Fishing and Mining and Capturing Small Animals in the Orb Vallis

With the Fortuna update, there are more minerals to mine, more gems to refine and more fish to, er, fish. There is also the whole capturing animals and sending them off to safety via miniature helicopters, but let’s talk about the more familiar things first.

Mining got the biggest changes. The whole tracing minigame is gone, having beem replaced with a heating minigame. Basically, while zoomed in, you can click and hold M1 on the glowing circles of any ore vein and hold it until it’s in the white highlighted area. Sometimes the correct area moves around, sometimes it is big, sometimes it’s a small area, but you want to ‘heat’ the node as close to the centre as possible. If you’re very lucky, a second, very thin highlighted area also appears. If you hit that, you will get an extra gem, even if you are mining for minerals.

The new mining system is much better, especially since it’s point and click. The old tracing minigame was a pain in the ass mostly because you needed to be standing in the right place to comfortably trace, and if the ore is in a funny position, it could be impossible to get 100%. Kavats getting in the way of tracing is still an issue but at least now you don’t lose your flow.

Fishing has changed a little too, but mostly just for the servofish in Fortuna. You can use your rudimentary pointy sticks on the robot fish swimming around the lake and ponds of the Orb Vallis but that will damage them. You need an electrified grabber if you want intact fishes. Using the electrified stick to catch servofish mostly works the same way catching normal fleshy Plains of Eidolon fish does, but once you successfully hit a fish, you get a minigame where you have to click on the correct area. It’s basically the same as mining, except the little icon moves on its own and all you have to do is click on the red-pink area.

Of course, a minigame will slow your fishing down a bit, so to help us out, when you catch a fish, it stuns other fish nearby. The stun doesn’t last long but it’s often enough to catch another fish. There are two fishing rods, a cheap one available at the lowest rank and a more expensive one. The more expensive one just stuns for longer and over a wider area but you don’t really need it.

Annoyingly, while the blueprints for ores and gems are much cheaper than in Cetus, the baits for fishing are single-use baits that cost standing. It’s not too bad since most fish will spawn naturally without baits, but it’s still annoying – one of the very first complaints with Plains of Eidolon was that the lures and baits were way too expensive, and it seems like we’ve gone back to that.

Finally, there’s conservation.

Conservation is weird. Not just because you’re being led by a guy called the Business. Before you can conserve anything, you need to get a tranq gun and a lure. At first, you can only get a lure for a Pobber, a sort of weird, mousy thing that looks like the weird mousy things in the Plains except happier and cuter. There are other lures too, for bigger animals, the biggest being a Kubrodon, which is basically just an angrier Kubrow.

So what you do, when you equip the tranq gun, you’ll see markers on your map. You go to a marker and there will be some… animal remains, which you can activate to start your next capture. You follow the tracks to some more animal remains, generally a meal or something, then you equip the lure and try to make a call with it to lure the creature out. If you’re successful, you need to equip your tranq gun and hide, so you can tranquilize the creature when it appears.

Couple of problems here. Firstly the creature are ALL really skittish and will quickly flee. Secondly, the creatures WILL get murdered by the local Corpus. They could have been murdered by unlucky Volts as well (using the same passive that makes Volt the best fisher on the Plains) but luckily that was patched. And thirdly, you don’t know until you use your call that you’re not calling the right animal. I discovered this the hard way after following a trail and using a Pobber lure, only to be told I needed to use a call for a Virmink, another creature who I didn’t have a lure for yet.

If you do manage to tranq the creature, you can run up to it and call to the Biz to capture the creature and take it away. You get points – standing and ‘tags’ depending on where you hit the creature with the tranq gun.

What’s even weirder though is that you can trade in your tags for ‘floofs’. Digital plushies that you can use to decorate your ship.

Let me just recap. The Business, a cyborg guy and former mercenary, is asking a bunch of kids controlling war machines to capture rare creatures so he can relocate them, in exchange for plushies said war machine-using children can use to decorate their ships.

The fishing and the mining don’t seem crazy at all in comparison…