FishQualityBonus

Hello! I created this mod to fix a nitpick that felt, in my opinion, like an oversight, which is simply this: fishing recipes should reward you for the quality of the fish.

In Valheim, Raw Fish, prepared from an actual caught fish, are multiplied in value based on the quality of the fish caught. If I catch a big, quality-5 tuna, I can actually prepare 14 "raw fish" from that single tuna.

However, this does not apply to any recipes that consume a whole fish, which in my opinion completely wastes the higher quality fish in those recipes.

Since recipes like Fish 'n' Bread, currently one of the best stamina foods in the game, take a whole fish, the player is effectively penalized for using the better quality anglerfish in that recipe.

This mod adjusts it by applying the same raw fish computation formula to other whole-fish recipes, as well!

Behavior

output = amount + (fishQuality - 1) * amount * BonusPerQualityLevel + speciesBonus

BonusPerQualityLevel is configurable, but defaulted to 3 to match the existing values used in computation of Fish (raw) (in the base game).

speciesBonus is the game's own +0/+1/+2 fish tiering based on the species of fish. See Raw Fish, and note the flat bonus based on the type. We access this data from m_extraAmountOnlyOneIngredient on the Fish (raw) recipe and treat the values as a property of the species. Essentially, this means that one anglerfish makes as many Fish 'n' Bread as it would raw fish. Note that this is a flat bonus that doesn't scale with quality, just like vanilla. So, even a little quality-1 anglerfish gets you 3 Fish 'n' Bread with this enabled. If you would prefer the bonus from this mod more related to how big the fish was, you can turn UseSpeciesBonus to false in the config and the species bonus will not apply.

This mod also makes ingredient selection deliberate: vanilla spends whichever fish you picked up first, no matter where it sits in your inventory, which is effectively random. This mod picks a quality on purpose (e.g. largest first or smallest first, configurable) and spends that.

This should be safe to pick up new recipes added via updates and mods, because we're loading recipes at runtime and matching via ItemType.Fish. A recipe qualifies only if all of these hold:

1. it is not flagged m_requireOnlyOneIngredient (currently only FishRaw uses this),
2. its output is not equipment, by the game's own IsEquipable() check,
3. it requires exactly one fish species; scaling when more than one is involved feels messy,
4. it passes the IncludeMeadRecipes and ExcludedRecipes configurable settings.

In vanilla and with default config, that means this mod applies to Fish 'n' Bread plus three mead bases: MeadBaseBugRepellent, MeadBaseStrength, and MeadBaseSwimmer.

Config

Written to BepInEx/config/pandincus.fishqualitybonus.cfg on first run, and editable in-game with ConfigurationManager (F1). Changes apply immediately.

Setting	Default	Meaning
General.Enabled	true	Master switch; false restores vanilla behaviour entirely.
Bonus.BonusPerQualityLevel	3	Whole-number multiplier, 1-10. At 3 a 1-item recipe yields 1/4/7/10/13 for quality 1/2/3/4/5 — matching the game's own Fish (raw) tuning. At 1, 1/2/3/4/5.
Bonus.FishToSpend	SmallestFirst	SmallestFirst spends the lowest-quality fish first, LargestFirst always spends your best fish first.
Bonus.UseSpeciesBonus	true	Grant each species' flat +0/+1/+2 tier as well, read from the Fish (raw) recipe at load. Anglerfish is +2, so Fish 'n' Bread gains a flat 2. Not scaled by quality.
Bonus.IncludeMeadRecipes	true	Whether mead bases brewed at the mead cauldron get the bonus too, if they use a whole fish as an ingredient. false effectively restricts the mod to food.
Bonus.ExcludedRecipes	(empty)	Comma-separated output prefab names to skip individually, e.g. MeadBaseStrength,MeadBaseSwimmer.
Diagnostics.LogRecipeReport	false	Dumps every fish and fish-consuming recipe to the log, annotated with whether the bonus applies and why. Development aid; off by default, and also requires Enabled.

Multiplayer

This is a client-side mod. The crafting result is computed locally and synced like any other inventory change, so the server does not need the mod. But everyone who crafts and wants this behavior needs it installed, or identical ingredients will give different results for different players.

Developing

Build instructions, tooling and tests are in the repo README.

This is my first mod! This was built through a combination of code-diving, wiki reading, and usage of Claude Code. Note that even though I used Claude Code to develop the code changes, I've reviewed each line of code, applied manual refactors, and have heavily rewritten code comments.

Please feel free to offer feedback and I would happily accept community contributions.

Future Work

This isn't perfect. If we get recipes in the future that involve more than one whole fish, I'll need to revisit this mod to eliminate the single-ingredient requirement. Further, I don't love that we get the fish-recipe-output multiplied, but don't also consume more of the other ingredients. Using Fish 'n' Bread as an example, additional bread dough should probably also be consumed, even though we've got 'more' fish to go around. The latter issue is one I will consider addressing in an upcoming release.

With Valheim 1.0 coming out soon, I'm not sure what will change that might impact this mod. Perhaps the devs have already fixed this issue! Or perhaps they'll add more fishing recipes and we'll want to test that this continues to work. But since I wrote this mod to use it, I will revisit and update in the near future.

See CHANGELOG.md for release notes.