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[Uzu Bash]

I still haven't got the hang of it. My fisherdwarves never caught anything in these vast and unlimited cavern waters (possibly because they all congregate on one tile, chatting away and scaring the fish,) so I shut down the fishery and turned them into haulers long ago. But if I were to do this successfully (and usefully,) how would I go about it? I'm totally lost on this, and The Wiki doesn't have any helpful answers.

EDIT: doh, editted wrong post

[LoveMachine]

I've see fish (with loo(k)) in cavern lakes, but they always seem to disappear after a short while.  All fished out I guess.

Maybe the lakes that are open to the map edge get repopulated - but you never know what's going to come in off the edge off the map.

[Daetrin]

I have not been able to catch fish in caverns in 31.x.
I rarely find fish aboveground in non-brook/stream/river aboveground water tiles.
Basically, if you want fish, you need flowing water aboveground.

[Uzu Bash]

The cavern is almost completely flooded, so the water is open to the edge of the map, but there's no flowing water except for what I push around myself. I was planning some aboveground aqueducts, and they'll probably kill my fps, but would it make fishable water?

[RandomNumberGenerator]

Fishing is bugged at the moment. If you're lucky, you might find some turtles in a murky pool, or if you're really lucky something else, but don't depend on fishing for anything useful.

[Akura]

I don't think I've ever tried to fish in caverns...

Have you designated a fishing zone in the cavern? It may be that they don't fish underground by default, so that they aren't killed by the creatures in the caverns(yet remain completely oblivious to everything on the surface ).

For the aboveground aqueduct, you might only get turtles, if anything. Which may be a good thing, if you want shells.

[Sphalerite]

Brooks and murky ponds sometimes give a few turtles before becoming permanently fished out.  Cave fish and cave lobster seem to be restricted to underwater rivers, which don't exist anymore.

I have had wonderful results fishing on the ocean.  All sorts of fish, and I've never managed to fish the ocean out.  I suspect that the only way to sustain a long-term fishing industry is on an oceanside fortress.

[Maninblack144]

I fished about 300-odd Mussels (also a couple of turtles but more mussles than anything else) out of the minor river on my site before there was nothing to catch anymore. The fisherdorfs checked all the ponds for fish, but they all came out empty. Fast-forward about an in-game year and the murky pools at the south side of my site suddenly have fish again.

So to me it looks like fish migrates, like land animals or something, though I'm absolutely not sure on that.

[Uzu Bash]

Have you designated a fishing zone in the cavern?

Standing orders don't require it, but yeah, I designated the hell out of fishing zones. Not too precise about it either, so there's plenty of room for them to stand and fish. I know they've tried because I got spammed with the failure messages 'no fish in the southern/western/eastern/northern caverns'.

I see the fish there, though, they pop in and out like any other vermin.

Also, the murky pools aboveground don't have water; they might reach 1/7 in scattered tiles about a month out of the year, so brief you can miss it if you blink. Sometimes there's lungfish flopping around, though.

[Shoku]

The way it would work if not bugged would be that your fisherdwarves would eventually fish a source dry and then have to wait for the next season change. The water didn't need connections to the map edge or anything like that, just to be in the region tile. You'd be able to pull a million fish out of a single mined out aquifer tile if you felt like it.
Well, not a million. Aside from the fish that happen to be present in a particular season you'd also have to worry about the total population number. When the total hits zero there are no more fish ever.

Hopefully we can get back to fishing with a nice bug fix in the next release or such.

[AngleWyrm]

My last fort had no fishable fish ever, in the eleven years that I played it. There were fish visible, but there was "nothing to catch in the whatever" each season. Here's hoping for better luck on my next fort.

[Sphalerite]

I see the fish there, though, they pop in and out like any other vermin.

It turns out that seeing vermin fish in a body of water has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you can fish from that body of water or what kind of fish you get when you do.  It appears that the fishing job does not result in the capture of vermin fish roaming the map, but rather generates raw fish objects based on what biome the fishing job is being performed in and some invisible count of how many fish are remaining in that object.  Vermin fish roaming the map can be captured with the 'capture live fish' command at a fishery, which will result in captive vermin fish that you still can't eat or butcher for shells.

[Nameless Archon]

I really hope Toady can throw us a bugfix bone on the fishing thing. It's really bothersome to constantly be getting "there are no invisible food fish to catch (but I'm going to tease you with visible vermin fish)" all the time. Sadly, the only thing I've done in the meantime is just work around it. Set your fisherment to fish until they get a backlog, then switch them to cleaning all the fish, etc. IF the season changes reset the population (which I've been assuming they do) then you can send them back out to fish when they're done and they'll get right back to work.

[Aner-Dyfan]

Ah thanks for clearing that up Sphalerite. I was wondering about turning Urist McBrokenline into bait so annoyed was I about him complaining about no fish, when I can clearly see entire shoals swarming through my rivers, pools and caverns.

[Uzu Bash]

That would explain why a tame coelecanth appeared in one of the cages while the fishing duties were turned off. I suppose someone ate it, but 1) who the hell did it 2) can they do it again 3) I've never seen coelecanth anywhere around here, so where the heck did this come from?

EDIT: The question about aboveground fishing remains; if I lay out an aqueduct of flowing water on the surface, will it become fishable?