How to Fish 1.0.9 adds Easy and Hard difficulty modes

24 August 2026 · 2 min read

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

Patch 1.0.9, released on 24 August, is the fourth update in the game’s first five days — and the first one that changes not the balance of individual creatures but how the whole game feels.

Easy and Hard

Before 1.0.9 there was a single difficulty for everyone. There are now three, and the patch notes spell the difference out in numbers:

• Easy — creatures have 25% less health and deal 50% less damage;
• Normal — unchanged;
• Hard — +25% health and +25% damage.

The asymmetry is deliberate: the easy mode cuts damage harder than health, which means Easy was built for players who struggle to survive rather than for players who find the killing slow. It matters more in co-op than solo: in an eight-player lobby creature damage is multiplied across targets, not divided among them.

Saves stopped breaking

The second item is a fix for save corruption. It continues the line started in 1.0.6 on 23 August, when the game began verifying the save file before loading it and writing it on Save, on Main Menu, on Quit and automatically once a minute.

The files live at C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\Saves — if you kept a backup from an earlier lost run, you can drop it back in by hand.

Connection debug

The main menu gained a readout for the Steam relay connection state. Red text means a problem in the networking layer, and the developers explicitly ask you to report those in the #common-bugs channel of their Discord rather than in a Steam review.

What it means in practice

If you gave up on the albatross or the final whale, this is the patch that makes another attempt worthwhile on Easy. The boss order and every trigger are unchanged — they are laid out in the all bosses guide.