Growing catfish

If you hang around the Cinci Bordertown enough, you'll get the option to find and build Your Bordertown Crash Pad. And after you do, if you keep hanging around and playing the decks, you'll get the option to set up a catfish farm. You probably should if you're looking for more money.

## Setting up your tanks

The first thing you'll need to do is drop a bunch of Spare parts and Electrical components into building the farm. This will take some times and probably raise your Skill/Electronics and Skill/Mechanic. You shouldn't need to buy the parts and components - it doesn't require that much work and you can hopefully scrounge the necessary parts.

Eventually, your catfish farm will have a quality of 6, and you can start raising catfish. Unless something goes really wrong, the quality of your catfish farm will never go below 6 again.

## Raising catfish

From now on, whenever you're in the Cinci Slums or the Bordertown, you'll get opportunities to feed your catfish. If you're in the Bordertown, you can do it for free and raise the quality by 0.5 points or so. If you're away, you can either spend $36 and 10-14 Bulk Shrimp Cakes to have your one of your Crew do it for you, or spend $20 and either 10 spare parts or 5 electrical components to have one of your crew clean the tank. Feeding raises quality faster but requires more resources, while cleaning the tank is cheaper and requires spare parts that you are probably getting for free by scrounging and clearing out derelict buildings.

## Selling Catfish

There's 4 ways to turn catfish into money.

### Like a hobo

When your catfish quality gets over 10, you can harvest catfish filet via a card draw. You'll usually get around 60. You can then go around to the Noodle Bar, the Fish Stalls, and other locations and peddle catfish filet 5-10 at a time. It's a lot of work, and the catfish may spoil, but you can earn $300 or more this way.

After the harvest, your catfish quality will return to 6 and you can go back to raising catfish.

### Like a boss

Alternately, you can use your phone (you'll get this option when you harvest) to transfer a shipment of catfish between the Bordertown and Gamble Street Market. You can either do this with reasonable chances of success if you have 10-15 crew in both places, or you can do it with 100% chance of success if you have Quality 15+ Logistics Teams in both places. Two logistics teams cost at least $2,100, so you may need to work you way up to it.

You can also use your phone to harvest catfish anytime after your Raising Catfish reaches 8 or more. This is a good thing to do in general, because increasing Raising Catfish past 8 takes more resources and time for not a lot of extra reward. After you harvest, your catfish quality will return to 6 and you can go back to raising catfish.

You can expect to harvest catfish filet 1-2 times a week.

### Like a genius

Even better than selling catfish filet like a boss is selling live catfish like a boss. This requires two logistics teams (minimum quality of 15 to have a 50% chance of success, and quality 25 for 100% chance) and 2 Empty fuel drums that you can pick up for $3 each at the Ethanol Plant.

It's possible, with some luck, to harvest two sets of live catfish in a single day, but harvesting live catfish 2 or 3 times a week is more reasonable. Live catfish grow quickly enough that it's very worthwhile to feed them bulk shrimp cakes, even though that's more expensive.

If you manage to have 25 or more crew in both the Slums and the Borderlands, you can do this with 100% success rates without depleting the quality of your logistics teams. This seems to sometimes drop your catfish quality to only 7, so it's faster and cheaper to get another sale. If you have enough crew, this is definitely a great option, but if you're also running the Junk trade, it's especially nice since you're not depleting the quality of your logistics teams.

### Home cooking

You can also harvest catfish filet and use them to cook food in your kitchen. Apparently. A lot of characters live off of free ramen from the Noodle Bar and high protein shakes from the Gym, but if you're cooking a lot of meals using basic groceries, maybe catfish dinners save you money.

## What's the payout

Assuming you pay your crew about 5 times to feed your catfish from bulk shrimp cakes that you buy at $99 per 15 at the Fish Stalls, you can expect to profit (after expenses) about $300 for selling catfish like a boss. This is not the best you can do by any means, but it does show that catfish farming is a decent way to make money.

All that said, catfish farming doesn't pay off nearly as well as running Your Fuel Depot. If you're trying to decide where to allocate parts between setting up catfish tanks and getting your depot running, the depot pays more in a bad week than catfish do in a good week. But after you have a depot set up (or A Fortune in Fuel sold to Smith) then don't delay on setting up the tanks if you're looking for a low cost maintenance scheme.

Running the numbers, it looks like it's slightly more profitable to pay your crew to clean the tanks using nearly free spare parts than it is to have them feed catfish with not quite free shrimp cakes. But it's also slower, usually requiring 3 or 4 card draws instead of 2, and making less profit every 2 days might be better than making more profit every 4 days. You'll need to experiment and see what works for you.

The fastest that you can sell live catfish is every 12 hours or so. This rate of sales is extremely profitable, but hard to sustain: you need some luck, a lot of bulk shrimp cakes, and a lot of actions and moods or Detailed Plans to Work your Crews to keep quality high. Netting about $7,000/week is possible but would require some dedication.