How to Fish Full Fish List: Every Island, Every Species, and Where to Find the Rare Drip Variants

Four days after launch, the surprise Steam fishing game everyone is talking about still has no official wiki, no in-game encyclopedia worth trusting, and a Discord full of people arguing about where the Flying Fish actually spawns. That’s How to Fish for you.

Dazed Games’ co-op fishing title landed on Steam on August 20 and immediately did the thing every indie developer dreams about: it peaked at more than 260,000 concurrent players, racked up thousands of reviews sitting at “Overwhelmingly Positive,” and turned into the kind of game where your group chat won’t stop sending clips of someone getting launched into the sea by their own dynamite. On paper it’s a fishing sim. In practice, you’re catching creatures, shooting them, cooking them on lava, gambling them on a roulette wheel, and hauling their corpses across five islands while trying not to lose a boss trophy to a seagull.

Buried under all that chaos is a genuine catch-’em-all system, and it’s a bigger one than the marketing lets on. Here’s everything currently confirmed about the fish list in How to Fish, species, islands, gear requirements, and what’s known so far about the elusive rare “Drip” variants.

The core loop, in case nobody explained it to you

Before the location breakdown, it helps to know why fishing alone won’t get you very far. The actual loop looks like this: catch something, kill it, raise its value, sell it, buy better gear, finish quests, beat a boss, unlock the next island. Rods and bait decide what comes out of the water. Guns, trick shots and cooking decide how much it’s worth once it does.

That matters for a fish list because species in How to Fish aren’t dropped into one giant shared loot table. Each one is tied to a specific island, a specific rod, and a specific bait tier, so if nothing’s biting, the problem is almost always your gear rather than bad luck.

Lighthouse: where you wash up

You start here, and the pickings are deliberately thin, this is the tutorial stretch, not the main event. Everything is caught with the free Crab Fishing Rod.

The Lighthouse is also the only location in the game that’s actually region-locked in the traditional sense. Everywhere else, species follow their lure tier rather than the map; once you own the right bait, you can chase the same fish on more than one island.

Your job here is simple: grab the $10 radar the moment you can afford it, and go deal with the Spider Crab, which is summoned with an Empty Beer Can. Beat it, hand in whatever it drops, and you’ll get the boat keys that actually let you leave.

Island 2 (Forest): the fishing rod finally shows up

This is where the game opens up. You trade the crab rod for a proper Fishing Rod and start working through Beginner Lure tiers.

Forest island has caught out more players than any other early area, and not because of the fish. The quest here asks for three leeches, and half the community spent their first hour on this island convinced the search bar was broken because they kept fishing for them. Leeches are a ground pickup. Lower your camera, walk the paths and the vegetation near the quest giver, and you’ll spot them sitting on the dirt. Some of the earliest guides claimed you needed five, that’s outdated; the objective is 3/3. Hand them in and they get turned into Modified Leech bait, which is what actually summons the Giant Piranha boss. The Old Pike is the island’s second boss and needs a Beginner Boss Lure instead.

Island 3 (Desert): the biggest single fish list in the game

Desert has more species than any other island, all caught on the Standard Lure.

This is also where the game hands you its best economic upgrade, and it isn’t a fish at all. Help the Grillmaster take down the Blue Shark boss (Standard Boss Lure) and you unlock the grill, which cooks anything sellable, fish, weapons, whatever, up to 1.5x its base value. Hold F on an item while it’s over the heat and pull it off the second it peaks. Wait too long and it turns to charcoal, value and all. Cooked fish also heal better than raw ones, so stockpiling a few before a boss fight beats scrambling for food mid-battle.

Desert’s second boss, the Puffer Fish, needs a Carrot rather than a fishing lure. You get that Carrot from a Tourist NPC quest, and the fish you need to feed him first is a Needlefish, so don’t sell every one you catch.

Island 4 (Rocks): where the rod actually starts to matter

Rocks introduces the Professional Lure and the widest spread of fish shapes yet, including one that’s clearly not meant to look like a normal animal.

Two bosses live here. Tuna needs a Professional Boss Lure, and once you’ve caught one, it doubles as the bait for the Albatross fight above it. After the bird goes down, hand in its trophy, not a random meat chunk, and you’ll get coordinates for the volcano.

This is also roughly where the Dual Motors boat upgrade shows up for $860, the fastest engine in the game. It’s tempting early, but most players are better off saving that cash for weapon attachments and circling back for the boat once money stops being the bottleneck.

Island 5 (Volcano): the endgame water

The last stop uses the Scientific Lure and has the shortest species list, but the highest danger.

Volcano’s boss line is the closing stretch of the story: Goblin Shark (Scientific Boss Lure), Bowhead Whale (Fish Bucket), then the Mutated Bowhead Whale, which is summoned with the regular Whale you just caught. This last fight is the one where a stocked food supply actually decides whether the run goes smoothly. One useful shortcut here: you can cook fish directly on the lava for the full 1.5x multiplier without babysitting a grill timer.

The full boss list, for reference

Bosses are rarely a straight damage race. The Spider Crab teaches the pattern early: dodge the charge, punish the stun window, and later fights build on it. Watch the white bar under a boss’s health bar too: let it run out, and the creature escapes, forcing you to summon it all over again.

Rare Drip variants: what’s actually confirmed

This is where a lot of guides start guessing, and it’s worth being straight about what’s real. The game’s own description says every regular creature has a rare “Drip” variant hiding behind it, and there’s a separate achievement, Fishipedia, that tracks catching all of them independent of the normal collection log. Beating the standard fish list does not automatically clear Drip progress, they’re tracked apart.

What isn’t confirmed yet, four days into launch, is exact spawn rates. Nobody outside Dazed Games has published real percentages, and the community numbers floating around are largely guesswork dressed up as fact. What experienced players agree on is more useful anyway: Drip creatures spawn from the same pool as their normal counterpart, just far less often, so the practical approach is to fish your usual spot with your usual bait and keep at it rather than hunting for some secret trigger. Kill any Drip you stumble into naturally while playing through the story, but save dedicated farming for after you’ve finished the campaign and have your full loadout, chasing shinies while you’re still underpowered for the next boss just slows everything down.

A few things that trip people up

Cooked and killed creatures are the currency here, so a couple of habits are worth building early. Don’t sell anything that looks like a distinct boss part, a shell, a fin, a skull, before checking whether an NPC is waiting on it, since new islands often need that specific trophy handed in rather than just the boss being dead. And once you land something worth keeping, grab it fast: seagulls will steal an unattended catch off the sand, which is annoying right up until you realise there’s an achievement for blowing one up with dynamite instead.

Co-op support was expanded to eight players in patch 1.0.4, and the game is considerably less painful with people split into roles, someone controlling the target, someone finishing it off, someone ferrying catches to the grill, rather than everybody unloading ammo into the same fish at once.

How to Fish clearly isn’t finished revealing itself. Patch notes are already landing days after launch, and the fish list above reflects what’s confirmed as of this week; expect it to grow as Dazed Games keeps updating a game that, by its own admission, was never really about fishing at all.