How to Play How to Fish: Beginner Guide

New to How to Fish? Here's what actually happens in your first session, how the controls work, and the habits that separate players who progress fast from players who are still stuck fishing off the starting dock an hour in.

How You Start the Game

How to Fish opens with a short setup: you and your friends (or just you, solo) crash a boat into a small island after a night of drinking. From that point on, you have nothing but a basic fishing rod and an empty pocket. The entire early game is built around one question — how do you turn "a rod and an empty pocket" into enough money and gear to survive the island and eventually get home?

Basic Controls

How to Fish uses a standard first-person PC control scheme. Exact bindings can be remapped from the in-game Options > Controls menu, but the defaults follow the pattern most Steam co-op games use:

How to Fish is built on a physics engine rather than scripted animations, so both casting and reeling have real weight to them — you can fling a lure into a tree, tangle your own line, or send a fish flying with a bad cast. That's intentional; a lot of the game's comedy comes from things not going according to plan.

The First Ten Minutes: What to Actually Do

1. Fish the starting dock. The water right around your crash site has plenty of common fish to get you started — there's no need to explore far before earning your first money.
2. Sell everything you catch. Early on, almost any fish is worth selling. Don't hoard your first catches; convert them into cash so you can afford your first gear upgrade.
3. Buy your first weapon. A melee option like the knife or brass knuckles is typically the cheapest way to start finishing off fish faster than your bare hands. See the weapons guide for what's available and roughly what things cost.
4. Talk to NPCs and pick up quests. Quest lines point you toward the island's boss fight, which is your gate to the next island.
5. Save up for a ranged weapon. Pistols and shotguns make boss fights and bigger creatures far more manageable than melee alone.

Tips for Beginners

• How you kill a fish changes what it's worth. Experiment with different weapons and trick shots — some methods pay out more than others. The money guide covers this in more detail.
• Play in co-op if you can. How to Fish is built around 1-4 player sessions, and progress (islands, quests) is shared, which makes grinding for boss fights much faster with friends. See the multiplayer guide to set up a lobby.
• Don't skip the shop board. Each island's shop area displays available weapons and gear directly on a wooden board — check it every time you return so you don't miss a new unlock.
• Boss fish need a plan, not just a bigger rod. Bosses hit harder and take more hits than normal fish; bring your best current weapon and expect a real fight, not a quick reel-in. Details in the fish & bosses guide.
• Collect rare variants when you see them. Rare colorations of normal fish exist throughout the game and are worth hunting down both for the challenge and for extra value.

Understanding Progression

How to Fish doesn't have a traditional skill tree. Instead, progression is almost entirely gear- and money-driven: better rods let you reel in bigger fish, better weapons let you kill them faster and more efficiently, and defeating each island's boss is what physically unlocks the path to the next island. If you feel stuck, the fix is almost always the same — go back to easier water, farm a few more fish, sell them, and come back better equipped. For a full breakdown of where the money actually comes from, see the money & upgrade guide, and for a look at what's waiting on each island, check the islands & maps guide.

Page last updated: 2026-08-27