Breedables
Bait Tank
Breed your own live bait. Stock it with two bait fish, keep them fed and their water right, and the shoal grows to thirty: the live bait a rod needs to reach the epics.
Size in-world: 1.2 m × 1.2 m, 0.8 m tall
L$1,000
Citizens L$800 · save up to L$600 with a membership
Delivery is handled by the bot, straight to your inventory in Second Life — or pick it up in-world at the Emporium. Members save on the whole range.
Watch it work
The product tutorial, start to finish.
Read it written up on the forum — the same walkthrough, with the numbers, and somewhere to ask.
The Bait Tank is the first of the breedables: an oak-framed, glass-sided tank where bait fish breed. Put in two of one kind, keep them fed and in their pH band, and one more is born every six hours, up to thirty: a week from a pair to a full tank. Take live bait out whenever you like; the tank always keeps two to breed from.
Live bait reaches the epics. Most baits stop short of them. A live fish is taken by the fish that hunt it, wherever those are biting that week, so each kind is its own key: live sprat for swordfish, tuna and common skate, live herring for Atlantic halibut, porbeagle and shortfin mako. Every live fish is an item too: put it on the hook, stock another tank with it, or trade it to another angler.
Choose its water once. The first touch asks fresh or salt, and from then on the tank takes only fish of that water: bleak, bluegill, creek chub, dace, gudgeon, pumpkinseed and rock bass in fresh, anchovy, herring, prawn, sardine and sprat in salt. One kind lives in a tank at a time. Emptying it hands every fish back to you alive, and an empty tank can change its water.
Stock it from the water. Land a small fish (common or uncommon, up to 0.6 kg) and the fishing HUD offers to keep it in your bucket, alive for an hour from landing: long enough to carry home and pour in with Stock, From bucket. Or stock it with live fish from your inventory, taken from another tank or bought from another keeper.
Feed it. One piece of feed keeps one fish fed for a day: bait worms or maggots in fresh water, fish feed in salt. Fed fish breed; hungry ones stop growing, but they do not die.
Keep the water right. Each fish has its pH band, and the fish's own waste pulls the pH down, faster as the shoal grows. Eggshells raise it 0.2 and are the everyday fix; peat moss lowers it 0.2 for when you overshoot. Out of band the tank loses a fish every six hours until the water is put right. The hover text shows the pH against the band, how long the fish are fed, and whether they are growing, hungry or sick. What a day of keeping it takes is set out below.
Share it, or make it yours. Who else may stock, feed, treat or take from it follows the tank's security, as on any SL Colonies station, and each person spends from their own inventory. It is modifiable: keep the root prim, where the scripts are, and you can unlink the rest, the tank and its swimming fish, to save land impact, or dress the root in a build of your own.
What you need to get started
A tank from its first two fish to a full shoal. The tank never wears out; the feed and the water treatments are used up.
To start
2 live fish of one kind
Fresh or salt water, chosen on the first touch. Catch them with a rod and the free fishing HUD, or get them from another keeper.
Feed
- Fresh: bait worms or maggots
- Salt: fish feed
One feeds one fish for a day. Hungry fish stop breeding but do not die.
pH band
- Salt: 8.0 to 8.4
- Fresh: 6.5 to 7.5
- Dace, bleak: 7.0 to 7.8
Eggshells raise it 0.2, peat moss lowers it 0.2. Out of band, a fish dies every 6 hours.
Grows
30 fish at most
One more every 6 hours while fed and in band: 2 to 30 in 7 days. Taking fish always leaves 2.
A day of keeping it
The fish's own waste pulls the pH down, faster for every ten fish, so eggshells are the everyday fix and peat moss is for when you overshoot. A salt-water tank starts at pH 8.2 and a fresh one at 7.0, the very bottom of dace and bleak's band: give them an eggshell as soon as they go in.
| Fish in the tank | Feed a day | pH falls a day | Eggshells to hold it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 to 10 | 2 to 10 | 0.2 | 1 |
| 11 to 20 | 11 to 20 | 0.4 | 2 |
| 21 to 30 | 21 to 30 | 0.6 | 3 |
Where the supplies come from
| Supply | In the tank | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Fish feed | Feeds a salt-water tank | 1 × anchovy, 3 × wheat make 10 at the Cooking Station, a level 1 Cook recipe. |
| Bait worms | Feed a fresh-water tank | Turned up by the Compost Bin's fertilizer, rich compost and mulches, and sold by the Fisherman Master for CXP. |
| Maggots | Feed a fresh-water tank | Turned up by the Compost Bin's fertilizer, rich compost and mulches. |
| Eggshells | Raise the pH by 0.2 | Collecting eggs from your chickens with a small basket turns up one or two on about half the collections. |
| Peat moss | Lowers the pH by 0.2 | 10 × dung, 10 × reed make 10 at the Compost Bin, a level 0 recipe anyone can make. |
Breeds 12 bait fish: bleak, bluegill, creek chub, dace, gudgeon, pumpkinseed, rock bass in fresh water; anchovy, herring, prawn, sardine, sprat in salt. Arctic cod and capelin join them when cold salt water opens.
