Blue's Practical Stardew Fishing Tips

Credentials: Reached perfection twice (once on switch, once on PC), have almost 800 hours of gameplay (across multiple saves, not just those two lol)

§ Notes:

I always play with a controller, so I'm going to be calling the thing you hit to play the fishing minigame the "button", but this should work with a regular mouse as well.

I'm going to try to make this guide as specific and explicit (instruction-wise) as possible; I will assume the reader has attempted the minigame a few times and is familiar with it conceptually, but does not have much experience.

§ Other Vocab:

"Lane" : the column where the fish moves up and down during the minigame

"Bar" : the green bar you control to catch the fish

"Progress meter" : the green bar on the rightmost side of the minigame that increases as you catch the fish

"Escaping" : what happens when the fish is not over the green bar, and the progress meter decreases

§ THE TIPS

§ #1 Tip: Tap the button — do not hold it down.

Except in specific/particular circumstances, you should NOT be holding down the button (causing the fishing bar to shoot towards the top of the lane) because this makes it much more difficult to control. The bar quickly gains inertia as you hold down the button, meaning the speed increases the longer you hold it. Especially when starting out, you won't have a great sense of how quickly it will go.

By rapidly tapping the button instead of holding it, the bar will still move towards the top of the lane, but you will have more control over its speed. This means when the fish changes direction, you won't have to wait as long for the bar to lose its upward inertia and start dropping.

You might have learned this from catching the treasure chest. Since the treasure chests don't move, you have to tap and hold BRIEFLY in succession in order to keep the bar around the same place in the lane. This is the same concept.

Many fish, especially the harder ones, like to shoot from end to end of the lane. You will be tempted to freak out and slam your finger on the button to try to follow it (I still do this sometimes lol). There will be instances where you will have to hold the button down for longer in order to follow the fish that do this, BUT I cannot stress enough, try to tap and hold as much as possible even for these fish.

§ Second Tip: Aim to keep the fish near the top of the fish bar like so ↓

Why? During the minigame, fish will often 'sink' suddenly, ie quickly drop towards the bottom of the lane. If the fish is near the top of the bar when it does this, it will spend more time on the bar as it sinks, and therefore will spend less time 'escaping'.

This means your reaction time to a sinking fish does not have to be quite as fast (since it spends more time on the bar). It's also beneficial because as the fish drops, you don't need to do anything to allow the fishing bar to drop towards the bottom of the lane, following the fish as it moves down. (Just tap the button a bit as it approaches the bottom to ensure the bar isn't going so fast that it bounces off the bottom away from the fish).

It might be the case that keeping the fish near the bottom of the bar would work equally well. However, I personally find that more difficult. I also think it would make it more tempting to hold the button for too long in an attempt to follow the fish towards the top of the lane, which will cause the issues discussed above. It's also harder to get the bar to land on the bottom of the lane (compared to just holding it at the top) {tk explicitly relate this to y u would have to do that, bc of where keeping fish on bar?}. However, if keeping it near the top isnt working for you, this could certainly be an option. Middle of the bar isn't a bad option either, but I also find that more difficult than just doing the top of the bar.

§ LEVELING

"But my bar is so small! I can barely keep it on the fish at all, much less a specific location!"

I totally feel u. The first few levels are very difficult for that reason. But, as you level up, the bar gets bigger.

For the first level, you only need 100 XP (experience points) to reach level two, increasing you bar by 8 pixels. (Each level gained increases it by another 8 pixels).

For the early game , it's my understanding that the Mountain Lake (by Robin's house and the mines) is generally the best location fish-value-wise in all seasons except summer (when you should fish in the ocean).

So assuming you're fishing in the mountain lake in Spring Yr 1, you'll be catching largemouth bass (19 XP), bullheads (18 XP), carps (8 XP), and chubs (14 XP), so an average of ≈15 XP per fish (assuming they're regular quality).

With these numbers, you only need to catch about seven fish to reach fishing level one. (You will need about nineteen fish to reach level two, and about twenty-six fish to reach level three.)

LM bass, bullheads, carps, and chubs sell for 100 gold, 75G, 30G, and 50G respectively, or ≈64G per fish. So catching seven will net you *approximately* 448G, nineteen will get you 1,216G, and twenty-six will get you 1,664G.

(Note: I don't think you're equally likely to catch each kind of fish, but for the numbers here I'm assuming that's the case.)

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A note regarding levelling XP:

The wiki has a table which lists the "total experience" necessary to get to each fishing level:

Level Total XP

1 100

2 380

3 770

4 1,300

5 2,150

6 3,300

7 4,800

8 6,900

9 10,000

10 15,000

I am assuming this means you can subtract the previous level's total XP from the next one in order to find how much XP you need *per level*. E.g., you need 380 total XP to reach level two, so subtracting the 100 XP from reaching level one means that when you start fishing level two, you need to gain 280 XP in order to reach level three. I'm not totally sure if this is correct, but it seems pretty accurate to my gameplay experience.

XP Needed to Reach from Previous Level

1 100

2 280

3 390

4 530

5 850

6 1,150

7 1,500

8 2,100

9 3,100

10 5,000