Fishies 0.8.1

field-guide/en-GB/caring/quality.md

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+# Quality, condition & breeding
+
+_What looking after a fish well adds up to, and where fry come from._
+
+## Health keeps a fish alive
+
+Every fish has a health stat, shown on its card and kept on the fish itself. Hunger drains it, and green glass drains it faster. Food and clean water bring it back, but slowly: one meal does not heal a week of neglect, so a fish that has been through a bad spell starts the next one already weak.
+
+Below sixty percent the fish is sick, and it shows. At zero it is lost. A well-kept fish empties exactly at the moment the old starvation deadline said it would, so nothing about ordinary care has changed; what is new is that health remembers. A fish in poor health also sells for a little less and will not breed.
+
+A fish below full health can take a Remedy: choose Feed, pick Remedy among the foods and tap the water. Only fish below full health go for the capsule. It adds 20% health, up to 100%, and costs a quarter of the fish's own price, paid only when the fish swallows it; a capsule nobody eats dissolves at no cost. It is medicine, not a meal, so the fish still needs feeding, and it does not raise its quality.
+
+## Six tiers of quality
+
+Quality is what your care adds up to over a fish's whole life. Each meal is judged against that species' own hunger clock, so a three-minute goby and a three-day boxfish are measured by their own rhythm. A meal on time scores full marks, a late one less, and green glass takes a little off the top. A meal only counts for the time since the last one, so feeding the same fish again and again adds nothing: gold takes about six on-time meals' worth of care, from a day for the fastest fish to about eight days for the slowest.
+
+[Water](https://fishies.lol/wiki/mechanics/water) sets a ceiling on top of that. Below 70% water, care can't lift a fish to gold, and below 50% not to silver either. Poor water never takes away a tier a fish already has; it only stops it climbing.
+
+- Plain · where every new fish starts.
+- Bronze · fed reasonably often.
+- Silver · fed on time, most of the time.
+- Gold · the highest tier care alone can reach.
+- Diamond · sometimes born to two gold parents, then raised well.
+- Purple diamond · sometimes born to two diamond parents, then raised well.
+
+## Where fry come from
+
+Fish breed on their own. There is no button: a grown male and female of one species, both in good condition and both rested, may lay one to three eggs in your aquarium whenever there is room for them. A bred egg hatches after twelve hours.
+
+A fish rests two days after a clutch, and the same pair waits a week before spawning again. If the chance comes up while the aquarium is full, it passes. Nothing is stored and nothing is owed.
+
+Each egg from two gold parents has a one-in-four chance to be born a tier above the care it receives. From two diamond parents it is one tier half the time and two tiers one time in ten. That head start is the only way into diamond and purple, and it is only a head start: a fry left hungry slides back down like any other fish.
+
+## Conditioning
+
+Every aquarium has a Conditioning Box: a small clear box clipped inside the glass near the surface. It is free, one to each aquarium. Tap it in the water, or open it from the Aquarium tab of the Shop, pick a fish, and it rests there for 48 hours, then swims back out one quality tier higher.
+
+Only a fish below gold that was not born with a head start can go in, and each fish only once. The fee is half the fish's plain sale value, paid as it goes in. The list shows every fish with its fee and the tier it will reach, and says why the others can't go in.
+
+One fish at a time fits in the box. While it rests there it can't be sold or moved to another aquarium, but it still gets hungry: tap the box with food, or use Feed on its card. Care still counts, so a conditioned fish that reaches gold through care stays gold.
+
+## What a fish is worth
+
+A grown fish sells for its species' value, then its quality, then three smaller terms. Tap the sale value on its card to see each one.
+
+Colour: every fish has one of six colours, rolled when you buy the egg and passed from a parent to most fry. Sand and kelp sell at the plain price, bleach ×1.1, teal ×1.2, ink ×1.35 and the rare coral ×1.6.
+
+Age adds up to +0.10 for a fish kept fed after it is grown, the full amount once it is ripe. Each bred generation after the first takes 2% off, never more than 10% in all, and a parent bought from the shop starts the line again.
+
+---
+
+In the game: https://fishies.lol/wiki/mechanics/quality · Fishies 0.8.1
+
+This page is generated. Its text lives in [`locales/en-GB.json`](../../../locales/en-GB.json) under `wiki.topics.quality`; correct it there.