How To Fish: Extended

Bigger upgrades. Bigger fish. Bigger rewards. And a New Game+ loop 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. 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 here is configurable, and every feature can be switched off on its own.

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.

🍀 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 B. 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.

💰 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.

⚙️ Fully configurable — prices, curves, the whole variant table.

Installing

Install BepInExPack (listed as a dependency — the mod manager handles it), then install this. That's the lot.

Installing by hand instead? 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.

Keys

Key	Opens
B	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.

Config

Written on first launch to:

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

Edit it and restart. Delete it to reset to defaults. When an update changes a shipped default, only that setting is reset — everything you've tuned is kept, and your old file is backed up beside it.

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 can't interfere with your vanilla saves.

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. Multiplayer storage is on the way.

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 byte for byte. Nothing is obfuscated or packed.

Links

Discord — https://discord.gg/CgXJJBFqkY — new versions land here first for play testing, so come and break them
Nexus Mods — https://www.nexusmods.com/howtofish/mods/70

Bug reports are very welcome. The mod logs heavily in BepInEx\LogOutput.log — look for lines tagged [How To Fish - Expanded], which is the plugin's internal name. Attaching that file usually gets a fix in one round rather than three.