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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Changelog

1.0.2

• Fixed mounted trophies rendering bright magenta. Creatures drawn with skinned meshes have no MeshFilter, so the trophy found no material at all.
• Fixed Toxic and Scalding variants never poisoning or burning whoever ate them: the patch bound to parameter names that do not exist in the shipped assembly, so it silently never applied.
• Added species now resolve their model recipe from their own tag, so mounted ones keep their eyes.

1.0.1

• Fixed mounted trophies rendering bright magenta when a fish's display mesh has more than one submesh, such as a lobster's claws. Every submesh now gets a material.

1.0.0

First public release.

• 1,166 fish variants — 22 morphs applied across all 53 species.
• 10 new species with procedurally generated models: Dolphin, Orca, Narwhal, Hammerhead, Swordfish, Manta Ray, Sea Turtle, Giant Squid, Moon Jelly and Sea Serpent.
• Abilities — every morph changes how a fish heals, feeds, fights back or poisons you, and its sale value is derived from those effects.
• Armed variants — Armed and Outlaw fish carry a real weapon, chase you and shoot, with burst fire, spread and line-of-sight checks.
• Per-individual size — a fish's rendered size now tracks the weight the game already rolled for it, vanilla fish included.
• Variant journal — click a species in the Tab journal to page through its morphs and see which you have caught.
• Trophies — mount any dead fish on a wall, on a wooden board with a nail. Saved per world, and taking one down hands the fish back.
• Uses no item ids, so unmodded players can join a modded host.