Fishing in Nier Automata takes a long time and some species are very very rare. This guide is here to give you some information about the fishes drop rate I managed to compute.

At some point during my Nier automata journey, I became interested in the fishing mechanics and completing the related ingame data. I got very surprised to see the difficulty to get some of the species, and at some point, I was even wondering what I was doing wrong. Out of curiosity, this led me to the computation of species drop rates in various biomes. In this guide, you'll see the results of the drop rates I obtained.

The estimates comes from my personal data acquisition and contribution from the community. If you want to be involved as well, please check the 'How to contribute?' section.

Whether or not you find this guide helpful, please don't hesitate to rate it and leave any comments you think might be helpful.

August 2022 edit: Ressources spreadsheet are availables since some time. They contains many drop rates including fishes and are available here. The numbers here seems to fit perfectly with the ones in this guide though they should be more precise (no need of error bars) because they were obtained from reverse engineering of the game code. It's up to you to have a look at them directly in the sheets files or to have a look at the figures in this guide. Thanks to jaynoo for the information.

• 2021-06: initial relase
  
• 2021-08: huge data input from eekiehd
  
  • Biome added: sewers, desert oil field, city ruins deep cave, ravine, stream and waterfalls.
    
  • Sewers separated in two distinctive biome due to drop rate differences: sewers leading to amusement park and sewers leading to flooded city.
    
  • City ruins stream and waterfall merged into a unique biome due to similar drop rates and species. Same applied to forest rivers and waterfalls.
    
  • Increased estimates precision in all biomes previously present in the guide

Please find below all drop rates computed for each biome I gathered data from. The value displayed is the mean with 95% confidence interval.

Each biome has its own fishing spots where the drop rates were estimated. You can their location (screenview + map) embedded in the graphics below. Do not hesitate to click on graphics for higher resolution.

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We discovered differences in the broken firearms droprate btween sewers leading to amusement parks and sewers leading to flooded city. That's why they were separated in this guide.
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Drop rates between city ruins stream and waterfalls were the same in our data so they got merged.
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This one is a bit challenging to reach. You can check this video for some help.
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We discovered differences in the broken firearms droprate btween sewers leading to amusement parks and sewers leading to flooded city. That's why they were separated in this guide.
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Drop rates between forest rivers and waterfalls were the same in our data so they got merged.
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This section will be enriched with the data gathered from the community.

• eekiehd: 1939 catches
  
• your servitor: 650 catches

The drop rates estimates precision is dependant of number of data used to compute them. My script is ready to handle more data, but the data collection itself takes a lot of time. While I personnally have most of the answers I wanted from the current dataset, I feel it's up to the community to decide whether they want more spots and more accurate estimates.

If you want to be involved in this story, please follow these few steps:

• Select a reference spot (see previous section) or propose a new one
  
• write down in the data template[drive.protonmail.com] how many fish of each species you got during your game session (WATCHOUT: check out the rule section below to avoid bias in the estimates)
  
• Send me your data (accompanied with a screenshot of your fishing spot if they're from a new biome or from another reference spot).
  
• Many thanks to you

In conditions where several people contribute into data collection, it's very easy to generate bias in the estimates.

To avoid such biases, please follow this simple rule: DO NOT decide to start or stop data collection because you found a certain species. Instead, you can for example decide before fishing how many fish you want to catch, or you can also decide when you're about to stop how many fish before you leave ('5 more and I stop').

For example, let's say you're in the desert region, at the Oasis, and you want to contribute but you also want a rare beetle fish. You get like 20 catches and then is you beetle most wanted fish. If you decide to stop here and send the data everybody do so, I'll have plenty of data all enriched with the presence of a beetle fish leading in the end to an overestimate of its drop rate.

This is a common observations related to the number of data used to compute the drop rate estimates. The more data you have the more precise are the estimates.

To help improve the estimates, you can contribute with your own data. Check the 'How to contribute' section for more information.


Well it simply means in the data used the fish was not caught (yet) and so no estimates could have been computed. This is especially possible for spot with very few data and for very rare fish species.

To help avoiding these cases, you can contribute with your own data. Check the 'How to contribute' section for more information.


A reference spot is the precise zone where I gathered the data within a game region area. You can expect to have drop rates very close to the one described as long as you stay within this reference spot. Their location can be seen in the pictures embedded within each graphic.

For example the flooded city region has 3 main fishing biomes, namely pond, coast and missile. Each of these biome so far has one reference spot where I gather my data and encourage people willing to help to go. Still, one can expect the estimates of the missile reference spot to be reliable for the whole missile biome.

In short : Game region >>> fishing biomes >>> reference spot(s)

To enrich the guides with more reference spots, you can contribute with your own data. Check the 'How to contribute' section for more information.