How to Beat the Pufferfish in How to Fish: Boss Guide

Updated 2026-09-02 · Steam How to Fish

The How to Fish Pufferfish is the island 3 boss, and you summon it with a carrot that a tourist NPC trades you for an endangered fish. The fight has two phases: it chases and rams you on the ground, then at half health it stops aggroing, rolls around the island and trails a purple poison cloud that hurts badly if you walk into it. Player guides recommend a fully upgraded submachine gun or a shotgun plus a stack of cooked fish, and the developers already nerfed the Pufferfish once in patch 1.0.4 on 21 August 2026. Island 3 is also where you unlock the grill, so clear the shark mini-boss first and bring cooked fish for healing.

Pufferfish quick reference

Detail	What sources say
Island	Island 3, the island with the grill and the coconut trees (player-reported)
Bait	Carrot, listed as the Pufferfish bait in the community bait and lure guides
How to get the carrot	Give the resting tourist NPC an endangered fish; he trades you the carrot (player-reported)
Phase change	At exactly 50% health, per the achievements guide (player-tested)
Official balance change	"Nerfed Pufferfish" in patch 1.0.4, 21 August 2026
Difficulty scaling	Patch 1.0.9 added Easy (creatures have 25% less health, deal 50% less damage) and Hard (25% more health, 25% more damage)

How to spawn the Pufferfish

The Pufferfish will not bite on a normal lure. The chain is the "Vacation" quest line:

Buy the Standard Lure on island 3 and fish until an endangered species is flagged on screen as you reel in.
Hand that fish to the resting tourist NPC; he gives you a carrot, which is the boss bait (player-reported). The guides do not say where on island 3 he stands, so that is not confirmed yet.
Cast the carrot to hook the Pufferfish, then swap to your weapon as described below.

Guides do not agree on the endangered species names. One achievements guide lists pigeonfish, sea horse and fish-in-aquarium; another lists needlefish, bowl fish and sea horse; a speedrun guide says a needlefish or a seahorse is enough. All of those are Standard Lure catches on the bait list, so the practical answer is to run the Standard Lure and take whichever the game flags first.

Island boss lures are always consumed on use, unlike regular lures which only have a chance to break, so a wipe costs you another endangered fish. When the boss bites, do not drop your catch by hand: press the hotbar key for your weapon, which drops the fish and draws the gun in one motion (player-written boss guide).

Phase 1: the charge

Phase one is a ground chase. The Pufferfish runs straight at you and tries to body you, and it visibly grows larger as the fight goes on (player-reported).

The player-tested advice is to walk, not sprint. Holding walk while strafing keeps you circling at a radius the boss struggles to correct for, while sprinting overshoots and puts you in its path. Keep firing as you orbit. Island 3 is full of coconut trees, so kite around them: they break the boss's line at you, but they block your own dodges too, so watch your footing.

Phase 2: the poison cloud

At half health the Pufferfish switches personality completely. It stops tracking you and just rolls around the map, and it leaves a purple poison cloud trailing behind it. Player-reported guides describe the damage from standing in that cloud as significant.

Because it is no longer chasing, phase two is a positioning problem rather than a dodging one. Hold a wider distance than in phase one, keep trees between you and its path, and shoot it whenever it rolls into open ground. Never chase it through its own trail to close distance, and heal with cooked fish between passes.

Weapons and loadout

Prices below are player-reported. One achievements guide notes its prices were recorded in a multiplayer run and that upgrades seemed cheaper solo, so treat them as approximate.

Purchase	Player-reported price	Why it matters here
Submachine gun (guides call it the SMG or the UZI)	$650 for the gun	The standard island 3 pick, sustained damage through both phases
Shotgun	$150	Cheaper alternative; several guides say it is easier to land because aim matters less
Compensator	Part of a roughly $2,500 full attachment set on the UZI	Cuts recoil noticeably, which is the main complaint about the SMG
Extended magazine	Part of the same set	Fewer reloads during the phase two window
Bullet damage upgrades	Varies	Guides call these the difference between an annoying fight and a short one

Cooked fish are the other half of the loadout: cooking lifts an item from 1x to 1.5x value and gives you healing on deck. Kitting out a single submachine gun with the full rack also clears the achievement for putting every attachment on one weapon; the four pieces an achievements guide names are an extended magazine, a red dot sight, a laser sight and, last, the compensator you wanted anyway (player-reported). Patch 1.0.11 removed the iron sight as a purchasable, because players kept buying it by mistake and losing their expensive attachments, and stopped you downgrading a suppressor back to a compensator. Full pricing is on the weapons page.

Explosives are the other route: a speedrun guide places dynamite near fixed landmarks and detonates it under the boss during the phase transition. That still works, with one caveat below.

What patch 1.0.11 changed for explosive strategies

The player-written "Under One Hour Tips/Guide 1.0.10" route opens by telling you to set friendly fire off so your own TNT will not kill you, and other pre-1.0.11 speedrun routes assume the same (player-reported). Patch 1.0.11 on 1 September 2026 changed that directly: you will now die from your own explosives even with friendly fire disabled. If you are following an older TNT route against the Pufferfish, you now have to clear your own blast radius. See patch notes for the full history from 1.0.4 to 1.0.11.

Killscore multipliers on this fight

These values come from a player guide documenting the exact triggers, so treat them as player-tested. The endangered fish you farm for the carrot carries its own bonus.

Multiplier	Value	Trigger
Endangered	1.25x	Killing an endangered species, which is exactly what you farm for the carrot
Explosion	1.50x	Kills dealt with dynamite
Headshot	1.25x	Head hit
Overkill	1.25x	Damage over the target health plus 70, and it explicitly does not work on bosses

Overkill is off the table against the boss itself. Two different things share the name Impressive, and it is worth keeping them apart: the killscore bonus called Impressive is a 2.00x multiplier that triggers when five or more other bonuses are active on the same kill, while the achievement called Impressive asks for a 5x total killscore multiplier. They are not the same requirement, and the worked example one guide uses to clear the achievement reaches 6.15x from six stacked modifiers without the 2.00x bonus (player-tested). The complete list is on the killscore page.

Achievements tied to the Pufferfish

Killing this boss unlocks Vacation, described in-game as helping the tourist swim on his vacation. A player speedrun guide adds that the kill leaves a quest item to hand back to the NPC before you sail on toward island 4 (player-reported). Island 3 also holds Grillmaster, which needs the shark mini-boss caught with the Standard Boss Lure, plus the attachment achievement above. All 28 are on the achievements page.

Mods that make the fight readable

Two Thunderstore mods aim squarely at boss fights. BossHP shows an exact synchronised boss health number beside the native bar, turning the 50% phase flip from a guess into a readout, and BossTimer shows how long you have before the boss leaves, since bosses run on a timer next to their health bar. Aimbot and cheat-menu mods for this game also exist on Thunderstore; this site does not cover them.

Sources and last check

Checked on 2 September 2026. The only official facts here come from Dazed Games patch notes on Steam: the Pufferfish nerf in patch 1.0.4 (21 August 2026), the Easy and Hard difficulty numbers in patch 1.0.9, and the explosive, iron sight and attachment changes in patch 1.0.11 (1 September 2026). Everything else is player-reported. The island 3 location, the carrot bait and the endangered fish trade come from the Steam Community bait and lure guide and two achievement guides. The 50% phase threshold, the walk-do-not-sprint advice, the coconut tree kiting and the poison cloud damage come from those achievement guides and a sub-one-hour speedrun guide. Weapon prices, the weapon priority order and the hotbar weapon-swap trick come from RubenS's "Complete Boss and Weapon Strategy Guide" and were recorded in a multiplayer run, so they may differ solo. The TNT route, the friendly fire setting and the quest item handback come from the "Under One Hour Tips/Guide 1.0.10" speedrun guide. Killscore values come from a player guide documenting the exact triggers, and mod descriptions come from the mods' own Thunderstore pages. Where guides disagree, both readings are shown above. See bosses for the full boss order.