How to Fish Beginner Guide: Your First Hour on the Isle

31 August 2026 · 4 min read

GameMapa editorial · how we check facts
Checked: Claude (AI) — fact-checked against the Ukrainian original; not proofread by a native speaker

The first hour in How to Fish decides whether the rest of it is fun. The game explains almost nothing: it drops you on an island with a lighthouse, hands you a rod and leaves you to it. Here is the route that removes every pointless stall from that hour.

Where you have landed

How to Fish launched on 20 August 2026, costs 7.99 USD and weighs a single gigabyte — all of it visible on the Steam store page. Inside are five islands that unlock in sequence, five bosses (the last in two forms) and a simple but harsh economy: reaching the next island needs a better boat, and a better boat needs money.

The detail newcomers grasp too late is that you do not only catch the fish here. You also shoot them. The shotgun, the SMG and the dynamite are as much a part of fishing as the bait is.

What to do in the first ten minutes

1. Buy the handheld radar for 10 dollars. The vendor stands by the lighthouse. The radar shows fish under the surface; without it every cast is guesswork.
2. Collect the mussels on the rocks by the shore. This is the fastest starting money in the game: no investment, only time.
3. Pick up the basic baits. Ham on the crab rod pulls brown crabs and shrimp, a hot dog brings rock crabs and lobster, and a french fry on the ordinary rod lands mackerel, gar and pike.
4. Sell everything that is not a quest item. Your early inventory is not a collection, it is working capital.

The grill pays off faster than any upgrade

There is a grill on the islands, and cooked fish is worth one and a half times as much as raw fish. Hold F while frying to watch how done it is so you do not burn the catch. It is the cheapest way to raise the income from the same haul, and it works from the very first minute.

Cooking has a second payoff: food. The crab sticks that drop from crabs fully restore both hunger and health even raw, so you do not need a separate healing item.

How to unlock the first boss

Bosses do not simply spawn here — you summon them with bait, and every bait has to be earned. On the lighthouse island an old man sits on a bench. Give him a beer and he hands back the empty can. That can is the bait for the first boss, the spider crab. The full chain of all five bosses is laid out separately in the guide to every How to Fish boss in order.

Set the game up for yourself

• Difficulty. Patch 1.0.9 added modes: on Easy creatures have 25% less health and deal 50% less damage, on Hard they gain 25% health and 25% damage. Easy is a reasonable pick for a first run.
• Saving. Since patch 1.0.6 the game writes a save on Save, on returning to the menu and on quitting, plus an autosave every minute. Before that, a crash cost you the session.
• Dropped items stick around. After patch 1.0.10 dropped items carry over between sessions — up to 64 of them, prioritising weapons, tools, quest items and creatures.
• Cleaning your gear. The same patch slipped in something easy to miss: weapons and tools can be cleaned simply by dipping them in water.

What not to do

Do not spend your first few thousand on a fully kitted weapon — the full attachment set for the UZI runs about 2,500 dollars and is useless on the first island. Do not chase rare fish before you own the radar. And do not play in an open lobby unless you want to meet a griefer: invite-only private lobbies were added in patch 1.0.5 for exactly that reason.