More Fish

1,166 fish variants for How to Fish — 22 morphs applied across all 53 species, ten of them brand new, with abilities, armed fish that shoot back, a variant journal and trophy mounting.

No new art assets, no asset bundles, no Unity install. Everything is generated at runtime from what the game already ships.

Requires BepInEx 5.

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What it adds

Variants

Every fish can turn up as one of 22 morphs — Albino, Melanistic, Ember, Tidal, Coral, Tiger, Spotted, Marbled, Camo, Harlequin, Hazard, Polka, Golden, Chrome, Verdant, Ruby, Glacial, Molten, Spectral, Prismatic, Armed and Outlaw.

They use the game's own skin system, so a Marbled fish gets real wood-grain banding and a Tiger fish real stripes, rather than a colour wash. Prismatic is the rarest at 1 in 556 catches.

Abilities, and value that follows them

Each morph changes what a fish does, and its sale price is derived from that rather than set by hand — a fish is worth what it can actually do.

Axis	Effect
Heal	Health restored when eaten
Food	Hunger restored
HP	How much killing it takes
Hazard	Poisons or burns whoever eats it

Values run from 1.7× (Tender Albino) to 8.9× (Fabled Prismatic). Toxic and Scalding fish pay well precisely because eating them is a bad idea.

Fish that shoot back

Armed and Outlaw variants carry a real weapon — a pistol or an SMG, sized to the fish and mounted on its head. They hunt you in short lunges, hold a stand-off distance, check line of sight, and fire: single shots from the pistol, four-round bursts from the SMG, with spread and misses you can see go wide.

Turn them off with General / HostileVariants.

Ten new species

Modelled procedurally in code and generated at load:

Dolphin · Orca · Narwhal · Hammerhead · Swordfish · Manta Ray · Sea Turtle · Giant Squid · Moon Jelly · Sea Serpent

Each is built on a donor creature chosen for how it moves — the turtle walks like a crab, the serpent and squid swim like eels — and every one has googly eyes. They inherit all 22 morphs, so there is a Golden Narwhal and an Outlaw Sea Serpent out there somewhere.

Size that means something

The game already rolls a weight for every fish, between 0.25× and 1.75×, and does nothing with it but change the number on the label. Fish now render at a size matching their weight — vanilla fish included — so a record catch is visibly bigger.

Variant journal

Press Tab, then click any species to page through its morphs and see which you have caught. Right-click to go back. Base-game achievement progress still counts only the base game's creatures, so "catch them all" stays achievable.

Trophies

Hold a dead fish, aim at a wall and press T to mount it on a wooden board with a nail. Aim at a mounted fish with empty hands and press T to take it down — it comes back with its original weight and morph.

Trophies keep their size, colour and species, and save per world.

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Install

With a mod manager — install through Thunderstore Mod Manager or r2modman. BepInEx comes as a dependency.

Manually — install BepInExPack, then drop MoreFish.dll into How to Fish/BepInEx/plugins/MoreFish/.

Run once to generate the config at BepInEx/config/com.scarletttech.howtofish.morefish.cfg.

Configuration

Setting	Default	Meaning
General / VariantChance	0.22	Odds any fish is a variant
General / RarityMultiplier	1.0	Scales that. 0 disables variants entirely
General / HostileVariants	true	Armed fish carry weapons and shoot
General / CustomSpeciesRarity	0.12	How often the ten new species appear
Individuals / SizeVariation	true	Render size tracks individual weight
Morphs / <key>	true	One toggle per morph
Journal / VariantBrowser	true	Click a species to browse its variants
Trophies / *		Mount key, reach, scale, plaque, labels, walls-only
Debug / Enabled	false	In-game panel (F8) to spawn any variant or force catches

Multiplayer

The mod is client-optional. Variants are carried on an existing synced byte rather than as new item types, so every fish spawned is a vanilla prefab. An unmodded player can join a modded host and simply see ordinary fish — no errors, no desync. Two players on different versions disagree only about what a morph looks like.

The ten added species do use their own item ids, so an unmodded client will not see those. Morphs are rolled on the host, so the host's settings set the rates.

Save compatibility

Nothing is added to the save format. A variant is an ordinary fish with a byte set in a field the base game already writes and ignores for creatures, so uninstalling turns every variant back into a plain fish of its species — nothing orphaned, nothing lost. Vanilla saves load normally with the mod installed.

Two sidecar files hold what the vanilla format has no room for: caught variants in Saves/morefish-caught.json and mounted trophies in Saves/<world>.morefish-trophies.json. Deleting either loses only that record.

Building

Needs the .NET SDK. Reference assemblies in lib/ come from the game's How to Fish_Data/Managed folder plus BepInEx core.

dotnet build -c Release   # or ./package.sh for a Thunderstore zip

Credits

How to Fish is by Dazed Games. This mod ships no game assets — it recolours, resizes and re-poses what is already installed, and generates its new models as geometry at runtime.

MIT licensed.