Foraging
Bait you dig up rather than tie. Today that is a click and a coin flip; this is the plan to make it a thing you can be good at — four small games, a real chance of walking away with nothing, and a reason to care which block you picked.
The trowel and its bait tables are written, but nothing on this page is — it is a proposal to replace how a swing is settled, and the details will move as it gets made. Published so the people who asked for a foraging minigame can push back on the parts they disagree with before it is built.
Why It Changes
Five baits are not earned by fishing at all. They are dug up with a trowel — worms out of dirt, grubs out of roots, crickets out of long grass after dark, glowgrubs off deep stone — so a brand new angler has bait before they have caught anything to make bait out of.
As it stands, one swing is: is this the right kind of block, and did a hidden roll pass? That is the whole of it. The only input a player has is where they chose to stand, and the only thing that ever varies is whether the die landed well. So foraging is a walk between identical coin flips, and the walk is the more interesting half.
The rule that stops it becoming a worm farm is already the right one and it does not change: ground you have turned over stays empty until you have worked through a good many other blocks. A cooldown on the tool just makes it slower and a cooldown on the block makes you stand there waiting — remembering where you have been makes you walk, which is what foraging is supposed to be. What changes is what happens when you find something.
The New Loop
The minigame replaces the coin flip. It does not sit next to it. Click a block; if something could live there, the game starts; win it and you get the bait.
A swing at stone is still instant, still quiet, still free — the gate is whether the ground is right, not whether you got lucky, so the game only ever opens on ground that could actually pay. That matters more than it sounds: a test on every swing would turn a ten minute worm hunt into forty minutes of minigame, and most of those swings were never going to be interesting.
Win or lose, that patch of ground is done. Today a failed swing deliberately leaves the block alone, and that was right when the failure was the server's die — being punished for a coin flip is arbitrary. A lost minigame is not arbitrary. You watched yourself lose it, so taking the block is fair, and it is the only thing that stops the whole idea collapsing into swing-until-you-win.
It is marked the moment the game starts, not when it ends — otherwise walking away from one that is going badly is a free retry, and walking away should cost exactly what losing costs.
Where The Odds Went
Every bait already carries a number for how often it turns up, and that is how the rarer ones are kept rare. Under a skill gate the same number is read as how hard it is to get: the glowgrub is not a worse coin flip than the earthworm, it is a tighter band and a faster marker.
One number, read by a different system — so the balance that is already authored across the bait tables carries straight over instead of being thrown out and guessed again. The global “how generous is foraging” dial survives too, as one difficulty scalar that can be tuned live.
What You Get
Lose and you get nothing. That is the floor, and the test needs it — a game you cannot lose is an animation with a delay in front of it.
Above the floor, winning is not one thing. Three winning bands, because the whole point is that doing it well should pay better than scraping through:
| Outcome | Casts of bait | Which bait | On top |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perfect | Double | Strongly weighted to the good stuff | A chance the bait comes out modified, plus a bonus roll |
| Clean | Half again | Mildly weighted | A bonus roll |
| Scraped | Normal — what a lucky swing pays today | Straight odds | — |
| Failed | Nothing | — | — |
A bare win pays exactly what a lucky roll pays now, so nobody who liked foraging before is worse off for winning scrappily — the two better bands are new upside rather than the old payout moved out of reach.
Tackle already carries Angler Modifiers — the small stat twist that makes two copies of the same reel different. Bait can carry one and currently never does. A perfect dig rolling one is a real, differently-named, stat-bearing item for no new system and no new art: the difference between a jar of worms and a jar of good worms.
Which bait you get is decided after the game, not before it. If it were decided first, a player who could see a common worm coming would have a reason to throw the game — and deciding after is what makes “doing well pays better” literally true, rather than just meaning a bigger pile of the same thing.
The Four Games
Four, because one gets old and this is something people do hundreds of times. They are picked to test four different things — control, reaction, search, nerve — rather than being four skins on the same timing bar.
Which one you get is a property of what you are digging, not a shuffle, so it is learnable: worms come out of soil the same way every time.
The Steady Pull
ControlIt is anchored and it will tear. Hold to pull and the strain climbs; let go and it eases. Release inside the give and you win a length of it, three times over. Pull too hard and it tears — once drops you a band, twice loses it.
Worms and grubs: soil, roots.
Turn the Stone
ReactionA marker sweeps the track. Green pays, amber pays less, and red is a nip — a crab, a nettle — that costs you the segment. Tap as it crosses. Three taps, two or three seconds, pure reflex.
River gravel, sand, wet stone.
The Trail
SearchThe swing turns up a sign rather than a find. Something nearby is the real one; a handful of blocks around you show a tell, and you get a warmer-colder read as you move. Two digs, on a clock. Right first time is perfect.
Forest floor, caves.
Careful Hands
NerveA grid over the find. Each uncover is a fragment, a root, or a strike; two strikes and it is over. Take it banks what you have at any moment. One fragment is a win, more is a better one — so the whole game is “one more, or take it”.
Rare finds and cave clusters only — never the tenth worm.
The Trail is the one that earns its place twice over: it is the only one that happens in the world instead of on a bar, and it gets people walking on purpose rather than as the consequence of a rule.
Careful Hands is deliberately kept off the common finds. It is a window — it takes the screen and it cannot be played while walking — which is exactly right for a rare dig and exactly wrong for a routine one.
If You Hate Minigames
Some people do, and a setting says so: Auto skips the game and settles the swing the way the plugin settles it today — one roll, a normal payout if it passes, nothing if it does not, block marked either way.
Auto is the coin flip; playing is the skill route. That is what makes it safe to offer. It is not a free win, so nobody switches it on to farm; it is not a punishment, so nobody is shut out of bait for disliking timing tests. And because a won game beats the coin flip and carries the two upside bands, anyone who plays is better off for it.
Getting Better At It
Two things move, and neither one is an item to grind for:
- Your fishing level widens the band — slightly, and capped. A veteran forager is measurably better at the same dig than a beginner. Right now level only decides what you can find, never how well you find it.
- A good dig rolls twice — and the second roll is pointed at crafting materials. That closes a real gap: tying bait and repairing line both eat materials, and materials currently come only off fish. Foraging that feeds the workbench is a reason to keep foraging after you already know every recipe.
Tackle stays out of it. Foraging is not fishing, and a rig should not be the answer to every question on the server.
What The Client Allows
Worth repeating here, because it is the wall every minigame idea meets: there is no continuous mouse channel into a server-drawn interface. The server sees clicks, it sees a button being held and let go, and it sees presses on interface widgets. It does not see the cursor move. Anything shaped like “trace the circle” or “follow the dot with your mouse” cannot be built, however good it would be.
All four games above are built out of what is left — a held button, a tapped button, a bar the server animates, a panel of things to click, and where you are standing. Which is the same alphabet the fishing fight is already made of, so none of it is new ground.
Still Open
- The bait trap does not get one, and should not. The trap is the passive tier on purpose — casting asks you to be at the water, foraging asks you to walk, a trap asks only that you came back. A minigame on the passive tier deletes the difference.
- Does this ever pay something other than bait? The frame does not care. If foraging comes to yield materials or the odd buried thing, the same result drives it.
- Careful Hands in a cave is a window with a mob behind you. Probably refused while something is hitting you.
- Sound and tells are not costed yet. Each game needs to read clearly without text, and the fight's existing cues are the first place to shop.
The plan for the rest of it — the catch, the species, the tackle these baits feed — is on the design page.