Two Games Called It Fishing: Cambria's Pond and TerraX's Deep

Two crypto MMOs shipped a fishing feature within a few months of each other and both of them got attention for it, which is unusual, because fishing is normally the thing a game adds when it has run out of ideas. Cambria opened Dungeon Fishing in beta and handed out up to 30,000 free Grub to pull people in. TerraX has been running and refining its own fishing loop for over a year. They share a word and almost nothing else. One is an idle wager you fund with a bait purchase. The other is a timing game you fund with energy that refills for free every night. Neither is wrong. They are answers to genuinely different questions, and if you are deciding where to spend an evening it is worth knowing which question you are answering. What follows is how each one actually works, where each one lets you down, and who each one is for.

A note on sourcing before we start. Everything below about Cambria comes from their public documentation and from coverage by outlets including eGamers, current as of August 2026. Dungeon Fishing is in early beta and its numbers will move. Everything about TerraX comes from our own live configuration.

How Cambria's Dungeon Fishing Works

Cambria is a risk-to-earn MMO built in the shape of old school RuneScape, and its headline mode is Dungeons: you burn Keys to enter a procedurally generated crawl, loot as deep as your nerve holds, and choose each floor whether to cash out or push. Die before you extract and the Keys you staked are gone. Players have risked around five million dollars in Keys through that mode, across roughly 242,000 runs as of early August 2026.

Dungeon Fishing is the gentle door into that same economy. It lives in the Lobby rather than the maze. You buy an Ice Fishing Rod from an NPC called Viktor for 10 Arena Tokens, you buy bait called Mirelle's Grub from a dealer called Mirelle Kain, and then you go away. The mode is explicitly idle by design. Casts resolve over time and you come back to a pile of fish, Angler Sacks, Charm Cards, Sacks of Gems and occasional NFTs from the wider Cambria ecosystem. The headline prize inside a sack is the Uncut Emerald, and the tier of sack you can reach scales with how much you stake per cast. Reaching the top T4 Massive Angler Sack takes a stake of ten or more paired with the right rod settings.

Everything you pull out converts to Keys, which is the hook that welds the fishing pond to the dungeon. Rare fish feed collections that pay out Depths Keys, daily quests hand out Scales and Keys, and every catch grants Fishing Power experience plus Genesis Points toward their coming RSGP token event. It is a well built funnel. Casting in the Lobby is a low friction way to accumulate the exact currency the high stakes mode consumes.

What the Bait Actually Costs

Here is the number that defines the whole mode, and it is easy to skim past. Mirelle charges three Dungeon Keys per 100 Grub, and Keys sell for 10 to the US dollar. So 100 Grub costs thirty cents of real money. Bait is not a resource you find. It is a purchase, denominated in stablecoin, and every cast burns some.

That single design decision cascades. It means there is no free floor to the activity. It means session length is a spending decision rather than a time decision. And it means the mode has to pay out something close to what it takes in, or nobody would keep buying bait, which is exactly why the next mechanic exists.

Attraction, and Why It Reads Like a House Edge

Buying bait generates Mirelle's Favor, which unlocks permanent boosts across ten levels and tops out at a 90 percent Attraction rate. Casting also produces Scales, which is a second route to pushing Attraction up. eGamers, covering the beta, described Attraction as working like a return-to-player rate, and that framing is hard to argue with. If Attraction is the fraction of value that comes back out of the pond, then the ceiling of the entire mode, after grinding all ten levels of Favor, is getting 90 cents back for every dollar of Grub you feed it.

Below that ceiling it is worse, and the ladder to the ceiling is itself denominated in bait purchases, so climbing it means spending more. None of this is hidden and none of it is dishonest, and Cambria's whole brand is built on being upfront that value is at stake. It is worth being clear with yourself about what the shape means, though. A player reading the mode as a gentler way into the economy should read gentler as a pace rather than a promise: the arithmetic still runs against you, it just runs slowly.

Balanced, Steady and Degen: Three Shapes, One Average

The rod carries three settings that can be freely combined: Balanced, Steady and Degen. The studio has said the average payout is identical across all three, validated with millions of simulations. What changes is the distribution. Steady pays smaller and more often, Degen pays rarely and enormously, Balanced sits between them.

This is an honest and technically elegant piece of design, and it is worth pausing on what it means for you as a player. If the expected value is flat across every setting, then no amount of study makes you better at Dungeon Fishing. There is no line of play. Your only real decision is how much variance you would like, which is a preference, not a skill. Some players genuinely want that, and it is the correct design for an idle mode that has to be fair to somebody who is asleep. It just means the mode has no ceiling to climb toward.

Cambria Also Has Real Fishing, and It Is Good

It would be unfair to judge Cambria's fishing on the idle pond alone, because the game also has a proper RuneScape style fishing skill out in the world. You start in the Safe Zone catching Raw Trout and cook it at Cooking level 1 for a Grilled Trout that restores 30 health. Fishing 15 unlocks Raw Cod, cooked at Cooking 30 for 50 health. Fishing 30 gives Raw Carp, cooked at 60 for 110. Fishing 50 with Cooking 70 gives Lobster at 150. Fishing 70 with Cooking 80 gives Eel at 200. Fishing 80 with Cooking 90 gives Rock Fish, the best in the game, at 240 health. Better levels unlock better spots in higher tier regions.

That is a real progression ladder and it is doing a real job in the economy: it feeds the food supply that keeps people alive in the risky content. It is worth knowing it exists, because it is a genuinely different activity from the idle pond, and the pond is the one that got the promotion.

How TerraX Fishing Works

TerraX fishing is the opposite arrangement in almost every respect. You cannot go away and come back. Every cast puts you into a bar minigame where a fish moves and you have to keep a zone on top of it, and you either land it or you do not. A cast cycle runs about 30 seconds.

The economics start with energy rather than money. A cast costs 5 energy times a multiplier set by the bait family: 1 for critters, 3 for crustaceans, 5 for cephalopods, 7 for luminous bait and a deliberately brutal 100 for Blood Chum, which is the leviathan summoning bait and works out at 500 energy a cast. Energy is a hard daily budget that refills in full at midnight UTC and does not regenerate in between, so at the energy cap a level 10 angler gets around 68 critter casts a day and a level 60 angler gets around 168. That budget is the only thing standing between you and unlimited fishing. There is no purchase in the loop at all.

Where the Bait Comes From

Bait in TerraX falls out of a system you are already running. Idle harvesting rolls a side drop on 30% of trees felled, and the weighted table includes Grub, Tadpole, Earthworm, Glowworm, Frog and Centipede. Your woodcutters stock your tackle box while you are doing something else. The store does sell bait, ten Earthworms for thirty cents or ten Centipedes for a dollar, but that is a convenience for people in a hurry, not the intended supply line. A player who never spends a cent will still be fishing with legendary bait eventually, because the trees keep producing it.

The coincidence is almost too neat to mention: Cambria's fishing currency is called Grub and costs three Keys per hundred. TerraX's entry level bait is also called Grub and falls out of a tree.

Your Rod Is a Permission Slip, Your Bait Is the Roll

Two separate things decide what you can catch. Your rod's rarity caps the rarity of fish you are allowed to attempt, and a legendary rod is the only thing that unlocks mythical species. Your bait's rarity decides the distribution you actually roll on. Common bait rolls common fish and nothing else. Legendary bait rolls a spread of roughly two parts legendary, two parts epic, two parts rare, three parts uncommon and one part common.

This catches a lot of new anglers out. Bait family, meaning critter or crustacean or cephalopod, decides which fish families are eligible and what the cast costs in energy. Bait rarity decides what you are likely to hook. They are not the same axis, and the cheapest legendary bait in the game is the Centipede, which is a critter, which means it costs the base 5 energy per cast while rolling on the legendary table. If you take one thing away from this article, take that.

Once you cast, the game samples up to ten eligible species into a pool and shows them to you. The pool persists for 60 seconds and you pick your target. This is the part Dungeon Fishing has no equivalent of: you are choosing what to fight before you fight it.

The Catch Is a Fight You Can Lose

The minigame is built on a Stardew style bar, but the tuning is where the design lives. Your rod tier sets the height of your zone, from 11% of the bar at the bottom of the ladder to 21% at the top, and it sets the ratio between how fast progress fills when the fish is in your zone and how fast it drains when the fish is out. Your lure tier does something different: it reduces how often the fish suddenly reverses direction, and it caps the fish's top speed on any given leg. Fish rarity sets the swim speed, the base reverse rate and a difficulty multiplier on the whole pacing.

The number that matters is the break-even fraction, meaning the share of time the fish must be inside your zone for progress to hold level. An entry rod against a common fish needs 55%. A top rod against a common fish needs only 30%, which is why overgeared catches feel like a formality. A top rod against an at-tier legendary needs 72%, and a rod one tier under needs 75%. That is the boss fight, and it is meant to be one.

Three mechanics sit on top. The inner 30% of your zone is a sweet spot that fills 1.4 times faster, which drops that legendary break-even from 72% down to about 65% for a player who actively keeps the fish centred rather than merely inside. The first quarter of the bar fills 1.15 times faster so a bite feels immediately rewarding. And at 50% and 80% progress the fish panics: 1.5 times speed and double the reversals for 1.2 seconds. Those are the moments people lose legendary fish, and they are placed exactly where a player has started to relax.

What Skill Is Actually Worth Here

This is the sharpest contrast between the two games, so it is worth putting a number on it. In Cambria's Dungeon Fishing, the studio's own position is that expected value is identical across every rod setting. Play well, play badly, play asleep: the average is the same.

In TerraX, simulation of the same at-tier legendary matchup puts the catch rate at 78% with the worst lure and 98% with the best. Technique moves the required in-zone fraction by seven points on top of that. And there is a Perfect Catch flag for staying in zone 85% of the time across the entire fight, which a skilled player on at-tier legendary gear hits somewhere between 5% and 15% of the time. It exists to be difficult. None of those numbers would mean anything in a mode where the expected value is flat by design.

What a Catch Pays

A landed fish pays experience scaled by species, from single digits on commons up to 1,000 on the rarest. It pays water, which is the fuel your idle mining floors and harvesting groves consume, at an expected 0.4 units on a common up to 6.4 on a legendary. It pays ingredients through a formula driven by the weight of the fish you actually landed, with a streak multiplier that climbs from 1.0 to 1.5 across 25 consecutive catches and an 80% chance of a second roll on top. Dawn, dusk and nocturnal species pay pearls, with a bonus at each phase transition, tapered so the daily total lands somewhere around 280 to 340 rather than scaling forever.

There is a rare tail too. Every cast carries a 1% chance of a Fishing Loot Box. Rare catches carry a 0.1% chance of a beast egg and epic or better catches carry 0.25%. Blood Chum summons leviathans, capped at five a day, with one more available through a streak hook.

Notice what is not on that list: currency. No fish pays you dollars directly. Fishing produces goods, and goods become money when another player buys them on the marketplace. The most valuable thing you will pull out of the water is the Prime Fish Fillet, because it is the input for Enhanced Fish Fillet Stew and Supreme Dish, which are the only two meals a raid will accept. Every serious boss fighter in the game needs a fisherman, and most of them would rather buy than cast.

The Seasons Move the Water

Since the seasons update, the year turns on a world clock and each of the four seasons lasts roughly 22 real days. Fishing feels all four of them. The Season of Bloom raises fishing rewards by 10%. The Season of Fire is when the record books are written: mean fish size climbs about 9% and total yield about 6%. The Season of Harvest cools the water, fish run smaller and fishing yield falls about 14%, with the groves paying 20% more to compensate. The Season of Frost is the hard one, at roughly a third less fishing yield, offset by ore seams paying 20% more.

You do not opt in and there is no way to buy your way out of a bad season. That is either a feature or an annoyance depending on temperament, but it is the reason fishing tournaments are forbidden from running across a season boundary: scoring an angler who cast in summer against one who cast in winter would be a rigged leaderboard, so the game refuses to schedule it.

Where the Money Comes Out

Cambria's fishing rewards convert to Keys, Keys and Dungeon Coins auto-redeem into weekly USDC payouts through a liquidity pool, and an 8% fee is taken and split between ecosystem growth and the developers. Higher Signet Tiers reduce the tax on winnings.

TerraX pays out of the marketplace. You list what you caught, another player buys it, the balance is yours, and you withdraw USDT to your own wallet with a minimum of 10, a cap of 50 per 12 hours and a 3% tax. The competitive layer is the fishing tournament: entry currently costs 20 USDT, the podium takes prizes funded by the game rather than by entrants, and every coin of the entry fees is pooled and split across fourth through tenth place. That is the one place in TerraX fishing where you can lose money, and we would rather say so plainly than let someone discover it.

The Pitfalls of Cambria's Version

The honest criticisms are structural rather than about execution, because the execution is good. Bait is a purchase in stablecoin, so there is no free floor and no way to fish yourself back to solvency after a bad run. Expected value is flat across every setting by explicit design, so the mode cannot be gotten good at. Attraction behaves like a return-to-player rate that tops out at 90%, and reaching even that ceiling requires spending your way through ten levels of Favor. Idle means there is nothing to do, which is the point, but it also means there is nothing to learn.

And the mode is a funnel by design. Everything converts to Keys, and Keys are what the high stakes dungeon consumes. Somebody who came to Cambria for a quiet pond will find that the pond keeps handing them chips for a table they said they did not want to sit at. Whether that is a criticism or a compliment depends entirely on what you came for.

The Pitfalls of Ours

TerraX fishing is not for everyone, and pretending otherwise would make everything above worthless. It is gated behind level 10 and a Twig Rod that takes a four hour forge, which realistically means your first cast lands on day three or four. It cannot be idled at all: 168 casts is around 84 minutes of active attention, and there is no version of this where you set it running and walk away. Leviathan hunting at 500 energy a cast will eat most of a mid level player's daily budget for a single attempt.

The rod ladder is long to the point of being intimidating, with the Blessed Rod sitting behind a 384 hour forge. Pearls are deliberately tapered so you cannot farm them past a few hundred a day. Nothing you catch is money until somebody else wants it, so a fisherman is exposed to marketplace prices in a way a dungeon runner staking Keys simply is not. And the Season of Frost will take a third of your yield for three weeks whether you like it or not.

There is also a fair criticism from the other direction. If what you actually enjoy is the swing, the moment where a number could be enormous, TerraX fishing will feel slow. Landing a mythical fish is a genuine achievement and it pays in ingredients, not in a jackpot. Nobody has ever screenshotted a Prime Fish Fillet.

Which One Should You Fish?

Answer one question and the rest follows. Do you want the outcome to be uncertain, or do you want the outcome to be earned?

If uncertainty is the fun, Cambria's Dungeon Fishing is a well made version of it, it demands almost nothing of your attention, and the studio has been unusually straight about the maths behind it. Go in knowing that bait is a purchase and the ceiling is 90 cents on the dollar, treat the spend the way you would treat any other entertainment budget, and it is a perfectly reasonable evening.

If being good at something is the fun, TerraX fishing is built for exactly that and priced at zero. The entry cost is a rod you forge and time you already had. The skill ceiling is real and measurable: a 20 point catch rate swing on gear, a seven point swing on technique, a Perfect Catch that most players never see. And what you pull out of the water feeds the rest of the game, from the water your expeditions burn to the Prime Fish Fillets that end up in a raider's Supreme Dish.

If you are coming from Cambria and want to try the other shape, the fastest path in is short. Connect a wallet, run the tutorial, send your two starter workers out on a mining and a harvesting expedition, and let the harvesting side drops stock your tackle box while you reach level 10 and forge the Twig Rod. By the time you cast, the bait will already be waiting, and it will not have cost you thirty cents a hundred.