Ender's Ultimate Fish Warden Admin Mod

Anti-cheat and admin tools for How to Fish, in one in-game console. Press F4.

Only the host needs it. Guests do not install anything.

If it saved your lobby a bad evening: buy me a coffee.

Install

The easy way (recommended)

1. Install r2modman or the Thunderstore Mod Manager.
2. Pick How to Fish, then Install with Mod Manager on this page.
3. Press Start modded.

That is it. BepInEx comes with it automatically.

By hand

1. Install BepInExPack for How to Fish first, and run the game once so it builds its folders.
2. Drop EndersGambit.dll into: steamapps\common\How to Fish\How to Fish\BepInEx\plugins\
3. Start the game and press F4.

If F4 does nothing, BepInEx is not loaded. Check that BepInEx\LogOutput.log exists — if it does not, redo step 1.

Already had this installed? One line turns the new console on

A fresh install gets the console built from the game's own menu prefabs, with nothing to switch on.

If you ran an earlier version you will not, and it is not a bug: a saved config file beats a code default. Your config was written back when the default was off, and it keeps the value it was given. Two ways to change it:

In game. Press F4, go to the TWEAKS tab, INTERFACE section, and click "Rebuild this from the game's menu". Then close and reopen F4 — it is built when the console opens, so it appears the next time you open it.

In the file. Open

steamapps\common\How to Fish\How to Fish\BepInEx\config\com.brade.fishwarden.cfg

find the [Interface] section, and change NativeConsole = false to NativeConsole = true.

Using a mod manager? Your config lives in the profile folder, not the game folder — r2modman's Config editor opens the right one for you.

Either way it sticks. And if a scene ever defeats the clone, the mod drops back to the plain console on its own rather than showing you half a sheet.

What it does

Host a lobby, press F4, and you get three columns.

WHO IS HERE — everyone in the lobby, most-caught first. Click a name.

WARDEN — what that person was caught doing, and what you can do about it. Every finding shows the rule, whether it was blocked, and a plain sentence explaining it. Then: freeze, mute, strip, remove, pardon, undo their damage, or one of the troll punishments below.

ENDER'S TWEAKS — the cheat menu. Off until you turn it on.

The guard

Around fifty rules watch what clients send the server. They fall into two kinds, and the difference matters:

• Asserted — the packet claims something impossible. Firing as another player, buying with the "free" flag set, reviving yourself while dead. These cannot be wrong about the world, so they are blocked and answered.
• Measured — the packet is compared against a number. Damage against a weapon's ceiling, speed, airtime. These can be wrong, so they ship with the punishment switched off and only ever get written down.

Every rule has two independent switches: block it and answer it. A lobby you are watching for fun and a serious room are the same guard with different switches.

Nothing malformed reaches the game at all — NaN, infinity and out-of-world coordinates are refused on every RPC, and anything that throws kills the packet instead of the lobby.

Punishments that fit the crime

Turn these on per rule, or press them yourself:

Most come with the offender announcing their own crime in chat.

Fishing licence

Trust somebody and the guard stops looking at them entirely — they can use whatever they like. The lobby is told when you issue one and when you revoke it, because a silent exemption looks exactly like a broken guard. Licences do not survive a restart.

Ender's Tweaks

The cheat menu, for your own lobby: spawning, money, God mode, Oops I Did It Again Jesus mode, Jesus mode, Mr. Fantastic, one punch, endless ammo, flight, and the rest.

You decide whether they are allowed. The guard does not care that the tools ship in the same file — if a guest uses an exploit, it is still caught and still blocked unless you have handed them a licence.

Notes

• Host only. Most of this needs server authority. As a guest you are just a player with a console that says so.
• Lobby size is 8 by default. Lobby/MaxPlayers raises it — the game was balanced around its own number, so expect to run out of boat seats before you run out of slots.
• Settings live in BepInEx\config\com.brade.fishwarden.cfg. Anything you change there wins over the defaults, and the log lists what you have changed.
• False positives: every finding is written to BepInEx\Fishwarden\poachers-log_*.txt with the reason. If the guard is wrong about somebody, /rule <name> turns that rule off on the spot.

Made by Ender. Free, and staying free — Ko-fi if you feel like it.

Ender's Ultimate Fish Warden Admin Mod — Changelog

2.1.4

The console built from the game's own menu prefabs is now on by default.

It has been in the mod for a while behind Interface/NativeConsole, off unless you knew the setting existed — so almost nobody installing it ever saw it. The plain console is still there: set NativeConsole = false, or use the toggle in the TWEAKS tab. If a scene ever defeats the rebuild, the mod falls back to the plain one on its own rather than showing you a half-built sheet.

If you are updating rather than installing fresh: a saved config file beats a code default. Your com.brade.fishwarden.cfg already says NativeConsole = false and will keep saying it. Change that one line, or press the toggle in the TWEAKS tab. The README has both routes written out.

Two labels that called the console unfinished are gone, along with a section header reading "PRIVATE - NOT IN THE PUBLIC BUILD" — a leftover from when the tweaks were held back from a public build, which stopped being true in 2.0.0.

2.1.0 – 2.1.2

Cheats that were in the menu but never actually ran

• God mode patched one damage path out of six, and not the one damage arrives on. It now hooks PlayerVitals.TakeDamage, which every source goes through — hunger, poison and fire included.
• Long arms exited silently in three places without logging why. Each exit now says what it was looking for and what it found.
• Inflate had no button in the column people were looking in, and the line that reported the result was reading a different field than the one it set.
• The magma whale was gated behind reaching island five. The prefab comes from GameInfo, not the lava scene, so the gate was never needed.
• Two features never ran at all: one bad cast and two field names that do not exist on the type.

The warden

• Fourteen rules that measure against a threshold were announcing findings as proof. They now record as [measured], do not announce in chat, and ship with trolling off. A threshold somebody chose can be wrong, and has been. The rules that assert something impossible — fired as another player, purchase marked free — still block and still answer.
• A shop ban that only stopped BuyItem left the other purchase paths open.

Release plumbing

• check.py was reading a DLL that nothing ever shipped, so its "clean" verdict had never once looked at an uploaded file. It now scans the zip itself.
• Both build configurations share the plugin GUID, so two DLLs present at once fails loudly instead of quietly loading the wrong one.

2.0.0

First public release, and the first to include the cheat menu.

Previously this shipped as two builds and the exploits were absent from the public one. That split is retired: the guard and the tools answer to the same person, and a host who can kick, troll and licence people can also decide whether exploits are allowed in their own lobby.

The guard

• ~50 rules across damage, economy, movement, spawning, inventory and impersonation.
• Rules split into asserted (blocked and answered) and measured (recorded only), so a mismeasurement cannot cost somebody their standing in front of the lobby.
• Two switches per rule: block it, answer it. Neither implies the other.
• Every RPC is screened for NaN, infinity, out-of-world coordinates, oversized strings and lists, and per-connection flooding — including the calls no rule covers.
• An exception inside RPC logic drops the packet instead of the session.

The console

• F4. Three columns, everything clickable, searchable spawn list, per-rule toggles.
• Selecting a player shows what they were caught doing, in words, above the buttons that punish them.

Punishments

• Blowback, butterfingers, skunked, the cooler, out to sea, freeze, mute, strip, smite, and a rollback that undoes what a cheat spawned or inflated.

Fishing licence

• Hand somebody your standing. Announced to the lobby both ways. Does not persist.

Admin

• Ban list, lockdown, lobby size, evidence screenshots, a pasteable report, and a session log of every finding with its reason.