Originally posted by Eightball:

I side with @jsholdschl on this. Specific fish hit specific baits in RL so the way the game handles it now is fine for me.

@Subsonic actually make a really strong point in that players would probably not like their high level bait to be used on low tier fish.

Well 2 points here. Let me discuss them.

1- About realism:

Im not professional fisherman, but have been fishing with friends and such, just on a ludic way. Sure there may be prefered bait for certain fishes, but usually as far i´ve noticed usually people use a general, all-purpose bait, wich most fish will take even if not "prefered". I don´t think even in real life there would be a single specific bait for a single specific fish in a 1:1 equivalence, meaning that bait only works for that fish, and that certain fish will only take a single specific bait. (Well, maybe some very rare fish, but seems exceptional)

Also about realism, talking about Valheim, i think one of the main point sof valheim is setting the realism somewhat aside in favor for fun. Like, you don´t starve, or get thirsty till deat, and so on. Sometimes less is more, and sometimes simpler mechanics makes games more enjoyable. Im all-in with adding "depth", different bait with different properties, and such, but not in that way thar, as said previously, seems a huge constraint and somewhat frustrating as you have to spend much more time fishing to actually fish anything. Also about realism, well, we have skeletons, magic, and stuff, so its neither like the game pretend to be a simulator as to stick to the more realistic way of doing everything.

2- Loosing high level bait to lesser fish:

Well, right now, "high fishes" gives just the same than "lower fishes" (raw fish) but in a higher amount. The only reward for getting a high-fish is just to get more of the same. In that sense, if the target of the player is to get as many raw fish as possible, it still would be better to catch anything (even if its worth just 1 raw fish) than spending much more time getting high-fish wiich will be more. Sure, high-bait would be more "efficient", but less effective. And then comes the second point:

High-bait fish isn´t actually all that much hard to get. "wasting" it by getting a lower-tier fish is not really so much of a waste, and as stated on previous paragraph, probably the annoyance of "getting a lower-tier-fish" is still less annoying than getting no fish even if that means "saving" the high-tier-bait, wich actually isn´t all that hard to get.

Hope this makes sense.