🎣 HOW TO FISH: EXTENDED

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

How to Fish: Extended takes the core progression of How to Fish and pushes it far beyond the vanilla limits.

Upgrade your weapons past 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 landing something truly ridiculous. Then, once you've finished the game, ascend and do it all again against a world that hits back twice as hard.

HOWTOFISHEXTENDED DISCORD — https://discord.gg/CgXJJBFqkY I add updated versions here first so they can be play tested, so jump in!

Also on Thunderstore — https://thunderstore.io/c/how-to-fish/p/XIPROZ/HowToFishExtended/ — if you use a mod manager, that route installs BepInEx for you.

🆕 Version 3.0 — you never have to open the config file again. There is now a How To Fish - Extended button on the game's main menu, opening a settings panel with 41 of the mod's options. Fish are also drawn noticeably bigger, and an update no longer overwrites settings you have deliberately tuned. Full detail below.

📛 The mod is called Extended now, not Expanded. Same mod, same author, same DLL name — just the name it shows under. Your config file and saved progress deliberately keep the old HowToFishExpanded names, because renaming them would orphan everybody's luck, ascension, catch records and stored items.

✨ What's Included? ⚙️ A settings panel on the main menu — no text files required 🐟 Six new fish size variants, drawn at a size that matches their weight 🎒 A storage panel (V) — 30 slots and up, because the game's pockets stop at nine 🪝 Extra hooks — more than one fish on the line at a time 🔫 Weapon upgrades that never run out — up to 255 tiers 🍀 Lucky Charm stands on every island, outlined so you can find them 🌀 An Ascension loop — New Game+ with scaling difficulty and rewards 💰 Massively increased rewards for exceptional catches 🏆 Catch stats and a Trophies menu (F2) — remember every fish you land 🎮 Multiplayer-compatible shared progression ⚙️ Fully configurable balance and features 🛠️ Built-in debug menu and host commands 💾 Mod data stored separately from your vanilla saves 🧩 No game files modified — survives Steam updates 📋 REQUIREMENTS

BepInEx 5 (x64) for Windows. That's the only dependency.

If you've never used BepInEx, it's the standard mod loader for Unity games. It takes about two minutes to set up and you only ever do it once.

Installing BepInEx (first time only) Download BepInEx_win_x64_5.4.23.x.zip from the BepInEx releases page: https://github.com/BepInEx/BepInEx/releases Make sure it's the x64 build, not x86, and the 5.x line rather than the 6.x bleeding-edge builds. Find your game folder. In Steam: right-click How to Fish → Manage → Browse local files. You want the folder containing How to Fish.exe, which is usually: ...\steamapps\common\How to Fish\How to Fish
Extract the contents of the zip directly into that folder. When you're done it should look like this: How to Fish
How to Fish.exe winhttp.dll <- from BepInEx doorstop_config.ini <- from BepInEx BepInEx\ <- from BepInEx How to Fish_Data\

If you ended up with How to Fish\BepInEx-master\BepInEx, you've extracted one level too deep. Move things up.

Run the game once, then close it. This lets BepInEx build its folder structure. You should now have a BepInEx\plugins\ folder and a BepInEx\LogOutput.log file.

That's it. BepInEx is installed permanently and every future mod just drops into plugins.

Do not install MelonLoader as well. Both loaders hook the game the same way and will fight each other. Pick one — this mod uses BepInEx.

📦 INSTALLATION Make sure BepInEx is installed and you've run the game once. Download this mod and extract it into your game folder — the archive mirrors the game's folder layout, so it drops straight in.

The only file it adds is:

How to Fish\BepInEx\plugins\HTFExpanded.dll

(The DLL keeps its original HTFExpanded name so that updating over an older install overwrites it cleanly, rather than leaving two copies of the mod loaded at once.)

If you'd rather do it by hand, just copy HTFExpanded.dll into BepInEx\plugins.

To uninstall: delete that one file. Nothing else is touched.

⌨️ Keys Key Opens V Storage panel — Trophies and Credits are tabs inside it F2 Trophies on their own F1 Debug menu — only when enabled in the config

All three are configurable. Everything else is on the main menu settings button.

⚠️ Steam updates

Because no game file is modified, Steam updates and Verify Integrity of Game Files no longer break the mod. It should keep working across ordinary patches.

A major update that renames or restructures the game's code could still require a new mod version. If that happens, the mod logs the problem instead of crashing your game, and you can remove the DLL until an update is out.

⬆️ UPGRADING FROM VERSION 1

Version 1 shipped a modified copy of the game's Assembly-CSharp.dll. Every version since is a plugin and doesn't, so clean the old install up first:

Delete the old HowToFishExpanded folder from your game directory. In Steam, run Verify Integrity of Game Files to restore the original game files. (If you've updated the game since installing v1, this has already happened automatically — the update overwrote the patched file.) Install BepInEx, then this mod.

Your progress carries over. Config and luck data live in the same place as before and are read by both versions.

⚙️ SETTINGS, ON THE MAIN MENU

New in 3.0. There is a How To Fish - Extended button on the game's main menu, under Quit. It opens a settings panel with 41 of the mod's options across five tabs — Features, Fish size, Luck, Ascension, and Storage and upgrades — each one with a line of plain English saying what it actually does.

Toggles are toggles, numbers have a minus and a plus, and every value is clamped to a range the mod will genuinely accept, so nothing you set can be silently thrown away next launch. Save, Revert and Close are on every tab; closing with unsaved changes discards them rather than half-applying them.

Why the main menu, and only the main menu? Because that is the one place where changing a setting is honest. Every option the mod has is read at the moment the thing it configures comes into existence — the upgrade ladders when a weapon spawns, luck when you walk up to a stand, fish size the instant a fish appears. None of that has happened yet while you are looking at the boat, so anything you change is picked up in full by the next game you load. No restart, and no "this one needs a restart" warnings against half the list.

The config file still works exactly as it always has, for the handful of settings not on the panel and for anyone who would rather edit text.

📏 FISH ARE NOW DRAWN TO SIZE

New in 3.0. The game never did this: weight drives a fish's name, its value and the number on the readout, and nothing else. A 15x Mythic and a runt of the same species were the same object on your screen.

Now the size follows the weight. A Mythic looks like a Mythic before the text tells you.

Weight Drawn at 0.25x (a runt) 0.55x 1.00x (average) 1.00x — untouched 3.00x (Massive) 1.73x 9.00x (Mythic, low end) 3.00x 15.0x (Mythic, top end) 3.87x

The maths is size = weight ^ FishScaleExponent. The physically honest exponent is 0.33 — mass goes as volume, volume as the cube of length — and it was the default until 3.0. It was also too small to enjoy: a Mythic at two and a half times length is barely a different fish across the width of a boat. The shipped value is now 0.5, which exaggerates it on purpose. Set it back to 0.3333 if you want the physics, or push it toward 1 if you want the whale.

Every peer works the scale out locally from the weight, which is already synchronised — so this adds nothing to the network, and everyone in the lobby sees the same fish at the same size.

🎒 STORAGE — BECAUSE NINE POCKETS IS THE GAME'S LIMIT

Press V for the mod's own inventory window. It starts at 30 slots and grows by 5 per ascension tier.

This exists because of a hard ceiling that cannot be raised: How to Fish builds your pockets from exactly nine slot objects and indexes straight into that fixed list. A tenth is not a bigger list, it is an error. Ascension takes you from 7 to 9 and stops, and no amount of configuration changes that — so the extra room had to live somewhere else.

Items are stored whole: species, variant, exact weight, value, cookedness and skin all come back the way they went in. The record is written to disk before the item is removed from your hands, so a crash at the wrong moment costs you a duplicate you can throw away rather than the fish itself.

Your trophies are a tab in the same window, alongside a credits tab. F2 still opens trophies on their own if you prefer.

Storage is host-only in this version — a guest can open the panel and look, but not move items.

🪝 EXTRA HOOKS

More than one fish on the line at once. Each extra fish is hung at its own point down the trace rather than stacked on top of the first, so you can see what you have caught.

HookCount sets how many (2 by default, up to 5), and HookSpread is how far apart they hang — set it to 0 to stack them. Both are on the Storage and upgrades tab.

Honest note: this one is still being tuned. The window where a second fish can take the hook is short, because most people reel in the moment they feel the first. Feedback on the Discord is very welcome.

🔥 PUSH YOUR UPGRADES FURTHER

The shop ceiling is no longer the end.

Every gun and melee weapon keeps gaining upgrade tiers far beyond its normal maximum, following its own existing progression curve.

The best part? The progression stays natural.

The original shops remain unchanged. Early islands keep their original upgrade limits. New tiers become available from the shop that previously sold the weapon's final vanilla upgrade. Every weapon continues from its own existing price scale.

The ladder does not end. It runs all the way to 255 tiers — the most the game can address — so however far you push Ascension, there is always another upgrade to buy.

Damage and price climb together toward a ceiling they both reach on the very last tier. This matters more than it sounds: damage and price are stored as whole numbers and cannot exceed about 2.1 billion, so a fixed 25% step per tier ran out of range with most of the ladder still unbuilt. Price stopped moving around tier 68, damage around tier 81, and every tier above that charged the same two billion dollars for no extra damage at all. Each weapon's curve is now fitted to its own length instead, so all 255 tiers are genuine upgrades.

Assault Rifle	Sniper Rifle

Last vanilla tier 100 dmg — $5,800 500 dmg — $10,000 Tier +1 121 dmg — $6,096 606 dmg — $10,487 Tier +25 1,328 dmg — $20,155 5,974 dmg — $32,849 Tier +50 7,052 dmg — $70,042 27,340 dmg — $107,909 Tier +100 158,413 dmg — $845,864 436,216 dmg — $1,164,436 Tier +150 3,453,649 dmg — $10,214,969 6,663,605 dmg — $12,565,320 Tier +200 75,193,893 dmg — $123,359,742 101,510,679 dmg — $135,591,168 Tier +242 999,999,998 dmg — $999,999,999 999,999,995 dmg — $1,000,000,000

Every weapon scales from its own numbers, so a cheaper gun stays cheaper and a hard-hitting one stays hard-hitting.

GunDamageGrowth and GunCostGrowth are an upper bound on the per-tier rate rather than the rate itself. Both default to 1.25: a short ladder still steps at a full 25% per tier, while a 255-tier one spreads the same climb across its whole length. GunDamageCeiling and GunCostCeiling decide where the top tier lands — lower either for a gentler curve.

ExtraGunTiers=-1 means "as many as the game can index". Set a number instead if you want a shorter ladder.

🐋 FISH CAN NOW BECOME LEGENDS

Every fish you catch has a chance to become something more. The mod introduces six size variants, each with its own name, weight range and value multiplier.

Variant Weight Value Bonus 🐟 Plump 1.75 – 2.25x 1.10x 🐠 Hefty 2.25 – 3.00x 1.30x 🦈 Massive 3.00 – 4.25x 1.60x 🐋 Colossal 4.25 – 6.00x 2.10x 👹 Leviathan 6.00 – 9.00x 3.00x ✨ Mythic 9.00 – 15.0x 4.50x

Because fish value already scales with weight, these bonuses stack on top of the game's existing economy. A Mythic fish can be worth roughly 50 times more than an ordinary catch.

At zero luck, approximately one in nine fish will become a variant. A Mythic? Around 1 in 2,500 catches.

The variant is determined by the fish's weight, meaning it naturally survives saving and loading and remains consistent for everyone in multiplayer. No strange network tricks. No duplicate systems. Just a very, very large fish staring back at you.

Because it's a prefix rather than a separate creature, it applies to anything you land — including the game's own special encounters. A Colossal Mutated Whale is entirely possible.

Some species could never be a variant, and that turned out to be a bug in the game. Anglerfish, blobfish, stonefish, goblin sharks, blue sharks, piranhas, pufferfish and spidercrabs all override the spawn method and never call the base, so the weight roll that lives there never runs — every one of them is pinned to exactly average weight for the life of the game. A blobfish always weighs the same 80 kg. The mod rolls for them now, which restores the size variety they were meant to have as well as making them eligible for variants.

Every species can roll a variant. The game only randomises weight for some creatures. The rest — the ones flagged to skip the roll, and the ones shipping a deliberate weight — are left as they are, and because the variant tier is read off the weight, those species could never be anything but ordinary no matter how much luck you had. Clams, snails, blobfish, stonefish and most of the late-island catches were all in that group. The mod rolls for them too. The roll only ever raises a weight, so a creature designed to be big keeps its size unless the roll beats it, and a fish restored from a save keeps the size you caught it at. Bosses stay out of it unless you set VariantsFromBosses=true.

Dynamite is excluded by default. It conjures fish out of nothing and kills them instantly, so letting it roll variants turns one stick into a pile of free jackpots. VariantsFromDynamite=true allows it if you want that. Seagulls and other birds do roll variants — they are creatures like any other, and shooting a colossal gull is half the fun. Set VariantsFromBirds=false to keep variants to the water.

All names, rarities, weight ranges and value bonuses can be customised through the configuration file.

🍀 BUILD YOUR LUCK

Every island now has a Lucky Charm stand beside the bait stall. Buying a charm increases your lobby's shared luck level.

Both of the mod's stands are left permanently outlined so you can pick them out from the ordinary stalls at a glance. Set HighlightModStands=false if you'd rather they blended in.

Luck starts small, but over time it dramatically changes the odds of what comes out of the water.

The curve is split into two stretches:

Up to level 50 (the "knee"): luck slides every tier smoothly from its no-luck chance to its max-luck share. The knee is exactly the old shipped max-luck table — 95% of catches are variants, and Mythic sits at 5%. Above the knee: the odds keep climbing. Each tier's weight is multiplied by a growth factor and the whole table re-normalises, so the distribution slides up the ladder and Mythic converges on certainty as luck rises.

The full progression curve (defaults):

Luck Ordinary Plump Hefty Massive Colossal Leviathan Mythic 0 89.160% 6.000% 3.000% 1.200% 0.450% 0.150% 0.040% 25 69.523% 14.170% 8.285% 4.333% 2.194% 1.047% 0.447% 50 5.000% 33.466% 22.881% 15.644% 10.696% 7.313% 5.000% 75 ~0% 0.003% 0.024% 0.186% 1.446% 11.225% 87.115% 100 ~0% ~0% ~0% ~0% 0.013% 1.122% 98.865% 125 ~0% ~0% ~0% ~0% ~0% 0.100% 99.900%

At the top, 99.9% of catches are Mythic — the rarest tier stops being a rounding error and becomes the default. That top share is LuckTopShare (0.999 by default) and is a solved target, not a guess: it lands there exactly no matter how you retune the variant table.

Luck is shared across the entire lobby, just like money.

The first charm costs $250, and the price climbs as you go:

Charm price	Spent so far

First charm $250 $250 Reaching level 25 $4,031 $47,080 Reaching level 50 (the knee) $27,303 $451,133 Reaching level 75 $184,917 $3,187,661 Reaching level 100 $1,252,392 $21,721,376 Final charm (reaching 125) $8,482,093 $147,244,846

The default luck cap is 125, with the knee at 50. LuckMaxLevel, LuckBaseCost, LuckCostGrowth, LuckCurveKnee and LuckTopShare are all configurable — the first three from the Luck tab on the main menu panel.

🌀 ASCENSION — THE NEW GAME+ LOOP

Finished the game? Good. Now do it properly.

Once you've beaten the final boss and completed the run, an Ascension anvil appears in the shop on the first island, beside the knife sharpening stand.

Each tier you buy makes every fish and boss tougher, makes fish worth more, grants free luck, and adds 5 more storage slots. The world gets harder and pays out to match, so you can keep climbing the weapon ladder instead of hitting a wall.

Tier Health Value +Luck Price 1 x1.5 x1.3 4 $250,000 3 x3 x2 12 $731,051 5 x6 x3 20 $1,494,927 10 x41 x9 40 $8,939,235 15 x263 x28 60 $53,454,044 20 x1,688 x87 80 $319,639,732 25 x10,819 x265 100 $1,911,353,188

The ladder runs to 25 tiers, and the numbers are shaped by a hard limit. Money is a 32-bit integer, so a wallet stops at $2,147,483,647 — which means the entire ladder only ever has about 8,590x of cost growth to spend. The growth rate therefore decides how many tiers you get, and raising it makes the ladder shorter, not longer. At the x2.5 per tier this mod originally shipped, the whole budget was spent in ten steps and tier 11 was priced above anything you could physically hold.

Health deliberately grows a little faster than value, so each tier takes slightly longer to afford than the last: roughly one good catch for the first tier, eleven for the last. Reaching tier 25 grants 100 free luck — most of the way to the 125 luck cap on its own.

Two things worth knowing:

The luck grant is bounded by LuckMaxLevel (125 by default). At tier 25 it adds 100 luck on top of whatever you've bought, so it stays useful well into the late game — it only stops counting once you've already bought your way to the cap. The value multiplier keeps scaling regardless. Creatures already swimming around you keep the health they spawned with. The change applies to everything that spawns after the purchase.

Health scaling, value scaling, luck bonus and the tier cap are all separately configurable, and the whole system can be switched off with EnableAscension=false. Set AscensionMaxLevel=0 and the cap is worked out from the wallet ceiling instead of a fixed number.

🌐 MULTIPLAYER

Everyone in the lobby should ideally use the same version of the mod.

The host controls fish weights, values, luck and ascension, meaning unmodded players still see the correct numbers for catches generated by the host. They simply won't see:

Custom variant names The Lucky Charm and Ascension stands Certain visual mod elements

The mod does not change the game's network protocol, so mixed lobbies should not desynchronise.

Luck and ascension are shared by the entire lobby.

🧩 PLAYING WITH OTHER MODS

Purchases from the Lucky Charm and Ascension stands complete directly when you are the host, so they no longer depend on the game's shared bait-buying call — a place other inventory and bait mods also patch. Remote clients still send a message, and it now runs ahead of other mods' patches.

Nothing in the game install is modified: the mod is a single plugin DLL and every hook is a runtime patch, so it coexists with other BepInEx mods and survives game updates.

💰 A NOTE ON THE MONEY CEILING

Money in this game is a 32-bit number, so $2,147,483,647 is as high as a balance can go, and the game adds to it without checking. Vanilla never comes close. With Ascension multiplying fish value every tier, a good late catch can be worth more than that on its own — and a single dollar past the limit wraps the balance round to about minus two billion, which then fails every price check, leaving a save that can't buy anything and can't earn its way out.

The mod holds the balance at the limit instead, and repairs one that has already wrapped. If you would rather a single catch didn't fill your wallet in one go, MaxItemWorth caps what any one item can be worth.

💾 YOUR SAVES ARE SAFE

This mod does not write anything to the game's Saves folder. Mod data is stored separately:

...\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\HowToFishExpanded.cfg ...\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\HowToFishExpanded<world>.luck.dat

This matters because How to Fish tries to load every .txt file in its Saves folder as a save game. Version 1 of this mod briefly stored luck data there, which could make the save list appear empty. The saves themselves were never deleted or modified — the game simply couldn't parse the extra file and gave up on the whole list.

This version keeps its files elsewhere, and on startup it also moves any leftover version 1 files out of the Saves folder. Moved, never deleted.

Your vanilla save files are only ever read, never written to.

Backing up your saves before installing any mod is always sensible:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\Saves 🪧 CUSTOM STAND MODELS

The Lucky Charm and Ascension stands can wear a model of your own instead of looking like the stall they were cloned from.

Models are plain Wavefront OBJ with a companion .mtl and PNG textures — whatever your modeller exports. Nothing is compiled into a Unity AssetBundle, and that is deliberate: an AssetBundle is tied to the exact Unity version the game was built with, so a game update can invalidate it. OBJ and PNG are text and images. They cannot go stale.

Drop your files into:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\HowToFishExpanded\models file replaces luckstand.obj the Lucky Charm stand ascensionstand.obj the Ascension stand

Where the stands go. The mod ships with a hand-picked position for every island, recorded in game rather than guessed, so the stands turn up somewhere sensible from the first launch. Prefer your own spot? Open the debug menu's Stands tab, walk to where you want it, face the way it should face, and press a button — the stands rebuild on the spot so you can see the result and adjust. Your positions live in HowToFishExpanded/standspots.txt, a plain text file you can edit or share, and always take priority over the shipped ones.

The stand model ships inside the mod itself, so the Lucky Charm stand looks like a Lucky Charm stand out of the box with nothing to copy anywhere. A loose copy is included in the download as a worked example to build your own from: 144 vertices, 68 triangles and four 256x256 textures. Anything you drop into the models folder takes priority over the built-in one.

Files are read fresh each time a world loads, so you can reshape a model and check it without rebuilding anything. .obj.gz is read too — OBJ text compresses about six to one.

Positions, normals, texture coordinates, n-gons of any size, and one submesh per material. Textures with transparent pixels automatically get a cutout material, so leaves and grates have holes rather than boxes. Materials are copied from the stall the stand replaced, so they are right for whatever render pipeline the game uses. StandModelScale, StandModelYaw and StandModelHeight sit it on the counter properly. Only the appearance changes. The collider, hover text and outline are untouched, so a model that fails to load costs you the look and nothing else — the stand still works, and the log says what went wrong. ⚙️ FULLY CONFIGURABLE

The configuration file is created automatically on first launch:

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

Edit the file, save it and restart the game. Delete the file to restore defaults.

Most of this is now on the main menu panel — the file is for the rest, and for anyone who prefers it.

You can independently enable, disable or retune:

Weapon and melee expansion, and how fast prices climb Fish draw size, and whether bosses scale with it Storage size, and how much each ascension tier adds Hook count and spacing Fish variants — names, rarities, weight ranges, value multipliers, colours Luck progression, pricing and maximum level The exact odds at maximum luck Ascension health, value and luck scaling Debug tools and colour formatting

The configuration system uses a ConfigVersion, and as of 3.0 an update is far more careful with it. When a shipped default changes, the mod checks what you actually have: if your file still holds the old default, it takes the new one — and if you had deliberately changed that setting, your value is kept. Only settings you never touched are updated, everything else is carried across untouched, and the log names exactly what it changed and what it kept. Your previous file is still copied to a .bak beside it either way.

If variant names display literal <color=#9BE39B> text, set UseColors=false.

🛠️ BUILT-IN DEBUG MENU

Off by default, because it can hand out money and luck. To turn it on, set EnableDebugMenu=true in the config, then press F1 in game.

The key can be changed with DebugMenuKey — any valid Unity input-system key name works (F1, F2, Insert, Backquote).

While the menu is open, player movement is paused and the cursor is released.

📊 Stats — FPS, world seed, current island, playtime, health, fullness, poison, fire, position, money, luck, ascension tier, held item details (weight, variant tier, base and total value), the full variant probability table at your current luck — broken out into bought luck, with-ascension, and the difference — and a locator showing how far away each of the mod's stands is and which way to walk.

💰 Money & Luck — add or remove money in steps or exact amounts, raise or set luck, set ascension tier, heal and restore fullness instantly.

🐟 Fish Testing — hold a fish and force it into any variant, or set an exact weight multiplier, and watch its name and value update instantly. There's also a 10,000-roll self-test that reports actual versus expected odds. Perfect for checking the whole variant system without spending an afternoon wrestling with RNG.

🔫 Weapon Testing — hold a gun or melee weapon to see its current tier, damage, next price, and the next eight tiers with their costs. Jump +1, +5, or all remaining tiers.

Anything that changes game state is host-only, since those values belong to the server. The menu tells you rather than silently pretending to work.

💬 HOST CHAT COMMANDS Command Effect /htfx Print the mod's current settings to the log /luck Display the current luck level /luck 12 Set the luck level directly /ascend Display the current ascension tier /ascend 3 Set the ascension tier directly /htfxreload Rewrite the config using the currently active settings 🩺 TROUBLESHOOTING

The mod logs everything it does under How To Fish - Extended here:

...\steamapps\common\How to Fish\How to Fish\BepInEx\LogOutput.log

On a healthy start you'll see the plugin load and report all 33 patch groups applied.

Builds before 2.8.3 log as Expanded rather than Extended. Searching the log for How To Fish - matches every version.

Every mod hook has its own error handling, so if part of the mod hits a problem it's logged rather than bringing down the game.

The mod doesn't seem to be loading. Check that BepInEx\plugins\HTFExpanded.dll exists, and that winhttp.dll and doorstop_config.ini are in the same folder as How to Fish.exe. If BepInEx\LogOutput.log doesn't exist at all, BepInEx itself isn't starting — re-check the BepInEx install steps above.

The game won't start. Delete BepInEx\plugins\HTFExpanded.dll. If the game still won't start, the problem isn't this mod.

Something looks wrong in game. Grab BepInEx\LogOutput.log and post it on the Discord. It records the mod's decisions, including every upgrade ladder it extends and the first fish rolls of the session, which usually pins the problem down quickly.

Part of the mod isn't working, or it says something could not be hooked. Game builds differ, and occasionally a method this mod hooks isn't present in yours. Since 2.3.1 that costs you only the affected feature — the log names it in plain English and everything else carries on. Before 2.3.1 a single missing hook threw during startup and left the mod half applied, so if you're on an older version, update first.

I can see the Lucky Charm stand but nothing happens when I buy. Fixed in 2.2.5. The purchase used to travel through the game's bait-buying call with a reserved index, so another mod that patched bait buying could take it first — you would see the stand and its price, and the purchase would quietly go nowhere. It is now completed directly when you are the host. If a purchase is still refused, the log says why (cannot afford, already at max level, game not finished yet for Ascension).

A species never seems to roll variants. Set SpawnLogCount higher in the config and the log will name each creature as it spawns, its weight and the tier it rolled, including which ones the mod rolled for because the game does not.

The settings button is not on the main menu. Check the log for a line beginning main menu: — it says whether the button was created and, if it was, exactly where on screen it ended up. If it says the button could not be added, that names the reason; the settings are still fully editable in the config file either way.

I changed a setting and it did nothing. Settings are read when the thing they configure is created, so a change made on the main menu applies to the next game you load, not the one already running. Load a save and check again.

My settings were reset by an update. As of 3.0 they should not be, unless the value was still the shipped default. The log line beginning config upgraded from version names every setting that changed and every one it kept because you had tuned it. Your previous file is beside the config as a .bak.

Deleting mod data. Mod progression lives in the HowToFishExpanded folder — <world>.luck.dat for luck and ascension, <world>.catches.dat for trophies, <world>.backpack.dat for storage. Deleting a file resets only that thing. Anything sitting in the storage panel lives in that folder and nowhere else, so empty it before you delete anything.

🎣 ONE CAST COULD CHANGE EVERYTHING

Start with a small fish and a cheap weapon. Build your luck. Push your gear beyond its original limits. Beat the game, then ascend and watch the ocean get meaner.

Then wait for the moment when the water finally gives you something Massive, Colossal, Leviathan… or perhaps something that was never supposed to be caught at all — and this time, you will see how big it is before you read its name.

Good luck out there. You're going to need it. 🍀🐋