gold arrows. Simply tap your MOVEMENT input in the corresponding direction of each arrow, the silver depletes some stamina and the golden arrows deplete a significant amount of stamina. Once the stamina bar is empty you can hit the CONFIRM input to attempt to reel the fish in and if done correctly you will pull up either a fish or a miscellaneous item. Failing to deplete the bar before hitting CONFIRM will cost you your bait/lure. If your skill is significantly lower (more than 30) than the skill cap of the fish you may get a "lack of skill" message. This guide will avoid almost all of these situations.

• Get Lu Shang's ASAP. It is the penultimate fishing rod only second to Ebisu which is totally unbreakable. I will be covering how to fish for this rod while getting skill ups in this guide and please keep in mind that this section will be a bit slower for skill ups as a result but fishing is a marathon not a sprint so that's okay.

Fishing Messages

You will get various messages when something catches your line they are as follows:

   Small fish: "Something caught the hook!"
   Large fish: "Something caught the hook!!!"
   Non-fish targets: "You feel something pulling at your line."
   Monsters: "Something clamps onto your line ferociously!"

About Lu Shang's Fishing Rod

This can be an incredibly time consuming task to obtain as you need to complete The Rivalry/Competition quest to obtain it which requires 10,000 moat carp to be turned in. Yes, that's right TEN THOUSAND.

Why do I Care?

This rod can