How to Fish Achievements: All 28 and Post-Game Route

Updated 2026-09-02 · Steam How to Fish

How many how to fish achievements are there, and what is the fastest way to clear them? The Steam store page lists 28 achievements for How to Fish. Twelve of them come to you naturally by finishing the story across the five islands, fifteen are trick-shot, collection and gambling tasks that are far easier after the credits roll, and one, Bean, is a sub-one-hour speedrun that stands apart from everything else. The single best piece of advice from the two big community achievement guides is the same: finish the game first, then clean up. Once the ending plays you respawn on island 1 holding every piece of endgame gear you earned, with free travel to all five islands.

Everything below is player-tested unless it is tagged as a patch note. The two guides used here were written on versions 1.0.4 and 1.0.5, and prices have not been re-tested since, so treat costs as approximate.

All 28 achievements at a glance

Achievement	Requirement	Best place to do it
Getting started	Kill your first creature	Island 1, tutorial
Drip	Kill a drip creature	Anywhere, happens on its own
Who stole my beer	Find and kill the culprit, bring it to the lighthouse keeper	Island 1, Spider Crab
Getting an upgrade	Upgrade the engine on the boat	Island 2, $230
Dinnertime	Catch dinner for the lady in the forest	Island 2, Giant Piranha
Grillmaster	Start the grill	Island 3, shark mini-boss
Vacation	Help the tourist swim on his vacation	Island 3, Pufferfish
I am speed	Buy the best engine for the boat	Island 4, Dual Motors $860
Terrorizing bird	Defend the scared islanders from the terrorizing bird	Island 4, Albatross
Fully equipped	Apply all attachments to a single weapon	Island 5, on your assault rifle
Deadliest catch	Help the military defeat the big creature the military located	Island 5, whale quest chain
We are so back	Finish the game	Island 5, hand in the tail
Easy	Kill a boss within 10 seconds	Post-game, Spider Crab
Noob	Get a kill with no kill score multiplier	Post-game
Impressive	Get a 5x killscore multiplier	Post-game, seagulls
360 no scope	Kill a creature with a 360 no scope	Post-game
Let me go	Get picked up by a seagull	Post-game, die and wait
Yummy in my tummy	Eat a burnt creature	Post-game, grill
Competitive eating	Eat a mini-boss	Post-game, grill
GOLD GOLD GOLD	Unlock a legendary skin from the slot machine	Any Reel of Fortune
I'm the bird now	Make the boat fly	Post-game, dynamite
Everyone's dream	Kill a seagull with dynamite	Post-game
Collector	Find and kill all the creatures	Post-game, island 5
Fishipedia	Find and kill all drip creatures	Post-game, island 5
All in	Bet on green and win at roulette	Post-game, island 5 roulette
Rich! Millionaire	Sell something worth 100,000 or more	Post-game, same roulette win
Handyman	Defeat the final boss with bare hands	Post-game, re-run the final boss
Bean	Finish the game within 1 hour	Separate speedrun save

Two naming conflicts are worth flagging. The older guide labels the "apply all attachments" achievement I am speed; the newer 28-achievement guide splits them, with I am speed as the best boat engine and Fully equipped as the attachments task. The newer guide's split is the one that adds up to 28, so this page uses it. The same two guides also disagree on Deadliest catch: one says it pops on the regular Bowhead Whale, the other says it is the lava whale. Both are player-reported and neither is confirmed by patch notes.

Island-by-island: the 12 story achievements

The story achievements are unmissable if you simply progress. What follows are the parts players report tripping over.

Island 1. Buy the crabbing rod ($3) and a beer ($12), bait the rod with the beer and fish up the Spider Crab. It stunlocks for a few seconds after it charges, which is unique to this boss. It drops a shell; the lighthouse keeper trades the shell for the boat keys.
Island 2. The $230 engine at the shack pops Getting an upgrade. For Dinnertime, three leeches are lying in the tall grass, and the achievement pops only when you bring the tail back to the lady, not when you kill the boss. The 28-achievement guide advises passing on the pistol and putting the money into the shotgun ($150) instead; the older Ultimate Guide only says a new weapon, pistol or shotgun, is worth buying at this point. Dynamite unlocks here at $25.
Island 3. Grillmaster needs the Standard Boss Lure ($280) shark handed to the grill master. Vacation needs an endangered fish (Needlefish, Bowlfish or Seahorse, per player testing) given to the tourist in exchange for the carrot, which is the Pufferfish lure.
Island 4. The Dual Motors engine is $860. Terrorizing bird needs the Professional Boss Lure ($1,200) to catch a Tuna, which you then drop on the ground as bait for the Albatross. Fight it from inside a building; every enemy shows a red dot through walls.
Island 5. Give the scientist five fish for the whale bait, kill the whale, throw its body into the volcano to spawn the final lava whale, then take the tail back to the scientist for the RHIB keys and the ending. Cooking in lava tops out at the full 1.5x multiplier and cannot be overdone, so there is no window to watch and no burnt fish; stock as many lava-cooked fish as your inventory slots allow ahead of both whale fights. See bosses for full fight breakdowns.

The post-game cleanup route

Once the credits finish, you are dropped back onto island 1; your inventory and gear carry over, and every island is already reachable. Players report this makes the 15 post-game achievements trivial, because you are fighting island 1 content with island 5 gear.

Do this	Unlocks
Beer on the rod, fish the Spider Crab, mag dump it	Easy
Mag dump a fish lying on the ground with a gun	Noob
Full spin, hipfire, one-shot a low-level fish	360 no scope
Headshot flying seagulls at range from the hip	Impressive
Die, do not press respawn, sit still	Let me go
Buy the Beginner Boss Lure ($40) on island 2, kill it, burn it solid black on the grill, eat it	Yummy in my tummy plus Competitive eating
Dynamite under the boat, detonate	I'm the bird now
Dynamite plus one fish on the ground, shoot the dynamite when the seagull lands	Everyone's dream
Gamble drip creatures at any Reel of Fortune	GOLD GOLD GOLD

Yummy in my tummy and Competitive eating are one action: the burnt mini-boss counts for both. Press F while cooking to watch the value multiplier fall to zero, which is how you know it is truly burnt.

Killscore achievements: Noob, Impressive and 360 no scope

Killscore is the game's style system, and the multipliers stack multiplicatively. A player-compiled multiplier list gives these values, all player-tested and not confirmed by the developers:

Multiplier	Value	Trigger
Impressive	2.00x	5 or more other bonuses active on the kill
360	1.50x	320 degrees of rotation within the last second
Explosion	1.50x	Explosive kill
Dogfight	1.50x	Both you and the fish airborne
Killsteal	1.30x	You did not damage it and it is under 30% HP
Longshot	1.30x	More than 25 units of distance
Headshot	1.25x	Headshot
Last Bullet	1.25x	Final round in the magazine
One Shot	1.25x	One shot, one kill
Overkill	1.25x	Damage above fish HP plus 70; does not work on bosses
Endangered	1.25x	Endangered species
No Scope	1.20x	At least 0.25s since last aim-down-sights
Finally	1.10x	More than 5 shots fired since the fight started
Point Blank	1.10x	Under 2 units of distance
Noob Kill	1.01x	Only fires with zero other bonuses

For Impressive you need 5x total. The 28-achievement guide reports a maxed assault rifle with a laser sight, hipfiring headshots into flying seagulls at range, reached 6.15x across six modifiers, while a maxed pistol only hit 5.16x and only because a Triple Kill carried it. Guns are hitscan with no travel time or drop, so the 360 is more forgiving than it sounds and the rotation can be split across two mouse swipes. Full detail is on killscore.

Collector and Fishipedia

Press Tab to open the in-game encyclopedia. It tracks every creature and tracks drip variants separately, so it names every gap in your list, but it will not say which lure or location fills that gap. The key correction in the newer guide is that your equipped lure decides the catch, not your current location, which means both achievements can be finished without leaving island 5, where every lure is on sale. One guide author reports that the last gap in their own list turned out to be an optional mini-boss on island 5 that no quest points you toward; the Scientific Boss Lure needed to summon it runs $5,800, so set that money aside before spending your endgame cash elsewhere. The full bait-to-creature mapping is on fish.

Patch 1.0.5 on 22 August 2026 fixed a bug where the drip-collection achievement would not fire until you caught one extra drip after completing the set, meaning players had to find "all plus one". If you completed the set before that patch, catching one more should resolve it.

All in and Rich! Millionaire in one spin

Set both of these up on the same spin at the island 5 roulette. A winning green bet hands back an item worth 35 times what you staked, and that payout item is what you then sell for the Rich! Millionaire credit, so clearing a 100,000 sale means staking something valued at 2,858 or more (100,000 divided by 35). Because lava cooking adds the full 1.5x, a raw catch worth around 1,906 gets you over the line once cooked, and players suggest padding up to roughly 3,200 after cooking so a slightly weak fish does not strand you at 99,000. Green is one pocket in 37; one player reported roughly 30 minutes of island 5 farming before it landed. Stake only fish above the threshold and both achievements pop on the same win. Patch 1.0.11 on 1 September 2026 nudged a roulette table because betting from the old position was awkward; the patch note calls that table's location "island 6", which does not match the five-island layout the community guides describe, and how the two numbering schemes line up is not confirmed yet.

Handyman and Bean

Handyman checks the final blow alone: the punch has to land the kill, but the rest of the fight can be fought however you like. Players suggest rifling the lava whale down until only a sliver of health remains, then switching to fists. Expect to overshoot a few times and re-run the fight. In co-op it is a single fight for the lobby: if any player lands the punch, everyone gets it. Patch 1.0.4 on 21 August 2026 specifically fixed this achievement so it awards to everyone, and the same patch nerfed both the Pufferfish and the Whale.

Bean, finishing the game in one hour, is the rarest achievement in the game and has its own page: bean-achievement. Note that patch 1.0.5 fixed the bug that let players travel to any island without unlocking it, which broke the original route. Save-file editing methods circulate on Steam for both Bean and skin unlocks; this site does not cover them. Patch 1.0.9 on 24 August 2026 added difficulty settings, and easy mode gives all creatures 25% less health and 50% less damage. One player's sub-one-hour tips guide, written on 1.0.10, opens by telling you to set difficulty to easy before starting a run; that is the only guide in this research set that leans on easy mode.

Patch changes that affect achievement hunting

Patch	Date	What changed
1.0.4	21 Aug 2026	Bare-hands final boss achievement fixed for everyone; Pufferfish and Whale nerfed
1.0.5	22 Aug 2026	Drip-collection achievement no longer needs "all plus one"; island-skip travel bug fixed
1.0.9	24 Aug 2026	Easy and hard difficulty added
1.0.10	27 Aug 2026	Dropped items now save between sessions, up to 64; anglerfish health nerfed
1.0.11	1 Sep 2026	You now die to your own explosives even with friendly fire off; roulette table moved

The 1.0.11 explosives change matters for Everyone's dream and I'm the bird now: friendly fire off will no longer save you from your own dynamite. See patch-notes for the full history and co-op for how lobby achievements are shared.

Sources and last check

Checked 2 September 2026. The achievement total of 28 comes from the official How to Fish Steam store page, as do the achievement names shown there. Patch behaviour for the bare-hands fix, the drip-collection fix, the island-skip fix, difficulty modes and the friendly-fire explosives change comes from Dazed Games' official Steam announcements for versions 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.0.9 and 1.0.11. Version 1.0.10 is cited here only for the item-persistence and anglerfish changes in the patch table.

Everything else is player-reported. The island order, quest steps, prices, post-game route and the All in threshold math come from the Steam Community guide "How to Fish - All 28 Achievements + Post-Game Route", written on 1.0.4 and updated for 1.0.5, and from "The Ultimate Guide to Unlocking All Achievements". The killscore multiplier values come from the community guide "Detailed Killscore Multipliers and how to Trigger them EXACTLY!", and the easy-mode speedrun note comes from "Under One Hour Tips/Guide 1.0.10". None of the multiplier numbers, prices or drop rates on this page have been confirmed by the developers, and the two achievement guides disagree on the naming of I am speed versus Fully equipped and on which whale awards Deadliest catch.