This guide will cover major aspects of the game in a little bit more depth. Ranging from basic navigation, map orientation to min-maxing your fishing.

After you are done reading you should be able to catch fish like these with some ease (9300 mola-mola below).

Whilst perhaps not important to some, proper video settings can make the game far easier to play, both for you and your hardware.



1. Set the game to English language - historically, the game had issues with translated items not working, totems, bought items such as beer cans or the big grill would not spawn if you were on a different language than English. While this is currently fixed, better be sure your game is running optimally and minimize potential bugs.

2. Cap your FPS settings - In video settings, limit your FPS to whatever your setup can handle, the higher the framerate, the more demands on your GPU and CPU, if left uncapped, the game WILL drain your entire available gpu and cpu power capping them at 100% nonstop.

Additionally, whilst in the video settings, if available use NVIDIA DLSS upscaling method, as its usually superior to other upscaling methods.

3. Start the game in DX11 - A note recommending this if you have any issues is visible in the main menu, in order to limit potential issues in the game I personally suggest turning it on.

You can turn DX11 by inputting this exact command in start-up properties of the game in your library.

"-DX 11"

When ready, you can create a server, which you can play on with up to 3 other people or solo.

Maps
When first creating a server, you will be asked which map to play on. Initially only the first map is available. As you survive certain amount of days, you will unlock the other two maps, I believe it was 5 days for Swamp and 7 days for the Jungle.



Generally speaking, Swamp and Jungle have the potential for the biggest leaderboard catches because of Arapaima and Mola-Mola spawns. The first map will in most cases not net you one of the higher spots on the leaderboard of catches even if you manage to fish up the biggest fish available there, consider the first map as more of an introduction to the game.

Cosmetics
After you are done choosing your map, you can choose cosmetic options for your character, these currently have no impact on the game.



Perks
Furthermore, you can also choose perks to equip on your character when creating a server and each time you start it again from a save (not sure if this is intended).



At first, you will not have any perks available, perks are unlocked when you survive for 7 days roughly in any game I believe. You cannot unlock duplicate perks, there are currently also about 7-8 perks ingame.

Perks are an important category and can have decent impact on your game, if you are aiming for the leaderboard catches, 5% bonus fish size (Fish Whisperer) is a must perk.

Generally the 5% bonus fish size should be in your every loadout, other than that it can come down to personal prefference, but personally I believe the faster sprint or bait duplication are other top tier perks - faster sprint can save you considerable amounts of time during day, especially since you have to move around a lot, bait duplication CAN duplicate even corpses when you pick them up, which compared to other available options for perks is just better.

Difficulty setting


Finally, after you are done choosing everything else, the difficulty setting is next.

The first two settings - Peaceful and First time fisher are NOT eligible for leaderboard catches, only choose those if its your very first time playing the game, or if you want a no-stress fish catching gameplay.

The other two options are Average Angler and Fish Catching Machine.

Average angler is the default setting of the game. The day starts at 6 in the morning and ends at 8 pm. Bait spawns are frequent enough that you wont run out and daily quotas are also fairly doable.

Fish Catching Machine reduces the day hours from 6 am to 6 pm, that is 2 hours less in a day for all your fish catching deeds and anything else you would normally be doing as compared to Average Angler. Bait is also less frequent, spots that would usually have 3-4 bait can have 1-2 at times. Some specific map bait spots seem unaffected by this though (capybaras in jungle, or the purple spider cabin in jungle).

Additionally, the monster spawns are more frequent, you will meet more crocodiles, boas in jungle and also the small rolling goblin fish that demands a sacrifice every now and then.

Most important factor of Fish Catching Machine is that EVERY fish you catch will be 20% bigger in size on leaderboard, therefore should you for example catch a 10.000 lb fish, it will appear as 12.000lb on the leaderboard.

Therefore if you wish to immortalized in the hall of fame as one of the greatest anglers to ever walk the soils of the jungle and swamp in Gone Fishing, you should play on Fish Catching Machine.

When you load into the map, you will start in your cabin.

This place serves as your homebase to which you will retreat every night to seek sanctuary from the denizens of the local wildlife and cave systems.



Interacting with the bed will make you sleep, provided every other player does the same on the server. This is usually done in the late evening, after you have hopefully fulfilled your daily quota.

Other things to note in your cabin are the depth meters, fishing rods, the cooking pan and with the new updates bait crates and beer cans.

Fishing rod - a staple tool in the inventory of every angler, used to catch fish. In most cases, you should always have one of these with you, unless you are making sole fish carrying trips to the sacrificial altar for instance.

Depth Meter - a self explanatory tool, as long as it is in your inventory, it will show you the depth of your sinker when you use the fishing rod in any pool of water.

Bait crate - Some maps now spawn with these in the cabin, they can also be bought from the trader at 15 gold a piece. When used and broken on the ground, they spawn a random bait from the entire pool of bait options - can spawn the corpse as well as bait not native to the current map.

Beer can - Drinking one beer can provides you with a temporary buff, roughly 1 minute long, that increases fish size of next catch. You can stack several beer cans, the most I tried is 4 so far. This is potentially lethal if you go over certain limit of the buff. Additionally, it will make the fishing minigame harder on your next catch (as the fish is larger), so keep that in mind.

Cooking pan - You can hold E to turn it on and off. When turned on, any fish placed on top will start cooking, usually small fish take about 10 seconds to cook. When a fish is cooked, its outline changes from green to brown / orange-ish to denote that it has been cooked already. Cooking any fish gives it exactly 33% more value currently.

The cooking mechanic has many nuances in the game - the last fish you place on the pan will start cooking first, meaning that if you would place a big fish that takes 50 seconds to cook and 40 seconds later you place a small fish that takes 10 seconds to cook, you overwrite and reset the 50 second timer on the first fish, thus losing precious time - which is one of your main resources in the game.

Ideally, drop of all your fish into the pan and go fish or explore the map. As you progress in the game, you can unlock the big grill, which upon purchase from the trader will spawn outside of your cabin right away. This grill fits more fish, automatically hooks them onto itself when a fish is dropped near it and is generally easier to use.

However placing very small fish in the big grill results in a bug where you cannot remove them afterwards currently. Already fixed

Now that you understand the basic items, take your fishing rod and venture outside to the nearest pool of water.

Fishing mechanic
Fishing generally requires bait, you can fish without bait, but that will give you the smallest of fish.

Generally the bigger the bait value of your applied bait, the bigger the fish that you can potentially catch.

The basic bait you can find around the map are worms, like any other bait you pick them up with E, then open your inventory and click onto the bait to apply it to your fishing rod.

The bait value of every bait is visible at the bottom right corner in the bait tab menu. The best current bait is corpse at 70 value, followed by small apes from the jungle and capybaras. The worst bait you can use is none or the worms.



When you have applied the bait and cast the sinker into the water, the fish will eventually bite and start the mini-game. Your first goal is to hit the red moving line as close to the green middle as possible, this gives you more stability during the initial phase of struggle with the fish. If you miss completely, the fish automatically gets away and resets the minigame, this means you have to wait for another bite.



If you successfully hook the fish, the struggle phase begins, holding down the mouse button brings the right further up, risking the snapping of your line if you get to the red zone at the top for longer than a second. If you do not hold down the mouse button, the green line begins to lower, if it goes down all the way, the fish will escape the hook. Take note that the depth is visible at the top in the middle of your screen if you have depth meter equipped.



The distance to your sinker is the key factor to when you will catch the fish. Ideally you want to cast the sinker as close to you as possible, whilst having it as deep as possible simultaneously, therefore using a boat on the open sea for example yields the best results.

The closer you are to the sinker when you get a bite, the faster you will catch the fish as you reel it in just a small distance - this technique allows you to catch huge fish really fast, as it takes at most half a minute to catch even the biggest ones. The struggle phase ends when the sinker reaches your character, resulting in you catching the fish.

Currently there is a bug that makes you fish get away if you fish from a big distance up on a hill - you have to drag the sinker all the way up on the hill, which results in extremely long struggle phases and the fish eventually getting away after roughly 5 minutes and you cannot do anything about it.

Keep in mind that the better the bait and depth you fish in, the harder the struggle phases will be, fishing with a corpse at 2.500+ depths in sea sometimes currently results in the fish getting away by snapping your line even if you do nothing at all with max upgrades, this might be a bug however.

Quota
Once you have acquired some fish and ideally cooked it as well for more points, you should fulfill the daily quota by sacrificing (dropping) the fish into the altar which is always next to your house on every map.



Initially, the bar totem will be empty, as you progress and put more fish in, it will gradually fill up, once you hit the required amount of sacrificed points, the fire will turn blue and make a sound. This means you are safe for the night.



The quota is based on your initial difficulty and scales roughly by 10% up every day. Each additional person on the server doubles the amount. For instance, a solo average angler player would have a quota of 50 on day one, but it would be 100 if you had a friend on the same difficulty with you.

Currently it is also possible to make a solo game, survive for a day, then have people join you on that save and the quota will not scale with that amount of people. This is most likely a bug, not sure if this is fixed when another day passes and it saves more people on the same save slot.

Usually at 9.30 a trader will spawn and fly in at specified spots on every map, these spots and times never change.

You can acquire gold by dropping the fish into the traders basket, be wary however, the basket range is huge and it WILL eat up any fish in its vicinity, so do not drop fish that you wish to keep near the trader at all.



The items you can buy are first off upgrades for your fishing rod - line, rod and sinker. The upgrades are self explanatory with the notes below them, basically each upgrades makes your fishing easier and allows you to catch bigger fish with more stability. If you wish to move to the best fishing spots asap, focus on upgrading line and rod and leave sinker as last, as it only increases the size.

The trader also sells various totems, you can ONLY buy 4 totems however, he has 3 available every day on rotation. You cannot change the totems once you buy them for the rest of the run, so do not buy something that might not be good in the long term. You also cannot buy duplicate totems, however this also seems to be bugged as when you load a save, the same totems you bought previously can show up in the trader window.

The ideal totems you should have are fish worth increase, fish size increase, bite frequency and daylight time increase on harder difficulties - especially the last one as 6 am to 6 pm is quite often not enough to do proper fishing.

You cannot see which totems you have currently bought, but you can see how many you have as they spawn as big stone pillars near your sacrifical altar, if there are 4 pillars near your altar, you are maxed out on totems.

Other things to note in the trader window is the must have previously mentioned big grill for 100 gold as well as beer cans and bait crates. You can buy various tools and lamps and more fishing rods from the trader, but most of those are not really useful and you can find them around the map for free as well.

The only additional item worth mentioning is the worm horn, for 150 gold, a permament use item that allows you to teleport any dropped fish in your vicinity in front of your cabin.

This means you will never have to carry fish again, you can just teleport them back to your house with this item in your inventory. The animation for the worm horn is very loud, it takes roughly 5 seconds for each fish to be teleported as well.

Once the quota is fulfilled and evening nears, you should close the door to your cabin and go to sleep. Evenings however are a good time to cook all your fish if you did not do so during the day. Put everything on your cooking pan or a grill, close the door and wait for it to cook. Since time resets to 6 in the morning once you sleep, you can spend the additional hour or two waiting on your fish to cook after you close the cabin door at 8 or 6 pm.

Monsters will spawn outside at "night" time at 8 or 6 pm, based on difficulty and whether or not you have bought the daylight increase totem, which increases the daylight time by 2 hours.

If a monster catches you, you will die immediatelly after a short animation, dropping a corpse for other players or you yourself to collect next day if you are in multiplayer.

If you did not fulfill the quota when "night" time starts, the monsters will break your cabin door and subject you to an uncanny fate as well.

If at any time you die during a multiplayer game, as long as someone is alive, the game will continue, if everybody dies, the run ends.
This however is currently easily avoided by reloading the latest save, you can at any time pause the game and load your latest morning save to do better.

Randomly during the days several things can occur.

Thunderstorm - rainy weather with lower visibility and a lot of noise, thunder can strike you and send you flying, very often into a pool of water where you will drown. Before the thunder hits you, it spawns a small visible visual cue in a form of white circle below you which you can dodge. The thunder very rarely strikes you at all, roughly 1 in 10 thunderstorms anyone gets hit.

Stalker - Weird fleshy human stares at you, if you look at him the game makes a loud noise and he crawls away and disappears.

Player clone - Rarely a player looking character spawns, waves, makes humming noises and then dies and spawns several spiders along with a corpse where he died. This is one of the ways to acquire a corpse bait.

Rolling fish goblin - More often on higher difficulties, a rolling fish like creature will run up to you demanding fish. You can drop it any fish and it will eat it and roll away. If you do not feed it I presume something uncanny will happen, I´ve always fed it so far.

Spiders in cabin - Sometimes spiders will flood your cabin, however they merely blind you if you walk in and then dissappear and leave a few spider baits around.

Fishing events

Piranhas or bugs - if you see piranhas or bugs swarming in the water, they will crawl up on you and blind you, generally harmless, might make you lose the struggle phase with the fish though.

Crab and shrimp - if you see something big coming out of the water, usually it also makes a ingame sound as a warning, drop your fishing rod and run away. The crab and the shrimp will drag you underwater where you will drown and lose all your items and bait on you.

Enemies

Alligator - the most notorious and spawning in the first map as well, if you go near it it will try to chase you and drag you into the nearest water pool to drown you. If you get caught in multiplayer, you can quickly drop off your fish and bait as he carries you so you can pick it up after you respawn. The alligator guards the small alligators which can be used as bait.

Boa - a big snake in the jungle, makes loud hissing noise to denote its presence nearby. Similiar to the alligator, will chase players that get too close, if you get caught, you will be subject to short animation and eventually die.

Points of interest

TNT spots - Currently only jungle features a spot that requires usage of TNT to open up, notably the upper jungle path near the starting house. TNT is either found around the maps, or bought from the trader. Tnt can also be used to blow up enemies like the alligator or the Boa snake.

Teleportation gates - currently each map features at least one teleportation gate, a big dark circle looking object, similiar to a star gate, which can be used to traverse quickly back to your house. If you drop any fish near it, it will consume the fish to open up a portal for roughly half a minute for anyone to pass through.

Keep in mind the teleportation, at least in the jungle map, does not always lead directly to the house. You can be teleported to the upper right house on the mountain or any of the tree houses in the middle of the map. This is especially important if you are teleporting in the last hour or two before daylight ends, as you might be teleported into a place which requires backtracking for several hours, which would lead to a game over if you do not make it to your cabin at night.

With most of the things explained, you might be wondering what is the most efficient strat to get the biggest fish currently.

Ideally you would play in a multiplayer game, which allows you to meet the quotas easier, thus allowing you to focus on min-maxing your fishing game.

With all max upgrades, you should stack at least 4 cans of beer, use the best bait you have available, usually at least 45+- and more, this means small aligators, capybaras, apes, turtles, peacocks and most importantly corpses and then cast your sink into the biggest water depth you can find on any given map.

The jungle supposedly has spots of up to 4.000 depth, but you can catch the biggest fish even in 2.500 roughly which is found in the sea around the lighthouse and capybara island. The best strategy is to get on the big fishing ship and park it near the edge of the map, where every spot is 2600. Cast the sink as close as possible to yourself, minimizing the struggle phase. This allows you to farm the biggest fish as fast possible. The smallest of fish you will catch here are worth around 30, and the bigger ones can be worth up to 260 at base uncooked value.

I´ve written this so people can get some insight on the more intricate mechanics of the game, which are not explained and require experience figuring out, reading this should allow anyone to start their game properly without struggling too much. I will update this with more information as it gets available or when I figure something important out.

May your cabin and sacrifical altar be blessed with many fish, cheers.