Fishing! i.e., ways to earn money in SL

Still a few weeks behind!

I’ll skip over my failed foray into Paleo Quest – in the first place, I can’t figure out how to play that game, which, while similar to Linden Realms in that it’s an adventure game, is at a higher difficulty level.  In the second place, you have to spend a minimum of real-life money ($2.50 USD) for the potential of making L$, which is kind of the opposite of what I want to do with SL.

So – on to what I’ve had some success in – fishing.

When I first decided to try out SL, I googled to find the different ways to earn money in SL and found information on fishing (among other things, but you can only try one thing at a time).  The basic rod is free and as a newbie, you get a handful of free worms to fish with.  There’s several different types of worms – anything from ‘small’ to ‘mini’ to ‘large’ to ‘candy’ to ‘magic’ worms. 

Basically, you wear the HUD and the rod, select the button on the HUD to go to a new location, find the buoy (a red arrow will point your way to it), click the buoy, click your rod, and wait to catch a fish.  Everything you catch has its own value of L$.  Once you get to L$1 (at least that’s what I’ve experienced so far) you can go to the ATM or headquarters and cash your fish in to move that money into your SL account.  You can only fish at a buoy for a limited amount of time, and then you can’t return to it for several hours.  Also, you can buy the better rods, but they’re quite expensive and I have doubts about how much value they actually would give you (later edit: it seems that they only give a shorter time for catching fish).  Reviews are positive on them, though. 

There are a few different companies offering fishing.  Each has their own name for their free and paid rods and their own types of worms, so if you want to do this, you have to pair up the correct HUD, rod, buoy and worms.  Whichever company you use, be sure to landmark their headquarters to make it easier for you to get back to it.

The first one is called Fish Hunt.  I pretty much just used up the free worms and then stopped.  The cost per worm (cheapest or most expensive) was greater than the amount of L$ being paid out, so in the end, you’re just paying to have fun.  I also ended up joining their group.  It’s a pretty friendly group of people, so I do like that.  The same company also has a game called Gold Hunt (which is next on my list to try out) and Trivia Hunt (as I’m writing this, I just earned 60 cents in L$.  Be near one of their trivia centers (you can also get a HUD to help with finding them), see a question, type the answer into your chat, and get some L$!).  For all of these games, you need to go to the same area for their headquarters to cash out.

The next company for fishing is Second Farm.  Their fishing game is called Magic Fishing.  After a little bit of a misstep, I’m having pretty good luck with them.  They have two different colored buoys, green and blue.  They have four types of worms (Candy, Big, Sticky and Mini).  Sticky worms only with the blue buoys and mini worms work with the green buoys.  As to the misstep, I accidentally purchased some candy worms (with L$), the most expensive ones, and I was only able to earn back that money by using all of those worms plus the free ones.  In short, the payout is just not worth it for the candy and the big worms, but you make, at a minimum, enough to cover the cost of the cheaper worms plus a bit (as in, enough to purchase the next round of worms plus net some money).  I believe the candy worms do have a chance of getting some high-earning ‘fish’, though.

Now for some practical tips: Once you’re near a buoy, sit down!  Alt+Ctrl+S.  That way, when you’re trying to click on your rod and miss, your avatar won’t walk away from the buoy.  And it will take quite a bit of practice to click exactly on the rod even most of the time, so go ahead and nip this little frustration in the bud by sitting.

Alt+Arrow button lets you zoom in and out, and while you’re sitting, the left and right arrows spin around your avatar.  Zooming in and changing your view to have a better view of your rod helps when clicking it.

Occasionally, you’ll have to solve a little math problem after clicking on your rod.  That’s just to prevent bots.

For some of the buoys, you’ll have to join a group first.  Don’t worry, there’s no spam!  Go ahead and join.  If you’ve joined that group previously, hit the back arrow in the left-hand corner of the pop-up, select the ‘Groups’ tab and activate the group you need.  Then go back and click on the buoy.

From time to time, you’ll get a potion as a prize.  Go to your inventory (the suitcase on your sidebar) and search for potions.  Right click, select ‘Wear’, and click on it once it pops up next to your avatar.  After it gives you the end result (Good luck, bad luck, extra experience), go back to your inventory, right click, select ‘Detach’, right click, select ‘Delete’ to remove it.  You can only use these once and you have to use them ten minutes after receiving them.

To purchase worms (this took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure out): left click on the barrel, select the type of worm you want, and then right click on the barrel and click ‘Pay’ from the dropdown menu.  Then, click on the amount of L$ you want to spend.  Voila!

Here’s the downside of teleporting to several different places – you might not be able to get into certain ones.  There’s a few different reasons for it that I’ve found, and probably more.  One might be that only certain people who are already in a particular group are allowed in.  Or you get dropped into a private area and are forced out.  An area might be restarting or have other technical issues (if that’s so, you’ll be able to get into it later).  A common one is that each area has a rating of General, Moderate, or Adult.  Unless you change your settings (it gives instructions for how to do this when you fail a teleport because of it), SL automatically blocks you from entering the Adult areas, thankfully.  I am very, very anti-porn, so I left the settings in their default.  Some of these areas that the HUDs can teleport you into (basically anywhere where a land owner has agreed to let these games be played on) are Adult, so as a result, I often end up selecting ‘Random Locations’ several times before finally finding a place I can teleport into.

There’s a third game called Superfish (I’m not sure who the company is with that one) that I haven’t tried yet, but I certainly plan to.