Fishing – Valheim

Fishing is a big draw for many players of survival-crafting games like Valheim. This guide will teach you how to fish in Valheim, how to get your Fishing Rod, and what catching it will get you. We’ll also tell you all about the different types of fish in Valheim and the bait you’ll need to catch it.

How to Fish

• You will need a spot with fish present, a Fishing Rod, and some appropriate Fishing Bait
• Equip the Fishing Rod and cast the line by holding then releasing the left mouse button
• Wait for the fish to bite, indicated by a flash of your bobber, then start reeling it in by holding the right mouse button
• Be careful not to run out of stamina

The basics of fishing in Valheim are simple. You need to find a spot of water where fish swim. This means you can’t cast your line and expect fish to just appear. It needs to actually be physically present around your fishing spot. Then, equip your Fishing Rod by either right-clicking it in your inventory or assigning it to your hotbar. If you have Fishing Bait in your inventory, it will automatically equip when you cast your line, so no need to manually click on that. That is unless you have multiple types of bait in your inventory. Bait in the upper left corner of your inventory gets priority for auto-equip.

To cast the line, click and hold the left mouse button with a Fishing Rod equipped. The longer you hold, the further it will go, up to around 25 meters. If there’s fish nearby and you have the right bait, it will soon bite. You’ll see your bobber flash and will get a “Hooked” message on your screen.

Start reeling in your catch by holding the right mouse button. Doing so consumes stamina. The bigger and rarer the fish, the more stamina it will consume. Because of that, make sure to eat stamina-boosting foods when out fishing. When the fish is close enough, you’ll be able to grab it off your line, or just keep holding the right button and it will get deposited in your inventory.

And that’s pretty much it for the basics. Just keep in mind that most types of fish have a specific type of bait that works on them and you’ll become a master angler in no time.

When fishing, make sure not to move your line too fast, or try to extend it too far past 25 meters. In that case, your line will break and you’ll have to cast again. If you try to catch a fish with the wrong type of bait, the game will let you know with a message that the fish is not taking the bait.

When fishing, there’s also a chance to get some bonus loot. It’s not a huge chance, and the loot is usually pretty minor, but when it happens, you’ll get a special message that you caught something extra along with your fish. And finally, while there’s no visual indicator for it when you’re fishing, fish actually comes in 5 different quality levels. The higher the quality level, the bigger the fish and the harder it is to catch. It also gives you more Raw Fish when processed at a Food Preparation Table.

How to Get a Fishing Rod

In order to fish, you will need a Fishing Rod.

• You can buy a Fishing Rod from Haldor the trader for 350 Coins
• You can find a free Fishing Rod in a rare frozen lake area of the Frozen Caves dungeons

Buy from Haldor

Haldor is an NPC trader you can find in the Black Forest biome. Haldor can’t spawn to close to your starting location, but he also won’t spawn too far away from it either. When you approach Haldor’s location, a white bag symbol will appear on your map. Check out our guide on how to find Haldor for additional details.

Once you reach Haldor, interact with him and you’ll open his shop. He sells some very useful items. Among them, you’ll find the Fishing Rod, priced at 350 Coins. You can either find Coins in chests while exploring the world or as drops from certain monsters. You can also sell Haldor your precious gems like Amber and Rubies to get more Coins.

Find inside Frozen Caves

If you think 350 Coins is too much to pay for a Fishing Rod, you can instead try to find one for free. To do that, you’ll need to start exploring the Frost Caves dungeons in the Mountain biome. There’s a small chance a large room with a frozen lake will spawn there, so you might be looking for one a while.

Somewhere inside a dungeon with a frozen lake, you’ll see a crumbling staircase leading down. Go down and you’ll see a large room with some Stone Golems inside. Aside from the golems, you’ll see a campfire with a skeleton and a runed stone. The stone tells you about an adventurer who came down into the cave and then couldn’t get out. Right by it, you will find a Fishing Rod.

With the Fishing Rod in your inventory, you’ll need to do what the dead adventurer couldn’t – go back up the same crumbling staircase. This will take some persistence and platforming, but if you have some stamina-boosting foods, it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.

How to Get Bait

• Basic Fishing Bait is sold by Haldor in the Black Forest
• Advanced Fishing Bait is created at a Food Preparation Table by combining Fishing Bait with enemy trophies

If you want to fish, a Fishing Rod isn’t enough. You’ll also need Fishing Bait. Fish in Valheim is very picky about the kind of bait it finds attractive. So, if you want to catch the game’s more elusive fish, you’ll need to keep making new types of bait. You do it at a Food Preparation Table by combining the basic Fishing Bait Haldor sells in bundles of 20 for 10 Coins with specific enemy trophies.

Here are all the different types of bait, how to make them, and what they catch:

Where to Find Fish

There are currently 12 different types of fish in Valheim. You generally can find a couple types of fish in each biome. Some of them will spawn close to the shore, others in deeper waters. And certain types of fish only spawn in very specific places, like the Tetra that only appears in the pools you’ll occasionally find in the Frost Caves dungeons.

Fishing Tricks

Reeling in fish consumes stamina. You can boost your stamina reserves by eating food. But if that still isn’t enough, when your fish is close to shore, you can simply start moving back, dragging the fishing line behind you. If you don’t do it too fast or go through too many obstacles, your line won’t break, allowing you to simply drag a fish out of water and then pick it up from the ground. On rare occasions, you won’t even need to hook a fish – waves can wash fish ashore, allowing you to just pick it up with your hands.

Keep in mind that in order to pick up a fish, it needs to be above the current water level. This means no sneaking up on fish swimming in a stream and grabbing it raw.

You can use items, like Mead, with a hooked fish. So if you’re trying to reel in a tough fish and you see you’re running out of stamina, you can drink a bottle of Mead to restore your stamina without interrupting your fishing attempt.

If you want to recast your rod, you don’t have to reel it back in or unequip it. Simply click the left mouse button again and you’ll immediately send out a new line.

Fish you’ve caught remains alive indefinitely. This means you can catch a fish, display it on your wall, put it in a chest for a month, and nothing will happen to it. Simply throw it back in the water at any point, and it will swim away as if nothing happened. Just make sure you’re throwing individual fish back, not full stacks of it.

Similarly to how you can use potions while fishing, you can also sail on a boat. This is a technique fishermen call trolling. You get in a boat, cast a line, then sit at a rudder. You’ll be able to control your boat while dragging a fishing line behind you. It takes some practice to figure out the right speed to avoid breaking your line, but once you do, you’ll be able to sail the seas and fish at the same time.

Fishing Skill

Valheim has a specific skill dedicated to fishing. This fishing skill governs the stamina drain and pull speed when fishing. Catching fish doesn’t actually raise it, just casting and pulling back your fishing line. You get the baseline Fishing experience gain when pulling an empty line, and double that amount when actually reeling in a fish.

If you want to boost your Fishing skill, you can craft a special Fishing Hat. You’ll need one of every fish in the game to craft this hat at a Workbench. When you do, equipping it will raise your Fishing and Swim skills by 20. You can then upgrade your Fishing Hat several times, which again asks for every fish in the game. However, doing so merely increases the hat’s durability and armor rating without further boosting your Fishing skill.

What to Do With Fish

In Valheim you’ll mainly be fishing because you enjoy the activity. The actual rewards for it are fairly limited. Still, catching fish is not completely useless.

Crafting

Fish is used in several crafting recipes. Some of them call for specific fish, while for others, you’ll need to process your catch into generic Raw Fish at a Food Preparation Table first.

• Fishing Hat
• Cooked Fish
• Fish Wraps
• Fish ‘n’ Bread
• Anti-Sting Concoction
• Draught of Vananidir
• Mead of Troll Endurance

Decoration

You can also use fish as decoration for your base. For that, you’ll want to create an Item Stand (Finewood x4, Bronze Nails x1) that can be found in the Furniture tab of the Hammer menu, and put it up on a wall. Then, assign the fish you want to mount to a hotbar slot, approach the Item Stand and hit the associated button. The fish will go on the wall, showcasing your fishing prowess. Occasionally, mounted fish will even give you some snarky text lines, so don’t be alarmed when you see something talking to you.

We hope this guide helped you figure out how to fish in Valheim. If you have any secret fishing techniques you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to do so in the comments.