How to Fish Mods

What "How to Fish mods" actually are

How to Fish is a physics-based fishing game from Dazed Games (developers Carl-Vilhelm and Melvin) that passed one million players within two days of its August 20, 2026 launch. Mods for it are small community add-ons, almost always single .dll files, that you load into the game with a mod loader rather than files you paste over the original game. They range from quality-of-life fixes and cosmetic tweaks to full cheat menus and economy overhauls. Nearly every one lives on the How to Fish page at Nexus Mods, and none are made or vetted by the developers.

Because these are player-made files, treat the safety of any download as unverified. This page is an overview of what exists and how the pieces fit together. For the in-game value-editing route that needs no mod loader at all, see the How to Fish Cheat Engine guide.

How mods get installed

Almost all How to Fish mods run through BepInEx, the standard mod loader for Unity games. You grab the BepInEx 5 x64 build for Windows from its official GitHub releases page, extract it straight into the folder that holds How to Fish.exe (in Steam: right-click the game, Manage, then Browse local files), and launch the game once so it builds a BepInEx\plugins\ folder. After that, installing a mod is just dropping its .dll into that plugins folder.

A second loader, MelonLoader, does the same job — the "How to MOD How to Fish" walkthrough on YouTube uses version 0.73. The one hard rule is to never install both, because BepInEx and MelonLoader hook the game the same way and will fight each other. Some mods, like the Expanded Inventory mod (662KB as of 2026-08-28), bundle BepInEx 5 so you can extract them straight into the game folder without a separate loader step.

Mods built as BepInEx plugins have a real advantage. Because they never touch the original game files, Steam updates and "Verify Integrity of Game Files" leave them alone. Older mods that shipped a patched copy of the game's Assembly-CSharp.dll break the moment the game updates, and you have to reinstall them.

The most popular mods right now

The Nexus Mods top list leans heavily on convenience and multiplayer tools. MorePlayers lets the host raise the lobby cap anywhere from 1 to 250 players (the game defaults to 8), and only the host needs it installed; a separate 16-player mod does the same job in a lighter package. Keep Inventory stops you losing items when you die, Stackable Items and HowToInventory clean up the cramped default inventory, and No Bird Steal stops seagulls snatching gear off the ground.

Several mods change how the world feels rather than how it plays. Day and Night Cycle adds a moving sun with shifting fog and lighting, and runs its clock off the server tick so co-op players all see the same time. Fishydex adds the bait needed to catch each fish to the TAB menu, GreedySeagulls makes the birds far more aggressive, and True First Person and True Dot Crosshair are small presentation tweaks.

Then there is the cheat-heavy end of the list. The Complete Cheat Menu (71KB, roughly 2,800 endorsements as of 2026-08-28) opens with the Insert key and packs 19 tabs of god mode, flight, ESP, aimbot, infinite ammo, teleporting, spawning any fish, boss, boat, gun or item, unlocking every skin, and editing money and kill scores. HowToFish.Trainer is the most-downloaded single file at around 5,800 grabs, the Advanced Mod Menu bundles God Mode, Infinite Money and a rigged casino, and AnglerAim is an aimbot whose ESP overlay labels each creature with its name and current sell price.

HowToFishExpanded: the flagship overhaul

If any mod counts as the headline act, it is HowToFishExpanded, a full progression rework built as a BepInEx plugin whose only file is HTFExpanded.dll. It adds six fish size variants on top of every catch — Plump, Hefty, Massive, Colossal, Leviathan and Mythic — each with its own weight range and value multiplier. A Mythic fish carries a 4.50x value bonus and can be worth roughly 50 times an ordinary catch; at zero luck about one fish in nine becomes a variant, and a Mythic shows up around once every 2,500 catches.

The mod also lifts the game's ceilings. Weapon upgrades keep going past their vanilla cap all the way to 255 tiers — for reference, the Assault Rifle's last normal tier is 100 damage for $5,800 and the Sniper Rifle's is 500 damage for $10,000 (as of 2026-08-28), and both keep climbing from there. A Lucky Charm stand on every island raises your lobby's shared luck, starting at $50 for the first charm and rising 11% each time, up to a luck cap of 100 that costs roughly $15 million to fully buy.

Finishing the game unlocks Ascension, a New Game+ loop driven by an anvil in the first island's shop. Each tier doubles the health of every fish and boss, doubles their value, and grants 10 free luck levels, running from $250,000 at tier 1 to $953,674,316 at tier 10 — the practical ceiling, because the game stores money as a 32-bit integer. All of it is configurable, and the mod keeps its data separate from your vanilla saves, so your normal progress is only ever read, never overwritten.

Which mod should you install first?

Pick by what you actually want out of a run. If the goal is a bigger group, MorePlayers or the 16-player mod is the single most useful install, and only the host has to set it up. If the grind is the problem, the quality-of-life cluster — Expanded Inventory, Stackable Items, Keep Inventory and No Bird Steal — smooths the parts of the loop that waste the most time without breaking the game's balance.

For players who want more game rather than fewer chores, HowToFishExpanded is the deepest option, adding fish variants, a 255-tier weapon ladder and a New Game+ loop that keeps a finished save interesting. The cheat menus sit at the far end: the Complete Cheat Menu and Advanced Mod Menu hand you money, spawning and god mode outright, which is fine for messing around solo but rarely welcome in a shared lobby. Whatever you choose, install one loader first and add mods one at a time so a bad file is easy to spot.

Solo versus co-op: what actually changes

Whether a mod affects single-player, co-op, or both depends on the mod. Loader-based cosmetic and quality-of-life mods generally work fine in solo play. Anything that changes shared game state in HowToFishExpanded — luck, ascension, fish values — is host-controlled and shared across the whole lobby, and unmodded players still see the correct numbers for catches the host generates, though they miss custom variant names and the mod's stands.

Multiplayer mods have their own rules. MorePlayers and the 16-player mod only need to be installed by the host. For cheat menus the picture is mixed: the Complete Cheat Menu advertises both host and solo use, while many spawn and economy cheats only work for the host because those values live on the server. For the smoothest co-op session, have everyone run the same version of the same mod.

Are these mods safe?

Nothing here is verified by the developers, and downloading and running community .dll files always carries some risk, so back up your save folder before installing anything. Cheat mods that spawn items, edit money or rig the roulette table can also corrupt a session or draw complaints in public lobbies, so they are best kept to private or solo games. Match the mod to the current game version too — the game was on patch 1.0.10 (August 27, 2026) at the time of writing, and a major update can still force a mod author to ship a fresh build.

If all you want is to edit a single number like your cash total without any loader, the memory-scanning approach covered in the How to Fish Cheat Engine guide is a lighter, mod-free alternative — though it is a single-player-oriented cheat, not something to bring into other people's lobbies.

Modding landscape

The shape of How to Fish's modding scene is worth understanding on its own: where files come from, which kinds exist, and which risks are real. None of it is official; the developers neither make nor check these files.

Where mods come from

There is no official mod support and no Steam Workshop — players have asked, the developers have not added one — so every mod is a third-party file from one of three places. Nexus Mods hosts the largest catalog and is the site nearly every guide points to. Thunderstore, usually through its Gale manager, is a second channel that some players use both to install mods and to run cheat menus. Individual authors also hand out builds through their own Discords. None of these channels vet files or guarantee they match your game version.

The kinds of mod you will find

Most files sort into a few types; the table names a representative mod for each. Their loaders — BepInEx and MelonLoader — are covered in the install section above; install one loader, never both.

The last row is specific to this game: How to Fish ships a full developer cheat suite internally, gated behind one switch, and several mods simply flip it and drive the game's own commands. The Complete Cheat Menu works this way, which is also why its server-authoritative options — money, spawning, god mode — grey out with a reason when you join someone else's lobby, while client-only options like ESP keep working everywhere.

What the risks actually are

The most-asked risk is a ban, and the honest answer is that there is no evidence either way. A search of the Steam discussions for ban, VAC, cheater and kicked turned up no reports of anyone being banned or flagged for using a mod, and the official patch notes never mention anti-cheat. Read that as "no reports seen," not as proof the game is safe to mod: How to Fish runs peer-to-peer lobbies with no competitive ranking and ships no VAC or EAC anti-cheat system, so there is simply nothing generating ban data. The one irreversible consequence that does have a source is narrow — unlocking a Steam achievement through a cheat writes to Steam's servers and cannot be undone from your PC.

The risks that are actually documented are more mundane, and save corruption is the real one to guard against. A mod that drops stray files into the game's Saves folder can make your save list look empty, because the game tries to load every .txt file in that folder as a save and gives up on the whole list when one will not parse; the saves are not deleted, just hidden until the extra file is removed. Pushing money past the 32-bit integer ceiling, whether through the casino or a cheat menu, flips your balance negative in the same abrupt way. And any older mod that ships a patched copy of the game's Assembly-CSharp.dll breaks the instant How to Fish updates, which it has done fast. The safe habit is simple: back up your save folder before installing anything, from the standard location %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\Saves.