IMC are dropping hints about including fishing in the game. Both in the new Klaipeda rework video and in new Maggi art.
My fear is that the fishing rod is just a gimmick item that gives us the same useless items as the shovel and metal detector.
My hope is that it works in the same way as Torchlight or Stardew valley fishing. We will be able to find fishing spots all over the world that can give different rare drops.
For the sake of usefulness, you could get items for the collection on the map you are on, and we could have one or several new fish collections. Either divided by rarity, like normal, hard and legendary, or divided by area, like jungle, forest and so on.
For the sake of fun and tradition when it comes to fishing mini games you could get old useless boots, but also if the map got any quest/monster that gives/drops shoes, that item would have a low chance to drop as well.
A guild mate of mine, MyriadColors also had a great idea that you could get message-in-a-bottle quests or just even bottles with random bits of lore would be fun.
Have an npc that sells fishing rods and bait, and you have to spend one bait every time you fish. Different types of bait gives you a slightly higher chance to get different types of items. Different rods could also have different properties. Like low quality rods also has low durability.
I would not even mind of you put a golden 14 days TP rod with unlimited durability into the game, as long as we can buy normal ones for silver.
There is also a tomb stone in the game that you can donate fishing rod items that the fisherman monsters in the game drop. I still don’t know what that one is actually for. But you can change that one a bit so it also gives you a bit of fishing luck for an hour or a day depending on how many of the monster items you donate. 1 gives you an hour, 10 gives a full day.