How to Fish Guide: Beginner Walkthrough & Tips

Every catch in How to Fish follows the same rhythm: cast your line and wait for a bite, then fight the fish once it lands. Catches do not sit still on the beach — they flop around and can escape back into the water if you are too slow to hit them. Once you land the finishing blow, sell the catch to a merchant NPC or store it in your backpack for later.

This is not a calm, realistic fishing sim. Guns can jam, rods bend, and fish physically flop across the sand, so every catch turns into a short fight on land. The whole early game runs on one loop: earn money, upgrade gear, complete the island’s objective, beat its boss, then sail to the next island.

You start on the beach with $0 and empty hands. The fastest way to get moving is to pick up clams along the shore and feed them to the old man near the Lighthouse — he pays for each one before you have caught a single fish. Use that money to buy the Crab-Fishing Rod, which costs $3, then start fishing for crustaceans and selling what you catch.

Buy and upgrade the knife once you have a little cash, since Island 1’s boss fight is a melee fight. Buy a can of beer for $12 and feed it to the Lighthouse Keeper to start the island’s quest chain; he hands back an empty can, which becomes the bait for the Spider Crab boss. Defeat the Spider Crab, feed its shell back to the Lighthouse Keeper, and he gives you the boat key. Buy the radar tablet next to him for $10, then follow the marked dot on the water to reach Island 2.

Selling clams and other shoreline catches to NPCs before you have even bought a rod is the fastest way to build starting capital. Fish aggressively once you have a rod, sell everything you do not need, and reinvest in gear rather than cosmetics — cosmetics come from the Reel of Fortune slot machine and can wait. Buy the Extra Inventory Slot as soon as it is available on a new island so you can carry more fish to sell or eat.

Dynamite, unlocked around Island 2, lets you catch or kill several fish in a single throw, which is a fast way to farm cash once you have some money to spend on it. Cooking a catch before selling it also raises its value, and stacking a Killscore trick shot with a good cooking multiplier produces the largest payouts of all.

After you catch a creature, how you finish it off can raise its final selling price through a Killscore multiplier. Headshots, no-scopes, airborne kills, and full 360-degree spins all add to the bonus, and multiple bonuses can stack on the same finishing shot. Only the last hit needs to land the trick — you can weaken the creature normally first and save the stylish finish for the killing blow.

You do not need a complicated combo on every catch; even a simple headshot or no-scope adds up over a full session. Later in the game, the Sniper Rifle’s accuracy and damage make it one of the easier weapons for consistently landing a high Killscore.

You begin with melee options like the knife and Brass Knuckles before ranged weapons start appearing: the Pistol and Shotgun on Island 2, the SMG on Island 3, the Sniper Rifle on Island 4, and the Assault Rifle on the final island. The SMG deals fast damage but is harder to control, the Assault Rifle is a balanced all-rounder, and the Sniper Rifle excels at accurate finishing shots for Killscore.

You do not need to buy every new weapon the moment it appears — a gun with several damage upgrades can still outperform a newly unlocked one with none. Attachments matter too: extended magazines cut down on reloading, sights improve accuracy, and compensators help control recoil, all of which help against fast-moving bosses.

Cooking becomes available on the Desert Island (Island 3) after you complete the Grill Master’s Blue Shark request and receive the lighter that lights his grill. Once it is lit, hold or place a catch over the flames and watch its cooking multiplier climb — pull it off once it peaks, since leaving it too long burns the catch and destroys most of its value. A properly cooked catch sells for about 1.5 times its normal price.

On Volcano Island, the final island, lava replaces the grill entirely: drop or hold a catch over the lava flow to cook it instantly without needing to find a Grill Master. Killscore and cooking multipliers combine, so a good trick-shot finish followed by a proper cook produces the biggest payout for any single catch.

Every island guards its exit behind a main boss, and most of these fights begin the moment you use the required bait, so gear up and heal before you commit. Island 1’s Spider Crab is a melee-only fight; Island 2’s Giant Piranha multiplies as the fight goes on and responds well to dynamite; Island 3 has the Blue Shark miniboss (needed to unlock the Grill) followed by the main boss, the Pufferfish, caught using carrot bait earned from feeding an “endangered” fish (Needlefish, Bowlfish, or Seahorses count) to the tourist on the beach.

Island 4’s sequence has you catch and kill a Tuna, then drop its corpse on the grassy patch in the middle of the island to summon the Albatross. The final island builds toward the Bowhead Whale, and after you throw its corpse into the volcano, the Mutated Bowhead Whale spawns as the last fight before you can go home — it spits lava, so keep more distance than in the first phase. In general: avoid a boss’s big attacks, wait for the opening after a charge or jump, then punish before resetting to a safe distance.

How to Fish supports both solo play and online co-op, and there is no dedicated matchmaking server — players look for teammates through the game’s Steam Discussion Forum or its official Discord instead. When you create a lobby you choose a session type (such as single-player or invite-only/ public) and cannot change it afterward, so pick deliberately if you plan to invite friends later.

Cosmetic skins come from feeding creatures into the Reel of Fortune slot machine rather than from progression, so they are entirely optional. Island 4 also has a casino with a roulette table; a written community guide calls it “a bit pointless” once regular fishing is paying well, and in one player’s own recorded session, roulette lost far more often than it paid out — by their own estimate, about 80% of the time. Treat it as a novelty, not a moneymaker.

New players tend to make the same handful of mistakes. Spending early money on the slot machine instead of a rod and weapon slows down the whole run, since skins do nothing for your fishing or combat. Being too slow to finish a flopping fish on land is another common one — catches can and do escape back into the water if you hesitate.

Fighting an island’s boss with an unupgraded weapon turns a short fight into a long, punishing one, so spend on damage upgrades before you trigger the boss bait. Finally, players who skip co-op make the game harder than it needs to be — a second player roughly halves the difficulty of most fights and lets you split the fishing-and-fighting workload.