How to Fish Beginner Guide: First Hour and Money Loop

Updated 2026-09-02 · Steam How to Fish

The fastest start in How to Fish is to collect and sell clams on the lighthouse island until you have about $60, then buy the crabbing rod ($3), a beer ($12) and the knife ($45), bait your rod with the beer, and kill the spider crab. Its shell buys the boat keys from the lighthouse keeper, and island 1 is done. This How to Fish game guide covers that first hour in order: settings, reeling, what to buy and how money is actually made.

The game is a $7.99 physics-based fishing title from Dazed Games, released 20 August 2026, with online co-op and 28 achievements. Prices and tactics below are player-tested from Steam Community guides, not official; patch-note facts carry their patch number.

Settings to change before your first cast

Patch 1.0.11 (1 September 2026) added most of the comfort options new players ask for, so open the options menu first.

Setting	Added in	Why it matters early
Toggle for aiming	1.0.11	No holding right mouse all fight
Toggle for sprinting	1.0.11	Handy, though some boss tactics want you walking
Hold to attack	1.0.11	Melee stops being a click race
Toggle nametags	1.0.11	Cleans up the screen in a full lobby
Difficulty easy / normal / hard	1.0.9	Easy: 25% less creature health, 50% less damage. Hard: 25% more of both
Invert X and Y axis	1.0.5
Private invite-only lobby	1.0.5
Minimum locked FPS	1.0.5	Lowered from 50 to 30

The same patch colour-coded dropped item dots and made the game Steam Deck Verified and GeForce NOW playable.

Casting, reeling and your first catches

Three habits, all player-reported, separate a smooth first hour from a frustrating one.

Press Tab. An encyclopedia of every creature, with rare "drip" variants tracked separately. Players call it the most-forgotten feature.
Reel gently. Players report easing the line in and saving fast reeling for the moment a rare drip variant appears.
Release what you do not want. Right-clicking while reeling drops the creature off your line; players report five to eight bites per cast this way, and put drip creatures at a 10% chance on eligible non-boss catches.

What you catch is decided by the bait or lure on your rod, not the island you stand on, per the achievement guide authors: ham and hot dogs on the crabbing rod, a french fry on the normal rod for mackerel, gar and pike, then the lures. Full list on bait and lures.

Guide author RubenS reports that manually dropping a catch leaves you holding your fists, while pressing a weapon hotkey drops it and draws the weapon in one motion.

What to buy, in what order

Prices below are player-reported from a multiplayer run; that guide's author says upgrades looked cheaper solo, so treat them as close, not exact.

Purchase	Price	Island	Note
Crabbing rod	$3	1	Your first tool
Beer	$12	1	Give it to the keeper; the empty is boss bait
Knife	$45	1	Recommended over brass knuckles
Dynamite	$25	2	Food and crowd control, not a weapon
Shotgun	$150	2	Carries several islands
Boat engine upgrade	$230	2
Beginner Boss Lure	$40	2	Cheapest mini-boss summon
Standard Boss Lure	$280	3	Shark that unlocks the grill
SMG	$650	3	Best mid-game value
Compensator	$600	4	SMG recoil control; that figure is from a solo speedrun guide
Professional Boss Lure	$1,200	4	Summons the tuna
Scientific Boss Lure	$5,800	5	Optional mini-boss; budget for it

Weapons take four attachments: extended magazine, laser sight, red dot or sniper scope, and compensator or suppressor. Patch 1.0.11 removed the iron sight from shops because players bought it by mistake and lost attachments. See weapons.

The money loop that actually works

Fish, kill, sell. Two multipliers sit on top of that.

Cooking. Once the grill is unlocked on island 3, holding a fish over the flame raises its value from 1x to 1.5x, then collapses it to 0 if it turns solid black. Press F to watch the multiplier live. Players report the 1.5x applies to weapons too, so cook anything before selling it, and that the lava pools on the volcano island reach the same full multiplier without any burn window to judge. Patch 1.0.10 lets you clean cooking off a weapon by dipping it in water.

Killscore. The game scores how stylish a kill was, and that score feeds the sell price. Player testing puts explosion and 360 kills at 1.5x, long shots at 1.3x, headshots at 1.25x and hipfire no-scopes at 1.2x, all multiplying together, which is why speedrunners finish kills without aiming down sights.

Dynamite in the water gathers fish fast, but guide authors warn it earns less than fishing properly. Treat it as a food source: cooked fish in your pockets keeps you alive in boss fights.

Killing the spider crab and leaving island 1

Give the beer to the old man on the bench and he returns the empty, your rod bait for the first boss. Players report the crab charges, then stunlocks for a few seconds after its dash, which is your window. Guide authors warn that no later boss stunlocks like this, so treat it as a one-off rather than a tactic you can lean on.

The crab drops a shell and crab sticks. Hand the shell to the keeper and he trades it for the boat keys, which is the only way off island 1; then buy the radar and follow the green marker. Every later boss has the same shape: a quest gives you a lure, the boss drops a trophy, and the trophy is what the quest giver wants. See bosses and islands and map.

Co-op basics

The Steam store lists 1-4 player co-op; patch 1.0.4 raised lobbies to 8, and 1.0.5 added private invite-only lobbies.

The rule that catches new groups: since 1.0.11 your own explosives kill you even with friendly fire off. Players report you can pick a downed teammate back up instead of losing them, and that bosses fall faster with more guns on them; one author also notes the bare-hands final-boss achievement is a single lobby-wide fight, so if any player lands the killing punch everyone earns it. That same author says the under-an-hour Bean run is the one thing better done solo. Patch 1.0.10 also made dropped items persist between sessions, up to 64. More at co-op.

Gambling: read this before you bet

Reel of Fortune slot machines take drip creatures and boss trophies and pay out weapon skins; there is one per island, and drip creatures respawn, so nothing is lost forever. Roulette is the dangerous one: a green result is player-reported to return an item worth 35 times whatever you staked, but there is a single green pocket among 37. Bet only fish you were going to sell anyway, never quest items.

Thunderstore also hosts mods that rig the roulette or add aimbots, god mode and cheat menus; this site does not cover them. The quality-of-life mods worth a beginner's time are on mods.

Do not lose your run

Patch 1.0.6 moved saving to the Save, Main Menu and Quit buttons with an autosave every minute, 1.0.9 addressed corrupted saves, and 1.0.11 checks every save before loading and keeps backups. Patch 1.0.4 blocked special characters in server names because they broke saves, so keep lobby names plain.

Sources and last check

Checked 2 September 2026. Patch numbers, settings, difficulty values, save handling, the friendly-fire explosive rule and the iron sight removal come from the official Dazed Games patch notes on Steam, chiefly the 1 September 2026 post for 1.0.11 plus the 1.0.4 to 1.0.10 posts; price, release date, co-op count and the 28 achievements come from the Steam store page.

Everything else is player-reported and paraphrased from the five Steam Community guides listed in the sources above, checked the same day: the all-28-achievements and post-game route guide (prices, cooking, the crab, roulette, co-op notes), the bait and fish guide (baits and drip rates), the RubenS boss and weapon guide (weapon order, hotkey swap), the detailed killscore multipliers guide, and the Bean 1.0.5 solo speedrun guide (the island 4 compensator price). Most of those prices were recorded on a multiplayer run and the compensator figure on a solo one, so expect small differences on your own save.