I cannot, for the life of me, f**ing fish. I play on Mac and keep clicking my mouse button, but I just really don't get it?? When the exclamation point pops up I can do that fine, but after that I don't even know what to do and I've been avoiding all fish missions like a plague lmao.
Briefly, the instructions from the wiki on the basic technique: To cast, start by holding down the left mouse button. A meter appears, indicating how far the line will go. Release to cast. You can cast further with a higher skill level and better fishing rods. It is possible to slightly alter the line's placement mid-cast with the arrow keys or WASD, allowing you better control over aiming the cast. The distance your bobber lands away from any dry land determines what kinds of fish you'll hook. Sometimes a pool of bubbles appears in the water. Cast into these pools to get a quicker bite. You will know you cast correctly when the pool starts to sparkle. When a fish bites, the game displays "HIT!" and gives a metallic sound clue. Click the left mouse button to start the mini-game. The mini-game display consists of two larger rectangles: a blue water-depth indicator at the left and a progress bar at the right. There is a smaller, movable green rectangle inside the depth meter that indicates the area of effect for your fishing line. The goal of the fishing mini-game is to keep the small fish icon within the green rectangle until the progress bar to the right is completely filled. If the fish's icon moves above or below the green rectangle, the progress bar decreases; the fish escapes if it dwindles to nothing. The game declares a "perfect" catch when the fish never leaves the green rectangle. You can slowly raise the green rectangle by rapidly clicking the left mouse button. Slower clicking holds the green in place when it is not on the bottom. Stopping the clicking allows it to descend. Hold the left mouse button to raise it at increasing speed. Be careful moving it, though, for it gathers momentum quickly and takes time to reverse, making it easy to overshoot the fish and drain the progress bar. For more detailed instructions and some helpful tips, the full wiki article is here: https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Fishing Some personal advice: Fishing seems very hard when you're starting out, both because your skill (which determines the size of the fishing bar) is low and because you haven't gotten personally used to the reflexes involved. Stick with it and don't worry if you lose more than you catch. And catching anything at all-- even trash-- will actually help train your skill up. Good luck!
Surely gotta be some videos on YouTube if you search Remember that the fishing mini game is hardest at the start, literally. It's designed in a way that it gets easier as you progress through the levels, so just persevere. Simply catching trash in the farm ponds will increase your levels, albeit slowly. Catch enough trash to reach Fishing level 2 and you can craft or buy bait. Also scour the beach regularly for the shellfish forage, and get a crab from killing a rock crab in the mines, and then you can complete the crab pot bundle you get three crab pots, which you can then bait and use to continue to passively increase your fishing level. The more your fishing level increases, the easier it is to catch fish
Yea the first few levels are hard as crap but once you hit lvl 4 or start sucking down food with fishing bonuses the bar gets much wider and it becomes super easy. At lvl 10 with the +3 fishing buff you can leave the bar still for a lot of fish and get perfect casts.
I can't do it either, because I'm just plain awful at games like that. A new mod just came out called Fishing Automaton. It's not as cheaty as other mods - I don't think it alters chances or anything, just plays the game for you and you can watch Sometimes it misses fish, too, so considering my total ineptitude at the game and 100% inability to fish without mods, I'd say it's pretty fair and balanced.
What I suggest people starting on the game, and specially on fishing (considering its difficulty) if to switch to using the keyboard hot key for fishing. If you go to your controls section, you ll see tools right and left click, determine which key suits you best for the purpose of using tools and fishing, and it should help you keep up with the catches better than clicking with your mouse.
Has anyone tried fishing on different computers or with different controllers? I’m playing on a laptop that has a track pad. I’m wondering if using an actual mouse would make it any easier?
Assuming your trackpad has actual buttons to click, I don't think you'd see much of an improvement in your fishing skill from switching to a mouse. Probably makes the rest of the game a whole lot easier, though.
If it's really hard (and you don't want to just mod it), there are two relatively easy ways to level, although both are slow. 1. You can complete the crab pot bundle using foraged shellfish (including a crab from the mines). The crab pots you get from it give a total of 15xp a day, so if you level using crab pots only (plus the sunfish you get the first time you fish, which you can't lose), it will take 86 days after completing the bundle before you reach level 4 and can craft some more crab pots to speed the process. 2. Once you get a steel axe, you can access a secret area with a pond that mostly contains carp. Carp are easy to catch and give 8xp each (more if they're higher quality), so that can speed your leveling. Once you've leveled enough, you should be able to catch normal fish more easily. Yes it's slow, and you won't be able to follow the minmaxing strategy of spending most of the first spring fishing (which is very lucrative compared to the other things you can do early game), but it'll work eventually. Or you can just be like me and mod it out.
Trout soup on day 1 helps me. It makes your fishing bar just that much wider to make it easier to keep fish in it early. I honestly try to trout soup days 1and two for sure, sometimes day 3 and 4 as well. I fish all day on day 2 so using the trout soup to help catch more fish early I am at level 2 fishing by day 3. After a full day of fishing day 3 I am quite often fishing 4 and that is where it starts to get more manageable. That and buying the better rod quickly helps too I think. I have had very good luck switching my mouse from one to another, it must have been a sensitivity thing? I also have substituted for a key on the keyboard and that helped too. I reccomend not thinking of clicks. But pulses. Pulses are what makes the bar move more smoothly in my experience. Push and hold the key/mouse. Just long enough to get the result you need, then again. Pushing and holding instead of just trying to click more and more rapidly. Fishing at the mountain lake is the easiest I have found. Plenty of carp. Some you do not even have to click for. Bullhead are slow and steady rise and good exp. Chubs and largemouth are harder, but not terrible.
@Erick648 Your plan is flawed. Bait is not available until Fishing 2, and without it the crab pots from the bundle won't catch anything. Also, crab pots are available at Fishing 3, not 4. The only way to get there without actually catching fish is to catch trash or algae/seaweed, which are automatically caught when they "bite", and therefore can't escape. It's 3 XP per piece. If you want to grind it up as quickly as possible, although still slowly, then AFAIK it's all you get from the farm ponds. Fishing 1 will take 34 casts, which you can do in a day, and Fishing 2 will be a rather laborious 127, which will take about 3-4 days. OTOH, if you want carp, there's a totally non-secret area called the mountain lake, which also has carp and doesn't need a twice-upgraded axe to get there. IIRC the bite rate of carp in the lake is about 30% of casts. Even if you never catch any of the other fish, you'll also pick up some trash and algae for those 3XP boosts and I'd imagine Fishing 2 for bait could probably be got in half the time. In fact I'm going to try right now, I'll just catch carp and trash, and see where 1 day of fishing gets me. BRB EDIT: OK, I just did a quick day 2. Having run down to the beach to see Willy and grab the rod, then up to the lake, I was fishing by 8am. Without trying at all, just clicking to cast, I got Fishing 1 at 4.40pm, courtesy of eight trash and five fish, including two chub at 14 XP each, who seemingly couldn't be bothered to escape either. A couple of those fish were so docile they were perfect catches. Just under 9 hours of in-game time (and 11 minutes of real world time) for 103 XP and I didn't have to move the green bar at all. If we scale that up simply, Fishing 2 at 380 XP is about 32 SDV hours. Even if you don't run so good it might still be had inside two days. You'll get over 30 casts from a full bar of energy, and surely even the worst fishermen might catch one or two extra fish if they get several dozen attempts at it.
Don't forget you can use your x or c key (forget which one) to cast, hook, and fight the fish instead.
