Catch of the Day: The New Bank of Halfang

If you're played Wizard101 for very long, you're probably familiar with Halfang - either from hearing it so many times or having farmed there yourself. Gary Scott Smith, the Senior Software Engineer for Wizard101, promised an alternative to this gold-gathering method... and he delivered in this most recent update.

Fishing Tournaments and Catch of the Day

Besides several new doodlefish available to be caught in houses, Wizard101 also introduced two new fishing features. The first is tournaments. Like PvP tournaments, these award arena tickets at the end of the week when they're over. The tournament requires you not only to catch a particular fish, but to catch either a small fry or a whopper, and the largest or smallest fish will win. Catch of the Day is the other new feature introduced with Polaris, and it's a little bit different.

How It Works

The Catch of the Day is a fish that you can see from any of the primary fishing vendors in Grizzleheim, Dragonspyre, or Wizard City. You do not need to catch a particular size, only that fish. The bonus is that when you sell the Catch of the Day, you will receive three times the normal gold amount. 

Fish sell prices vary greatly based on species and size, but let's say that your fish typically sells for 1,000 gold. While it is the Catch of the Day, it will sell for 3,000 gold. It's important to note that it doesn't matter when you caught the fish, it's only when you sell it that this bonus is taken into account. So if a fish that you already have becomes the Catch of the Day, you can sell it for the bonus. Every night at midnight CST, the Catch of the Day changes and the bonus no longer applies to that fish.

There is another part to it, though. Each consecutive day you catch the Catch of the Day, you will receive a 100 gold bonus on all sales. So the first day, if your fish is typically worth 1000 gold, it will actually sell for 3,100 gold. If you catch the Catch of the Day on the following day, you'll get 200 extra gold for each fish sold, all the way up to 3,000 extra gold per fish sold. So if you caught the Catch of the Day every day for the month, then your fish that typically sells for 1,000 gold would sell for 6000 gold.

Getting the Gold

At this point, 6000 gold is still a pretty great bonus for a single fish, but that's only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how much you can make. Many fish sell for prices well above 1,000 gold on a normal day.

Say I'd been catching the required fish all month and the Catch of the Day was Jaws. A Jaws fish that I have now sells for over 9000 (for real!) gold. Take that and multiply it by three and add a 3,000 gold bonus. That's 30,000 gold... per fish! There are several that would sell for 16,000-20,000 each that are extremely common.

This becomes a very easy way to get gold, easily surpassing the old Halfang farming method. Plus, this is much less luck-based. With Halfang, you relied on the 8,000-gold amulet drops to really get rich quick. With fishing, you have a lot of control over what you catch.

KingsIsle has been trying to tempt more and more players into fishing, first with crafted Darkmoor decks and now with extreme gold bonuses. If you've never tried it, I recommend testing your fishing ability. And if you're familiar with it, you now have a reason to stop in daily to see what the Catch of the Day is!

Will you be fishing for the Catch of the Day each day?

Good luck with the gold! Thanks for reading and see you in the Spiral!