Credit: Dazed Games
featureDeep Dives
How To Fish A Complete Beginner Guide To Surviving The Chaos
August 24, 2026·9 min read
How to Fish recorded an all time peak of 266,896 concurrent players in only four days of being available on Steam. It is not as if hundreds of thousands of players suddenly developed a craving for fishing simulators.
The viral appeal came from how quickly How to Fish turns a simple cast into something much more chaotic, with co-op mishaps, physics gone wrong, boss fights and players improvising their way through situations that barely resemble fishing anymore.
Once you start playing, though, it quickly becomes clear that How to Fish is not just a sandbox for random co-op disasters.
Quests drive the campaign, while fishing mostly keeps your wallet topped up along the way. Catching and selling fish pays for gear, but it is surprisingly easy to stay busy without actually getting anywhere. The game leaves quite a few progression rules for you to figure out yourself, and that is where beginners tend to get stuck.
You start with almost nothing, so a few cheap catches are enough to fund the basics. After that, stop grinding the shoreline and go see what the Lighthouse keeper wants.
His quest is called "Who Stole My Beer". Buy the Beer Can and "Give It To Him". He drinks it and hands the empty can back, which is exactly what you need to catch the Spider Crab.
Before you cast it, check what you are carrying.
The Spider Crab is your first proper boss and the white bar underneath its health is already ticking once the fight gets going. Let that bar run out and the crab escapes. You then have to set the encounter up again.
The crab itself has a fairly readable attack. Stay close enough to tempt it into charging, move sideways when it commits and hit it while it is stunned after the miss. That stun is specific to the Spider Crab, so don't assume every later boss needs the same approach.
When it dies, pick up the Spider Crab Shell and take it back to the keeper. Handing it over completes the quest and gets you the boat keys, finally opening the way off the Lighthouse.
Before you leave, make sure to buy the Radar, as you will need it to navigate to the coordinates the game gives you for the next islands.
The Radar costs $10 from the Lighthouse keeper and you want it installed before sailing toward the Forest. The game starts giving you coordinates for new locations, and the Radar turns those coordinates into a waypoint on the water. That takes most of the guesswork out of travelling between islands.
Finish the island quest first. Once it gives you the coordinates for the next area, use the Radar to sail there. From the Lighthouse, the route eventually takes you through the Forest, Desert, Rocks and Volcano.
If you have killed a boss and the next destination has not appeared, check the quest before jumping back into the boat. Quite often there is still something sitting in your inventory that belongs to an NPC.
You can waste a surprising amount of time casting from the right island with the wrong thing attached to your line.
Different areas use different lure tiers, and the bosses are even pickier. The Spider Crab wants the Empty Beer Can. The Giant Piranha on the Forest island needs the Modified Leech, and later islands continue changing what you need as new fish become available.
Before blaming your rod, read the quest a bit more carefully.
A good example of this is the Giant Piranha. First, you collect three leeches and give them to the woman by the lake. She then turns them into the modified lure used to summon the boss. Simply standing there with a normal lure and casting over and over will never start that fight.
You can use this same logic with different creatures. If the creature never appears, check the bait and the location. If you are able to catch it but struggle to kill it, start looking at your weapons and ammo instead.
The white bar underneath a boss health bar is an escape timer. That means you are not free to spend ten minutes running around, sorting your inventory and deciding which gun you want to use. When it empties, the boss leaves and the attempt is over.
Before casting boss bait:
You notice this straight away with the Giant Piranha, because it brings smaller enemies into the fight as well. Smaller piranhas appear around it and can chew through your health while you are trying to keep damage on the main target.
Clear enough of them to give yourself room, but do not spend the entire timer hunting every small fish on the screen.
After the Giant Piranha goes down, pick up the Giant Piranha Skeleton and take it back to the woman who gave you the Modified Leech. She gives you the coordinates for Island 3.
If a strange item drops from a story boss, keep it until the local quest is finished. The vendor can wait.
Each new island adds more weapons and upgrades to the shop, and it is easy to start buying gear just because you have unlocked it. Before spending anything, try the fight and see what is actually going wrong.
If your shots are landing but barely touching the boss's health, you probably need more damage. A gun that kicks so much that half the magazine misses points to a different problem, so look at recoil or accuracy instead. And if the boss will not appear at all, stop shopping for weapons and check the bait.
Weapons also take attachments, which can let you improve damage, recoil or accuracy without replacing the gun entirely. If you already have something that feels comfortable to use, upgrading it can be a much cheaper fix than buying a new weapon every time the shop expands.
For the first few islands, you only need a weapon that can handle the enemies and bosses in front of you. Keep some money aside for ammunition, lures and whatever the next quest asks you to buy.
There will be plenty of time to experiment once a bad purchase no longer leaves you short on the basics.
You unlock cooking on Island 3 after helping the Grillmaster with his shark problem. Buy the Standard Boss Lure, catch and kill the Blue Shark, then bring it back to him instead of selling it. He will open the grill once the quest is complete.
Cooking lets you get more money out of a catch before taking it to the vendor. Put the fish on the grill and its value gradually increases, with the multiplier reaching a maximum of 1.5x. Leave it there too long and the food burns, dropping the value to zero.
You do not have to guess when it is ready either. Inspect the fish while it cooks and keep an eye on the value, then take it off once the multiplier reaches its peak.
That 50 percent makes a much bigger difference once you start bringing back more valuable catches. It is also another reason not to spend too long farming cheap fish at the Lighthouse just to build up money. By Island 3, the same catch can already earn you more before it ever reaches the vendor.
How to Fish pays you for making kills more complicated than they need to be. Trick shots increase your payout through the Killscore multiplier, and the game even has achievements for reaching a 5x multiplier and landing a 360 no scope.
That is fun once you can shoot properly. It is less useful when an ordinary catch still costs you half your ammo.
Get comfortable with your weapons first. When you can land a fish and kill it without wasting much ammo, start experimenting with spins, longer shots and other ways to push the multiplier higher. A failed trick shot is much easier to laugh off when it does not leave you short on money for the next lure.
Gambling belongs in roughly the same category early on. You can make money from roulette and the slot machines, but you can obviously lose it just as quickly.
For now, spend your money on progress first and save the flashy kills and gambling for when you can afford them.
Getting stuck usually comes down to one of a handful of things. Before you start grinding for more money or sailing around at random, check these first:
How to Fish throws enough distractions at you that missing one small quest step is easy. If progress suddenly stops, check the objective and your inventory before assuming you need better gear or another hour of fishing.
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A 1-4 player physics based fishing simulator. While drinking and boating you suddenly crash into a small island. To work your way back home you have to learn How to Fish.
Released
August 20, 2026
Developer
Dazed Games
Publisher
Dazed Games
