How to Fish Beginner Guide: First Hour, Controls and Upgrades (1.1.3)

Current version: 1.1.3 (2026-09-29). How to Fish is not a real-world fishing tutorial. It is Dazed Games’ physics-based fishing, combat and boating game, released 2026-08-20. The opening loop is catch → defeat or process → sell ordinary loot → buy one useful upgrade → complete the current NPC hand-in.

Settings you should change before the first hour

Three of these exist because of later patches, so older guides skip them:

1. Difficulty. Since 1.0.9 you can change it in the main menu and in-game. The numbers are official: Easy = every creature has 25% less health and deals 50% less damage; Hard = 25% more health and 25% more damage. Easy is a legitimate first run, not a cheat.
2. Minimum locked FPS. 1.0.5 lowered the floor from 50 to 30. If your machine struggles, that is now an available setting rather than a forced 50.
3. Toggle vs hold. 1.0.11 added toggle options for aiming and sprinting, a hold-to-attack option, and a nametag toggle. 1.1.2 added rebinding for reload. Set these before a boss fight, not during one.

Also worth knowing: the game is Steam Deck Verified and playable through GeForce NOW since 1.0.11 — that is a patch statement, not a store badge.

Saving, Steam Cloud and crashes

Save behaviour changed twice, and this is the part that costs players progress:

• 1.0.6 stopped the game from saving on a crash. It now saves when you press Save, Main Menu or Quit, and still autosaves every minute.
• 1.0.11 made the game check a save for corruption before loading, and keeps backups in case one does become corrupt.
• 1.0.12 moved saves to Steam Cloud. The official wording is specific: play and exit the game once on the PC you saved on to upload that save to the cloud.

If you switch machines and your world is missing, the fix is usually to launch the game once on the original PC rather than to hunt for a file.

Lighthouse first hour: what to buy

The first island only sells a few things, and the order matters. Prices below are what current guides measured; patches can change them, so trust the in-game shop price.

1. Start with the starter Crab-Fishing Rod and catch crustaceans. Hand ordinary catches to the Lighthouse Keeper for cash. Hot Dog bait in his shop catches more valuable creatures.
2. Buy the Knife for $45, then upgrade it twice on the anvil: $12 for the first, $28 for the second. The higher your melee damage, the faster Spider Crab goes down.
3. Buy a can of Beer for $12. Do not hand it over yet — the moment you do, the fight starts.
4. Hand over the full can and he returns an empty one. Equip the empty can as rod bait and Spider Crab will bite.
5. After the kill, give him the crab shell to get the boat key. Then spend $10 on the Radar. Hold it in your hand or the route marker will not show.

First ten minutes

1. Learn movement, interaction, pickup, casting and reeling around the Lighthouse.
2. Catch several ordinary creatures. Keep quest bait, named trophies and whole bodies that an NPC mentions.
3. Buy food before a boss and a ranged weapon before expensive cosmetics.
4. Open Tab to check the encyclopedia and active gaps rather than grinding blind. Since 1.1.3 the Fishipedia also shows which bait catches a fish, once you have killed it at least once — that turns the encyclopedia into the fastest way to plan a fishing session.

What not to sell

Do not sell or grill an Empty Beer Can, Modified Leech, Carrot, Fish Bucket, boss skeleton, fin, head, Tuna body or Bowhead body until its related hand-in or trigger is complete. A boss death is not enough to unlock the next destination.

Two official rules back this up:

• 1.0.10 started saving items dropped on the ground between sessions, up to 64 items, prioritising weapons, tools, quest items and creatures — so leaving a trophy lying around is safer than it used to be, but it still is not a hand-in.
• 1.0.11 made selling require that an item must have been held once first. You cannot accidentally sell a trophy you have never picked up.
• 1.0.11 also made explosives lethal to you even with friendly fire disabled. Dynamite is a fine fishing tool; it is a bad opener when you are standing next to it.

First island unlock

Finish the Lighthouse Keeper’s Spider Crab chain. After the hand-in, take the boat key, then buy the $10 Radar as a separate handheld item. Equip it and sail toward the green marker to the northwest. See the island progression decision table if the route does not appear.

Co-op basics

The store description calls How to Fish a 1–4 player game. Official Patch 1.0.4 later added support for up to 8 player lobbies. Those describe different layers, not a contradiction. For a stable first run, start with a small private lobby — private lobbies themselves arrived in 1.0.5 — assign one trophy carrier, and let the host confirm every quest update before changing islands.

Best first purchases

Prioritize healing, one reliable gun, the Radar, and only then the engine or attachment that removes the current bottleneck. Slot-machine skins and luxury upgrades can wait until the story route is stable. Note that 1.0.11 removed iron sights as a purchasable because players kept buying them by mistake and losing expensive attachments, then 1.1.2 added the option to downgrade to ironsight again — so attachment rules have flip-flopped and an older guide may state either one.

Achievement targets for a first run

The official Steam list has 31 achievements. Three are realistic in the first hour and give you a reason to do things properly:

• Getting started — kill your first creature.
• Getting an upgrade — upgrade the engine on the boat.
• Bilingual — earn your first euro. (The euro is not the ordinary shop currency, so treat this as a later-game tidy-up rather than a first-hour task.)

The full list, with the ones that are easy to miss, is on the achievements page.

Sources: How to Fish on Steam and the official Dazed Games patch notes for the release announcement, 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.0.6, 1.0.9, 1.0.10, 1.0.11, 1.0.12, 1.1.0, 1.1.2 and 1.1.3, read 2026-09-30; current progression guides (IGN Wiki, GamesRadar) for shop prices, which the game shows in the shop itself.