The Spirit fish gate

At a glance

Where

Fishing overlay, PROT entry 0972 (load base 0x801CE818)

Species table

Per venue, 3 lure rows × 5 band columns; parser legaia_asset::fishing_species

Saved state

Lifetime cast counter in the save block - the gate's hidden precondition

Confidence

Confirmed - MIPS disassembly, checked against a retail USA disc

Used by

Playable fishing demo · curated fishing tables

The spawn tables

When a fish strikes, the hooked-fish handler picks the species with species = spawn_table[lure*8 + band]. The equipped lure picks the row; the current cast band (0–4) picks the column. The species agree cell-for-cell with the community tables - the gap is in how band 4 is reached.

† Dead cells. Each venue's band-4 gate hardwires the lure it fires on (Normal at Buma, Heavy at Vidna), so band 4 is only ever read on the row carrying the rare fish. The other Spikefish cells are unreachable in retail play - only a developer shortcut (debug flag + R1 at the strike) forces band 4 unconditionally.

How the band is chosen

Band assignment has two phases. While the lure is in the water, the band is re-derived every frame: a cadence match pins it for a ~64-frame hold window, otherwise the frame's random roll replaces it. At the instant a fish strikes, the venue's gate may upgrade band 0 to band 4. Everything after the strike is deterministic.

The band roll

While the lure sits deep enough (line record over 500 units) and no fish is hooked, the band re-rolls on every frame no cadence holds it: rand() & 0xfff against three fixed cutoffs. The published 184/48/16/8-out-of-256 estimate has the right shape; the real cutoffs sit slightly lower at the rare end. No outcome maps to band 4 - there is no fifth cutoff.

The reel-cadence recogniser

Before each frame's band roll, the game consults a reel-cadence recogniser: a 16-slot ring of {button, held-frames} reel history, walked backwards against four templates, each hold matched with ±10 frames of tolerance. A match does three things:

• fires the “Good!” splash;
• stores the matched template's id as the band;
• arms a ~64-frame countdown during which the band holds instead of re-rolling and the bite roll runs at roughly twenty times its idle rate.

A strike can only land on a frame where a reel button is held, so the final press of the cadence doubles as the bite window.

Performing the band-0 cadence

Setup: cast deep (the cadence check only runs once the line record exceeds 500), then press either reel button briefly and release so the first rest starts from a measurable point. Then:

1. Hands off for about two-thirds of a second (0.52–0.82 s accepted).
2. Hold ✕ for about 0.4 s (0.27–0.57 s), then release.
3. Hands off again for about two-thirds of a second.
4. Press and hold □. The splash fires about a tenth of a second into the hold: band 0 is set. Keep holding - the boosted bite lands only while a reel button is down. If nothing bites, release and repeat from step 1.

The hold window is the load-bearing part. A rolled band 0 exists only on the frames the dice produce it; a cadence-set band is pinned for the full window, and the boosted strike usually lands inside it. The four templates:

The band-4 gate at the strike

When a strike lands (reel held, per-frame strike roll passed, nothing hooked yet), one branch immediately before the species lookup decides whether an active band 0 upgrades to band 4. Every condition must hold at once:

The cast counter increments once per cast when the lure lands, persists across sessions and is saved with the game - band 4 at Buma is unreachable inside the first 51 lifetime casts. With either other rod equipped the gate short-circuits and band 4 cannot occur.

if (venue == Buma) {                          // DAT_801d90d0 == 0
    if (0x32 < casts                          // > 50 lifetime casts  (_DAT_80084460)
        && (casts & 1) == 0                   // cast counter EVEN at this instant
        && lure == 1                          // Normal Lure          (_DAT_80084450)
        && rod  == 2                          // third rod            (_DAT_80084454)
        && band == 0)                         // rare band active     (DAT_801d90e8)
        if ((rand() & 0xf) == 0)              // ... then 1 in 16
            band = 4;                         // -> Spirit
} else {                                      // Vidna
    if ((casts & 1) == 0 && lure == 2 && rod == 2 && band == 0)
        if ((rand() & 3) == 0)                // 1 in 4, no cast-count threshold
            band = 4;                         // -> Baraba
}

Effective probabilities

Per-catch Spirit probability at Buma, assuming a deep cast and a landed strike:

Under a flat 1/32, 250 catches without a Spirit has probability ~0.04%; under the gated model without cadence input the same drought has probability ~68% - long empty sessions are the expected outcome. Baraba at Vidna has no cast-count threshold and a 1-in-4 roll, matching its far higher observed rate.

Passing the gate selects the species; landing it is a separate problem. The Spirit carries the species table's largest pull factor, so a gated strike can still be lost in the reel.

Player reports, mapped to mechanisms

How we know

Everything above is read from the MIPS disassembly of the fishing overlay (PROT entry 0972) and checked against a retail USA disc. No Sony-owned bytes appear here - only addresses, offsets and decoded parameters. The full subsystem reference is minigame-fishing.md.