Aquaponics for Vintage Story

I cant seem to get the fish to breed, they have eaten a full stack of feed at this point and have produced 0 new fish? There was some possible egg thing that spawned but days later and its still not hatched or interacteable.

edit: Turns out I was having a memory leak and needed to relaod my game.

I've got a question about how farmland fertilization works: all of the images show the farmland in the water directly, but does it have to be that way, or can the farmland be around the edge of the pond instead so the water isn't being blocked off?

I'm trying to avoid the problem malfiros was having where fish would spawn on the farmland and beach themselves.

Unsure if it's been reported but on the latest version, all the fish are just sitting frozen still in waters.

thepods1 I have not been able to replicate your issue. Try deleting the mod and reinstalling from scratch. DO NOT open your save in between or you risk losing all your fish and mod blocks you have. 

Ijkdenem no, they don't starve. They have an AI issue where they zombify as a result of this mod preventing them from despawning. If you bucket them, they will revive. Alternately, if you have a pond set up, you can click on the pond with your bucket and hold there while the pond quickly cycles through all of the fish in the pond. This revive will currently need to be done when reloading chunks with zombie fish. Also, reloading into the game is reported to revive the fish as well. This is what is being discussed in bold under the new features section.

thepods1 could you elaborate on how it is now broken.

In regards to fish that are despawning from my pond - I do seem to be finding dead fish in random places around the pond, sometimes around 50 blocks away. Also, sometimes when breeding them they spawn on a farmland block, which means I either have to sacrifice the plant by breaking the block if I want to save the fish, or let the fish die thus wasting the breeding to an extent (still get some fish out of it but would much rather keep my pond stocked). This seems to happen after travelling far away from the pond. Hope this helps with diagnosing the bug. Love the mod so far though, keep up the good work! This will definitely become one of my core mods once all the bugs are smoothed out! ☺️ 

So how do you get fish to actually spawn? Ive searched a million lakes and the ocean and havent seen a single fish in over 10 hours of play :( I do play with Primitive Survival, does this ruin things?

Yeah I seem to be losing fish quite quickly now. I went from 50 fish to about 30. Not finding any corpses or anything nearby, but they seem to be despawning.

IssaDwarf Good point. I didn't think about the fact that you would lose the fish anyway without the mod due to them not being persistent entities.

I wonder if the code telling fish to despawn is a 1.22 (or maybe 1.21) change, because I used to have a 1.20 world where I had two salmon in a pond in a cave, and they lasted an entire year without ever despawning (and I frequently walked very far away from them). I had just assumed from having had that experience that fish don't despawn (unless their pond freezes).

Does the temporary fix where you use the bucket on the pond block to revive the AI of all the fish last, or do the fish freeze again if you leave and come back? I was saying that it sucks to have to keep doing it every time you come back. I haven't tried the temporary fix yet because my pond is made of muddy gravel atm rather than the pond blocks (it's not a pond for farmland fertilization, just a sanctuary for fish).

Only problem with IssaDwarf's solution is that if you ever uninstall the mod, all of the fish you have personally collected will like, break, right? Since they are technically fish from the mod instead of vanilla fish.

I mean, in theory, it should work

Try them as a yourmod:domesticated whatever species. Have the generation that hatches, litterally be the same model and AI but rename them and see if that works, if so then you have your fix. 

Just wanted to report that occasionally when I come back to my pond, I find some dead or soon-to-be-dead fish flopped up on the deck around my farmland. Seems to happen when they breed and a new fish spawns in a weird spot.
Also, I'm a little concerned about winter and my pond freezing over and killing all the fish. Currently it is only 1 block deep. As far as I understand, it will need to be at least 2 blocks deep to keep my fish alive when winter hits. Guess that's a future me problem lol.

Pawnd180 I wonder how the Primitive Survival author got around this issue (if they did). If all else fails, maybe you can ask them how they got fish to be persistent entities without having the fish AI turn off.

EDIT: Apparently the fish in the Primitive Survival mod despawn after a while. Yikes, that's not good.

Pawnd180 Okay, I understand what you mean now. Yeah, I just tested it on my pond. I used the fish bucket on all of my fish to make them no longer frozen, but after a while they were all frozen again. Can't keep using the fish bucket on every single fish in my pond over and over again, even if I use the holding right-click method you mentioned to do it quickly. Like you said, definitely need a more permenant solution, i.e., a way to make it so that the fish AI stays on, at least for fish that have been captured and released once with the fish bucket.

Pawnd180 So what you're saying is that all fish, including newly discovered ones that have never been picked up with a fish bucket before, will need to be picked up and put down once with the fish bucket in order for them to stop staying still? Or are you saying that you reverted the way you coded it before and that no fish will ever be standing still now? I can live with the former if that's what you meant. Let me test it to see if I can find out how this works now.

maybe add a fish tank recipe? or a holding tank recipe? that way you can store live fish for whatever the crap you need them for. either for restocking an accidentally depleted fish source or just to move fish to other spots cuz you fell like not enough fish in the spots you want them in. or cuz you want an indoor aquarium.

whatever the reason please add something like this in some way/shape/form.

Ahhhh okay, so it keeps nutrients at a minimum level, I see now. I was under the impression that it added an amount of nutrients per day. Thank you for the clarity, much appreciated. I updated my pond and added blocks under the edge walls, that seems to have corrected the fish count on all blocks. 👍

Hey there! I've put together the pond and have farmland on it, I am able to breed the fish, but I'm not seeing any nutrient values change on any of the farmland blocks. I've got well over 20 fish in the pond, I can right click most of the blocks and it reflects the proper amount of fish I have, but some blocks are saying there are fewer fish than there actually are. I've lined the bottom and edges of the pond with pond blocks, but am wondering if I need to put pond blocks under the edge blocks as well? Am I doing something wrong? Maybe a video demonstrating step by step how this mod is supposed to work would help with any confusion. Thanks!

Dubbin912 yes. The author is aware of this bug and is working on fixing it.

You (and the author, if they aren't already aware) should know that a fish doesn't simply turn to the opposite sex upon being released; it has a 50/50 chance when you release it of being either sex. For example, you can catch a male fish, release it as a male, catch it again, release it as a male again, catch it again, and then release it as a female. The same can happen for a female fish. I've been enjoying using this as a way to get one of each sex in cases where I only have two male fish or two female fish. Hurrah for exploits!😛

this is such a cool idea, well done!

Can I assume that this is compatible with the fish caught using Primitive Survival mod?

Also, is anybody else having issue that when you catch a female fish in your bucket out in the world, when you place it into your pond, it turns male? Same if I catch a male, when I dump it into my pond, it's female. Not an issue as I just catch one of each but just a little odd.

How long does it take for two fish to breed? I have a male, and a female of the same fish and feed them. The whole farm plot is surrounded by the pond blocks, but its been a few days and they say they are ready to breed, but don't seem to be doing so?

Can you make a different recipe for the fish bucket. I currently have three because I made blood sausages which uses a bucket of blood, ofal, and redmeat. I had the ingredients to make the max amount so I held shift and clicked the blood sausage. It then transferred 32 blood sausage and one fish bucket to my inventory. Thinking it was a fluke, I tried it again and it did the same thing. Maybe make the fish bucket recipe with a bucket and piece of fish food or something of that sort? Otherwise, great mod so far!!

Hey, I'm still experiencing the frozen fish bug (I'm using version 1.0.3). There's a translocator I have which leads right to a pond, and whenver I go through that, or whenever I go through it, back through it, and then through it again, some of the fish in the pond are immobile.

Mod is installed on the server and on the client side but nothing in game. I see nothing stating the mod didn't load properly or anything in the mod is broken in the server status. Ideas?

I am by no means a coder, but maybe you could look into the chickens' egg laying behavior and partially copy it for fish laying their eggs? And also make a "feeder" trough-derived block so fish could eat by itself? 
Doing it "the minecraft way" genuinely made me chuckle though!

There's an issue with the mod where all the fish in a pond will just stand still sometimes (not even moving when you go right up to them and splash around), including fish that have never had the bucket used on them. I was never seeing this anywhere before installing the mod, so I'm fairly sure the mod caused this. Quitting to the main menu and going back into the world often causes the fish to start moving again, but only until the next time the bug occurs. It seems to only happen for fish in chunks that were not loaded when you first entered the world. So the way to reproduce the bug is to load up a world and then travel to a fish pond that's a decent distance away (the bug doesn't always occur right away, but the longer you have a world running, the higher the chance that this will happen at some point).

IDK if it has been mentioned, but for anyone who doesnt know or use the primitive survival mod, it lets you catch fish alive.  I would like a remove fish from hook step thathas x chance to kill fish when fishing in general.  but the bucket transpert works as well.

The idea is great, if a little OP at the tail end with the whole farm fertilization. I've found a bunch of issues though:
First, the pond block recipe accepts any stones, but only blue clay. Is that a balancing choice or an oversight?
Second, with the mod installed, it spams the chat with messages containing the entire info on whatever block of tiled soil you are currently looking at: the size of a pond the block resides in, the amount of fish around, the nutrient level and the fertilization rate. There's no way to NOT have it do that (or none I have found, at least). Even if you are looking at a farmland not inside a fish pond. Even if there's literally no pond blocks around. Even if it's just a piece of dirt you accidentally tiled. Is there a way to maybe add an "inspect" keybind for that instead of just showering the player with the information they never asked for?

Pawnd180 I have been into aquaponics for about 15 years now and am thrilled to see it come into Vintage Story as a mod. I find abculatter_2's ideas interesting, but most are not in line with aquaponics. It would be an amazing aquaculture project, but the more complicated you make your aquaponic setup, the greater the variety of causes and likelyhood of causing a cascading catastrophic die-off. As for self feeding though, duckweed is a great product for that as long as you can keep it out of the filter... since this is basically a bogfilter setup, there's no issue there. As far as fish capacity in a system, the limiting factor is actually soluable oxygen. As an aside, all water dwellers produce plant food, it's litterally their waste product.  Fish eats food [of whatever type] -> bateria breaks down waste -> different bateria breaks down farther -> plants eats results, purifying water for the fish -> cycle continues.  

A couple of additional notes: if you are raising Omnivores or Carnivores, lower stocking is required because they'll just eat each other. Also, they need places to hide from each other. Talapia are usually what is grown irl as they reach full size in a growing season [6-8months]. The reason for hand feeding is to observe the fish eating to note if changes to amount is needed as part of the goal is to grow the fish as quickly as possible. Basically, you are forcing them to put on as much weight as possible as quickly as possible because once they reach a certain age, their growth rate slows down dramatically. In a less pure system, you can set up an ecosystem where you have multiple types of aquatic creatures living in a food chain system while using their waste to grow your crops. However, at that point, you've basically just got an aquaculture system with your farmland acting as the bogfilter rather than an aquaponics system. You're not going to get the maximum  from an aquaculture system that you can from an aquaponics system (at least irl). The beauty of the aquaponic system is in the shear volume of food that can be produced in a compact space virtually anywhere. 

Something I would like to see is overstocking your pond without planted crops causing nitrate/nitrite/amonia toxicity requiring you to manually replace water with clean water to prevent harm to fish stock.

Also, having a fishtank for breeding stock in the house to release fry into the pond every spring to grow for harvest in the fall in cooler locations that can't sustain a pond all year.

*There's no rule saying you can't grow sea dwealing creatures and plants in an aquaponic setup, that's not creep at all. All aquaponics means is that you are using fish waste to grow your plants. This is typically done with fresh water as a means of convenience as salt water is very harsh on most mechanical systems. On the other hand, I would classify setting up complex ecosystem ponds as creep, but I'm not the mod author. 

As you progess in your modding journey, it would be great to see you develop a system to build a framework out of sticks or wattle fences to hold sand to be used as the grow medium inside your fish ponds as that wold definitely be more authentic. It would ensure that the only nutrients present are coming from the fish as you can forbid the use of soil modifiers. Also, once you have your own medium to plant on, you should allow for faster growth. Plants grown in aquaponic systems grow significantly faster than those on soil when properly stocked with fish. (I totally haven't been thinking of how to develop this into a mod for years 😁)

Concept looks pretty cool, as a QoL addition this mod could also allow to pick up farmland blocks or at least return them as dirt blocks when destoyed, it would probably allow for more flexible repositioning.

I like the concept of this mod! Would you be able to change the food system to be more similar to vanilla animals? (IE; based on food item tags, and varying by fish species)

It would also be neat to have some form of passive feeding system, at the cost of nutrients. Maybe a special kind of crop or farmland that consumes nutrients and rarely feeds the fish without needing any player input, up to a specified carrying capacity?

EDIT: if you really wanted to go extra with the above, you could make it so that the passive feeder block only feeds fish that eat vegetables or grass, and omnivorius/carnivorous fish will sometimes eat those smaller fish. To encourage the creation of a full ecosystem, fish that do this cause the fertility to increase much more, allowing you to make a more complex system with more failpoints, but allows for *much* higher fertility values then otherwise! ( If you did do this, though, you'd probably want to greatly reduce the current default fertility values, so that you have more room to allow for buffs. Also, a config for all of these values would be great!)