Verified 2026-10-04 · game version 1.1.3 · how we source things
Editorial policy
This page explains where every number on this site comes from, what we do when we do not know something, and what we refuse to publish. If you only read one page here, read this one.
Who runs this
Fishbook is an unofficial fan reference for How to Fish. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or paid by Dazed Games. We take no sponsorship, and no game publisher has any input into what we publish or how we rank things.
Our sources, in order of trust
| Tier | What it is | How we use it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Steam's own API | Release date, price, developer, live player count, review totals, patch notes. | Re-fetched by a script rather than typed by hand, so the numbers cannot drift from the source. The verified stamp in the header of every page reflects that fetch. |
| 2. The game's own UI | The in-game encyclopaedia screen, captured in community screenshots. | This is where our 55 fish prices come from. The game displays each price itself — we read it off the screen, we do not estimate it. The same screen reports the 62 creature total, which is why we quote 62 rather than the 45, 49 or 54 other sites print. |
| 3. Community guides | Player-written guides on the Steam Community hub. | Bait pools, boss triggers, island routes, all 28 achievements. Every page that leans on these links the specific guide at the bottom. |
| 4. Player reports on the discussion board | Bug reports and fixes in the game's Steam discussions. | Our troubleshooting pages are built from these. We collected 1,050 threads and sorted them by problem before writing a word. |
The rule we do not break: no number without a source
Every figure on this site can be traced to one of the tiers above. Where a source gives a range or players disagree, we say so rather than picking a number that sounds confident. Three examples of that in practice:
- We publish 55 priced fish even though the game's own counter says 62 creatures, and we say so on the page. The gap is creatures whose list pages we could not read clearly. We would rather show a hole than fill it with a guess.
- Our creature total is 62 because that is what the game's completed-save counter reads — not because we picked the largest number floating around.
- Where the community's own answers conflict (one player says only singleplayer loads, another says only multiplayer does), we print both and say behaviour changed between patches.
What we do when we do not know
Troubleshooting is where a wrong answer does real damage — follow bad steps and you can lose a save. So every fix page carries one of three labels:
- Community fix available
- A player posted something that worked, and other players confirmed it in the same thread.
- Cause understood
- We can explain what is happening but there is no full recovery — only a workaround.
- No confirmed fix yet
- Players are reporting it and nobody has solved it. We publish the pattern and the symptoms, and we tell you plainly that we have no fix. We do not invent steps to fill the page.
What we refuse to publish
- Unsigned executables as "fixes". A community guide in circulation claims to fix error 51 and hands you an unsigned
.exethrough a file-sharing link. We do not link it and we warn readers off it. Running an unknown binary to fix a game error is a good way to lose more than your save file. - Numbers we cannot trace. If a figure exists only because another site printed it, we do not repeat it as though it were ours.
- Other people's prose. We aggregate player-found data and cite each source. We do not copy another site's writing and we do not present community work as our own.
- Made-up fixes for unsolved bugs. See the label above. "No confirmed fix yet" is a legitimate answer.
Why every page carries a version stamp
How to Fish shipped six patches in its first six weeks, and several of them changed mechanics and fixed launch bugs. A guide that does not say which build it describes is worse than no guide, because you cannot tell whether its advice is stale. So every page here carries a verification date and the game version it reflects, and the version number is read automatically from the game's own patch notes rather than typed in.
How the content is actually produced
Honesty matters more here than looking impressive, so: this site is produced with heavy automation and AI assistance, directed and reviewed by a human operator. Practically that means:
- Steam figures come from a script hitting Steam's API, not from anyone's memory.
- Community data is collected in bulk (all 1,050 discussion threads, the community guides, the in-game encyclopaedia screenshots) and then checked against each other before publication.
- Editorial pages like this one, and the prose around the tables, are drafted with AI help and then held to the sourcing rules above.
We think that is worth stating outright, because the alternative — dozens of sites quietly generated at scale — is a big part of why this game has guide sites quoting three different creature counts for the same save file. The value we add is not original authorship; it is that every claim here can be traced, and that we say when we do not know.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, the likeliest reason is that a source was wrong — and the fix is the same either way: tell us and we will change it and move the verification date. Nothing on this site is too small to correct, and a correction costs us nothing but improves every reader after you.
Keep reading
- About this site
- Known issues & fixes — where the labels above are in use
- All 55 fish with prices — read off the game's own screen
- Back to the hub