Stardew Valley Fishing Guide

Fishing is one of the five main skills in Stardew Valley and an excellent way to make some money. However, the fishing minigame involves a bit of skill and the type of fish you can catch changes each season. Combine that with a few different fishing locations, bait, and tackle, and the fishing can become a bit overwhelming. Here’s everything you need to know about fishing.

How to fish

Using a fishing rod, you can cast it into a body of water by holding the action button to determine cast strength. Once the bobber is in the water, you need to hit the action button again when an exclamation point appears, which will hook your catch. If it was a fish biting your line, this will start the fishing minigame.

The fishing minigame puts a fish icon on a large bar, moving sporadically up and down the bar. You need to keep your green bar on the fish to reel it in, feathering the action button to keep it in the same place. The best technique is to hold the button to move the green bar and to let go to let its momentum hold it in place. When the fish isn’t in your green bar, the catch meter goes down and the fish escapes if it bottoms out. The rarer the fish, the more frantically it moves during the minigame.

While your first fishing rod can’t have any attachments, at fishing level 2 and 6, new rods are for sale in Willy’s Fish Shop, which can hold bait and tackle.

Bait makes fish bite faster, so you can catch more fish in a single day. Bait is made from bug meat or from a bait spawner, which will produce bait every day. There are a few specialty types of bait, like targeted bait, which helps you catch specific fish.

Tackles on the other hand impact the fishing minigame or the type of fish being caught in different ways. Below is a table of every tackle type, what it does, and how to obtain it.

Ocean fish

There are three primary places to catch fish: the ocean, river, and mountain lake. Depending on which location you cast your line at, different fish will be available to catch. The Ocean can be found to the south of town.

River fish

The river is the water running through town and through the Cindersap Forest. The “lake” in Cindersap Forest counts as river fishing. If you choose the fishing farm layout, the water on the farm counts as a river as well. There is also a lot of crossovers between river fish and lake fish, so some of these fish will appear on both lists.

Mountain Lake fish

The Mountain Lake refers exclusively to the lake outside the mine in the northeast section of Stardew Valley.

Special fishing locations

There are a few special fishing locations in Stardew Valley. Each of these is typically only home to one type of fish that can only be found there. This includes small ponds inside the mines, the pond in the desert, and other special locations

Crab Pot

There are also a handful of fish that can be caught by Crab Pots overnight. These fish can be caught year-round and are only split by being either in the ocean or in freshwater (rivers and mountain lake.) Crab Pots can be crafted at fishing level 3 using 40 wood and 3 iron bars. Bait must be placed into the Crab Pot for it to catch anything.