HowToFishExtended
Weapon upgrades past the cap, six fish size variants, a Lucky Charm luck system, a New Game+ ascension loop, catch trophies, health bars and a storage panel. Fully configurable.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 3.0.2
❤️ Health bars no longer linger. A bar used to stay floating above the water when a fish escaped and despawned. It is now taken down with the fish, so no orphan bars are left behind.
⚙️ The health-bar switch is in the menu. EnableFishHealthBars was only
in the config file before; it is now a toggle under Features, next to
"Fish drawn to size".
New in 3.0.3
⚙️ A Health bars tab. A new tab on the main-menu settings panel lets you toggle the bar, set its width, thickness, height above the fish and opacity, and hide it until a fish is damaged. A live preview on the page shows the bar change as you edit it.
🤝 Credits. The Credits tab now thanks the Discord moderators, helpers and bug finder who helped with this build.
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.
🍀 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
pluginsfolder on first launch. - Drop
HTFExpanded.dllintoHow 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.
Links
- Nexus Mods — https://www.nexusmods.com/howtofish/mods/70
- Thunderstore — https://thunderstore.io/c/how-to-fish/p/XIPROZ/HowToFishExtended/
- Discord — https://discord.gg/CgXJJBFqkY — new versions land here first for play testing, so come and break them
Bug reports are very welcome.