While Will and Samantha start helping their Dad around the farm in Harvest Island, you will get to a point where it will be important to know how to catch a fish. It will progress the story, allow you to make offerings to more God Statues, and help you make some tasty meals. You’ll need to craft your fishing pole, collect some bait, and find the fish.
Craft the Fishing Pole
In the kid’s bedroom, there’s a craft table at the bottom of the room against the wall. In the Craft menu on the table, there’s a recipe for a fishing pole. You can make it with these ingredients:
- 2 Long Sticks
- 3 String
- 100 Bless
These items are fairly easy to get. Long sticks can either be gathered in the woods, they are the sticks in the woods that are bare and have a few small branches coming off one big branch.
The string is just above the fishing pole in the craft menu and can be made with two cotton, which look like fuzzy rocks, found in the woods, and 10 Bless.
Bless is gifted to you as you take care of things on the farm and make offerings at the God Statues.
Collect Fishing Bait
You can use various types of bugs gathered in the wild as bait. Different fish prefer different types of bait. When you begin fishing you’ll see which fish have a higher chance of being caught with certain bugs on your hook. To gather most bugs you’ll need a bug net. This can be crafted at the craft table just like the fishing pole with ten strings, five stones (found in the caves), and 100 bless.
As soon as you have a bug net you can walk up to bugs and press the interaction button to catch them. If you don’t have a bug net you can still search under rocks with white glimmers around them for worms, but this won’t work as bait for all types of fish. If you’re looking to catch ocean fish, you’ll have to use your fishing pole to catch other fish along the shorelines of the ocean as bait for the bigger fish. The smaller fish can be baited with some insects as well as things like sand fleas and sea urchins which you can pick up off the beach.
Fishing Mechanic
The action of fishing takes place as a sort of minigame. You have to either hop onto rocks where you can get close enough, or find ones along shorelines of the ocean or the side of the river, depending on the fish you’re looking for. If you’re West of the farm at the river, the areas you can hop onto rocks are marked by white glimmer, just walk toward them to hop on.
When you find a fish shadow in the water, get as close as possible and hit your interaction button to use your fishing pole automatically. It will pull up a menu to select your bait, showing you the chances of catching the different fish depending on bait and time of day. Once it’s selected, a window will pop up with a quick timer along the top and arrows below. Use your D-pad on the controller or arrows on the keyboard to hit the same direction before the timer runs out. If you succeed, you’ll pull in a fish.
