How to FishHowToFishExtended

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3.2.2

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How To Fish - Extended

Bigger upgrades. Bigger fish. Bigger rewards. And a New Game+ loop for when you think you're done.

Takes the core progression of How to Fish and pushes it well past the vanilla limits. Upgrade your weapons beyond their original cap. Haul in fish so enormous they earn names of their own — and, as of 3.0, are actually drawn that big. Build your lobby's luck over time and turn every cast into a chance at something ridiculous. Then finish the game, ascend, and do it all again against a world that hits back twice as hard.

Everything is configurable, every feature can be switched off on its own, and as of 3.0 you can do all of that from a button on the main menu instead of hunting for a text file in AppData.

New in 3.0

⚙️ A settings panel on the main menu. There's a How To Fish - Extended button under Quit. It opens 41 of the mod's settings across five tabs — Features, Fish size, Luck, Ascension, and Storage and upgrades — each with a line of plain English explaining what it does.

It lives on the main menu on purpose. Every setting is read at the moment the thing it configures is created: the upgrade ladders when a weapon spawns, luck when you walk up to a stand, fish size when a fish appears. None of that has happened while you're looking at the boat, so anything you change is picked up in full by the next game you load. No restart prompts, and no "requires a restart" warnings against half the list.

The config file still works exactly as before, for the handful of settings not on the panel and for anyone who'd rather edit text.

🐟 Fish are drawn bigger. The old size curve was physically honest and it read as too small — a Mythic at 2.5x length is barely a different fish across the width of a boat. A 15x Mythic now draws at 3.9x, and everything below it scales up to match.

🛡️ Your tuning survives an update. Previously, when a shipped default changed, that setting was reset for everyone — including people who'd deliberately picked something else. Now the update checks first: if your file still holds the old default it takes the new one, and if you'd changed it, your value stays. The log tells you which settings it kept and why.

New in 3.0.1

🐟 Stored fish keep their variant. A Mythic put into storage used to come back out ordinary — the weight that decides the variant was overwritten when the fish re-spawned. It's now restored exactly, so a fish keeps the name, size and value it had when it went in.

🐟 Big fish stay big in your hands. A large fish used to shrink back to default the moment you picked it up. Its size is now re-applied after every pickup and drop, so a Mythic stays Mythic-sized on the ground, in your hand, and on the deck.

❤️ Health bars. Every fish now shows a small bar above it that drains green to red as it's fought. Toggle it with EnableFishHealthBars.

🍀 A proper Lucky Charm stand. The stand is now a pedestal with a faceted green gem instead of the boxy placeholder, with the buy prompt at the gem.

New in 3.1.0

🧬 Fish mutations. A second trait alongside size, describing what a fish is rather than how big it is. Ten of them — Ironscale, Gorged, Venomous, Smoldering, Gilded, Fortuned, Ancient, Radiant, Feral and Warbound — each with its own colour, its own swing on healing, fullness, worth and creature health, and a few with sharper edges: Venomous poisons you on eating it, Smoldering burns, Feral and Warbound bite back the instant they're caught, and Fortuned hands you a permanent luck level just for landing one. Feral needs ascension tier 1 and Warbound tier 10 — the rest are available from the start. A mutation and a size variant roll independently, so a fish can be both, either, or neither. There's a new Fish mutations tab on the settings panel with a master switch and the base chance; EnableMutations off returns every catch to plain names and values for this axis, same as switching off size variants.

🛠️ Debug menu can spawn fish now. For testing without fishing for an hour first: a "spawn a fish" section drops an ordinary catch straight into your first free hotbar slot, and once you're holding one, a "force a mutation" section can set its trait to any of the ten (or none) so you can see every colour and every effect on demand. Both are host-only and both are behind EnableDebugMenu, off by default.

New in 3.2.0

🎁 Five pickups. A rare fifth kind of catch alongside a plain fish, a size variant and a mutation: Lucky Coin, Mutation Catalyst, Message in a Bottle, Rusted Tin Can and Tangled Seaweed, about a quarter as common as a mutation. A Lucky Coin grants +2 permanent luck the moment you land it, a Mutation Catalyst guarantees your very next real fish mutates, and the rest are flavour. Each renders as its own model — on the hook, in hand, and in your inventory slot — sized to match the fish it replaced rather than a flat constant.

📏 A pickup can be Massive, but never mutated. A pickup can still roll a size variant — a "Colossal Tangled Seaweed" is a real, bigger, more valuable catch — but a mutation is refused for it by design, not just by luck. There's a new Pickups tab on the settings panel with its own master switch and base chance, the same shape as the mutations tab.

🐟 Mutated fish show their colour again. The renderer recolour a mutated fish is meant to show had quietly stopped working somewhere along the way. It's restored — a mutated fish's own renderer tints to match its trait again, same as it used to.

New in 3.2.1

🔧 Works with the game's latest update. The game added euros and a Currency argument to its money methods, which changed their signatures. A build made before that update called the old shapes — which no longer exist — so anything that touched money (buying luck or ascension, the money-overflow guard, the debug money buttons) could fail when it ran. This build is the same mod recompiled against the current game. Nothing about how it plays has changed.

New in 3.2.2

📍 The lucky charm stands are back beside the bait stall on the new islands. The game's island update moved the shops on islands 2, 3 and 4, which left the stand positions the mod ships pointing at the older layout of those islands — the stand could go up somewhere else, or not go up at all. Islands 2, 3 and 4 have been walked and re-recorded against the current game.

This only affects you if you had never saved a stand position on one of those islands: a position you saved yourself always wins, so anything you had already placed stays exactly where you put it.

What you get

🔫 Weapon upgrades that never run out — guns and melee keep gaining tiers up to 255, the most the game can address. The curve is fitted so the top tier lands right on the ceiling instead of maxing out a third of the way up.

🐟 Six fish size variants — a catch can roll into Plump, Hefty, Massive, Colossal, Leviathan or Mythic. Same fish, new name, far heavier, worth vastly more — and visibly larger in your hands.

🧬 Ten fish mutations — a second, independent trait alongside size: Ironscale, Gorged, Venomous, Smoldering, Gilded, Fortuned, Ancient, Radiant, Feral and Warbound. Each has its own colour and its own effect on healing, fullness, worth or creature health; a few bite back or hand you free luck.

🎁 Five rare pickups — Lucky Coin, Mutation Catalyst, Message in a Bottle, Rusted Tin Can and Tangled Seaweed can turn up in place of an ordinary catch. Rarer than a mutation, can still roll a size variant, never a mutation. A Lucky Coin grants permanent luck; a Mutation Catalyst guarantees your next catch mutates.

🍀 Lucky Charm stands — one on every island, next to the bait stall and permanently outlined so you can find them. Buy levels to make rare fish more likely. Luck is shared by the whole lobby, like money.

🌀 Ascension — a New Game+ loop — unlocks once you've finished the game. 25 tiers, each multiplying creature health and paying for it with higher fish value, free luck levels and extra pockets.

🏆 Catch trophies — every fish you land is recorded: species, variant, weight and value, into a per-save ledger and a lifetime one. A toast pops when you beat a record. Press F2.

🎒 A storage panel — press V. 30 slots to start and 5 more per ascension tier; a full 25-tier run reaches 155. Your trophies live in a tab of the same window.

🪝 Extra hooks — more than one fish on the line at a time, each hung at its own point along the trace. Still being tuned; off unless you turn it on.

💰 Money that doesn't break — at high ascension tiers fish get valuable enough to overflow the game's 32-bit money counter. This guards against it, and repairs a balance that's already wrapped.

🎮 Multiplayer compatible — shared progression, no protocol changes.

Installing

The easy way: install through a mod manager from Thunderstore. It handles BepInEx for you.

By hand:

Download BepInEx 5, x64, for Windows and extract it into the folder containing How to Fish.exe.
Run the game once and quit. This is the step people miss — BepInEx creates its plugins folder on first launch.
Drop HTFExpanded.dll into How to Fish/BepInEx/plugins/.

No game file is modified. The mod is a single DLL, so Steam updates and file verification leave your install alone, and uninstalling is deleting that one file.

Updating from any earlier version: overwrite the DLL. Your luck, ascension, catch records and stored items all carry over, and the config is upgraded in place with your old file kept as a .bak beside it.

Keys

Key	Opens
V	Storage panel (Trophies is a tab inside it)
F2	Trophies on their own
F1	Debug menu — only when enabled in the config

All three are configurable, on the panel or in the file.

Config

Written on first launch to:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\HowToFishExpanded.cfg

Most of it is now on the main menu panel. Delete the file to reset everything to defaults.

Your mod progress — luck, catch records, storage — lives in a HowToFishExpanded folder next to the config, never in the game's Saves folder, so it cannot interfere with your vanilla saves.

The config file and folder keep the old Expanded name on purpose. Renaming them would orphan every existing player's luck, ascension, catch records and stored items.

Host chat commands

/htfx        current settings        /luck 12     set luck level
/ascend 3    set ascension tier      /catches     catch stats
/storage     what's in storage       /htfxreload  rewrite the config

Notes

Only 9 inventory slots at high ascension? That's the game's own ceiling, not the mod holding out. How to Fish builds your pockets with exactly nine slots and indexes straight into that fixed list — a tenth is an error, not more room. Ascension takes you 7 → 9 and stops. That's exactly why the storage panel exists.

Storage is host-only in this version. A guest can open the panel but not move items.

Flagged as suspicious by an automated scanner? 0 of 67 antivirus engines flag it. The label comes from sandbox behaviour analysis, not a signature — patching game code in memory looks like "hijack execution flow" to a heuristic, whether it's a mod or malware. The full source is published with every release and rebuilds the exact shipped DLL. Nothing is obfuscated or packed.

Something not working? The mod logs heavily under [How To Fish - Extended] in BepInEx\LogOutput.log — attaching that file usually gets a fix in one round rather than three. Builds before 2.8.3 log as Expanded, so searching for How To Fish - matches every version.

HowToFishExtended

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