Question Pondering a Pond

Okay, so I am looking for some building advice, and I thought what better place to turn to than my favorite MUD builder's forum!
I am working on my first area for my new MUD "Undeath", a small town called Creepy Hollow. I would like this town to have a small pond, with a stream flowing out of it, towards another area which I will be building later. Their will be a small trail leading around the pond, which the players with the fishing skill can fish from. What I am looking for is some second opinions on how many rooms I should make the pond. I don't want to use to many rooms, because I would have to keep coming up with room descriptions for every water surface room, and I don't want to just copy room descriptions if I don't have to.

My original idea was to use 9 rooms, making the pond 3X3, so it would look like this:

Any thoughts?

Hi,

I think your idea sounds reasonable - but you might consider making the pond less square. Perhaps along these lines?

This will avoid a common pitfall; "you're on the north-west part of the pond". Generally the best rooms are described without needing this kind of structure.
Another feature of this kind of layout is that the pond is small enough that all parts of the pond are accessible from the trail (if you can fish diagonally, that is).

I like Thomas' advice. You might also consider doing many small lakes or ponds to provide more variety of fish/wildlife that otherwise normally be throughout one large lake. I do like keeping geography sensible so it maps well but you could do long stretches of trail in one room around a large lake. What about a loch? salt water lakes/inlets, a lot of variety possible and large bodies of water are often ignored in most MUDs or only used as barriers. 50% of all species are in the oceans.

Thanks for the tips! I am definitely going to make the pond less square now. I also like the idea of making some lochs at some point. I made an underwater room DOWN on either side of the bridge, and under the bridge itself, so it is now possible to swim under the bridge. I also made a gentle current that can gradually move swimmers westward into the stream, and then westward along the stream.

I asked my coder about diagonal fishing. He said that in his system, directions don't matter. As long as a room is marked SHORE, and the player has the appropriate skills and equipment, they can fish from there.

Anyway, I should be about done with the pond, and the easternmost part of my stream system by tonight. Tomorrow I will go back through and add some wildlife, and maybe a few folks with fishing poles strolling along the shore.