How to Fish Achievements: The Practical Completion Guide

How to Fish ships with a Steam achievements list spanning its whole design — story progression, trick shots, collection hunting and at least one achievement that turns the entire game into a speedrun. The full list lives on the official Steam page; this guide covers the confirmed standouts and the order that unlocks them efficiently, because several achievements quietly require opposite playstyles.

Official source: the achievement set is defined by the live Steam build — check the official Steam store page for the authoritative list, the official Steam news hub for patch notes that shifted triggers after launch (1.0.10, 1.0.11 and 1.0.12 all touched achievement-adjacent systems), and SteamDB for global unlock percentages.

Three things changed since launch that affect how you hunt: the 1.0.10 patch made dropped items persist across saves (up to 64 pieces, weapons and quest items prioritised), 1.0.11 added save-corruption checks and removed the iron sight from the attachment shop, and 1.0.12 rebalanced the piranha and moved the game onto Steam Cloud. None of that invalidates the routes below, but all of it makes a second run friendlier than a launch-week run.

The Confirmed Headliners

Launch coverage and the community wiki confirm these named achievements:

360 No Scope

The signature style achievement, named in howtofishgame.wiki's achievements section. It rewards the game's flashiest kill — a full spin before an unscoped shot lands. Practice on low-value shallow bodies where misses cost nothing; shotgun knockback launches targets into perfect follow-up position. Per TposeGaming's guide, 360s also carry top trick-shot multipliers, so the practice doubles as money farming.

Terrorizing Bird

Named after Island 4's sky boss. Defeating the bird is mandatory story progress anyway — the achievement simply formalizes it. Bring tuna baited with the professional boss lure and read our Terrorizing Bird guide for the dive-bomb counters.

The One-Hour Speedrun

Destructoid's walkthrough confirms an achievement for defeating the final boss within roughly an hour of starting. This is the list's great gatekeeper: it requires skipping most side content, buying exactly the right weapons (shotgun → SMG path), and chaining every boss summon back-to-back without farming detours.

The boss chain's HP budget explains the recommended purchase order — five gates, roughly 60,000 HP total:

A stock Sniper Rifle shot deals 200 damage — meaning the whale alone eats 190 unupgraded shots. The speedrun is therefore a shopping problem as much as a shooting one: every damage upgrade bought before the volcano multiplies across all five fights.

Achievement Categories and Their Natural Order

The list clusters into five families:

Attempting families out of order fights the game's own progression: collection achievements need island access, speedrunning conflicts with collection detours, and style milestones arrive free once the Sniper Rifle exists.

The Two-Run Structure

Most players complete the list across two runs:

Run one — explorer: normal progression through all five islands, no clock pressure. Bank story achievements, learn every boss pattern, start the Fishipedia, collect trophies properly. Sell nothing uniquely named.

Run two — speedrunner: known route, pre-planned purchases, bosses chained back-to-back inside the hour. Everything learned in run one converts directly into time saved here.

Post-game — collector: whatever remains, usually Fishipedia depth goals and drip-creature hunts, farmed with a completed arsenal and zero money pressure.

Co-op Notes for Achievements

Achievements credit the lobby, which makes four-player sessions the fastest way through kill-count and progression families — provided the crew shares wallet discipline. The shared-money system means one player's impulse pistol purchase delays everyone's assault rifle fund; agree buy priorities before each shop visit per our beginner guide.

Achievement Hunting Efficiency Tips

Whatever family you are working, four habits stretch every session:

Bank achievements passively first. Story, economy and combat families unlock naturally through a normal run — check what is already done before farming anything deliberately.

Pair conflicting goals across runs. The one-hour speedrun contradicts Fishipedia completion; rare hunting contradicts route discipline. Schedule opposites separately instead of alternating mid-session.

Use co-op for count-based goals. Kill counts and progression families credit the lobby — four players generate shared credit faster, and the shared wallet makes role-splitting natural.

Verify requirements in-game before grinding. Launch patches adjust achievement triggers occasionally; an hour farming a misread requirement is the classic completionist tax.

What the List Says About the Game

Achievement lists are design documents in disguise, and How to Fish's tells you what Dazed Games considers the real game: story completion sits alongside collection depth, style expression and speed mastery — nothing demands grinding money for its own sake. The list respects both two-hour tourists and hundred-percent hunters.

That philosophy matches the game's positioning: a tight co-op sandbox designed for replay with friends, where the second and third runs are the point. Plan your achievement passes around who you play with and the list completes almost as a side effect.

Tracking Without Spoiling Yourself

Steam's achievement page shows global unlock percentages — useful for spotting which achievements most players miss, less useful for knowing what yours require. Cross-reference three sources before grinding anything: the in-game achievement description, the store page list, and one community guide's read of the trigger conditions — the Steam community guides hub is the fastest way to see how other players read each trigger without trusting a single source.

Watch for the quiet ones. Launch lists include achievements players unlock accidentally (story completions) sitting next to ones nobody unlocks accidentally (style counts under timer pressure). Sorting your remaining list into accidental-likely versus deliberate-only halves the visible workload immediately — most lists look shorter after an honest audit than before.

The Money Achievements: Passive by Design

Several achievements track economic milestones — total earnings, sales counts — and the community consensus on them is universal: never farm these directly. They arrive as side effects of normal play, because every boss kill, trick-shot session and cooked sale feeds the same counters.

The only mistake players make with money achievements is quitting early. A crew that stops at the credits leaves counters frozen; a crew that keeps fishing for skins and Fishipedia gaps passes every threshold without noticing. If your post-game plan includes any collection goal at all, the economy family completes itself in its shadow.

For speedrun-focused players the calculus inverts: one-hour completion runs skip so much income that economy achievements may lag behind story ones. Another reason the two-run structure works — each run's natural style covers different families.

The headline entry in this family is the Rich! Millionaire achievement: sell a single fish worth $100,000 or more. It sounds impossible — no fish has a base price anywhere near six figures — but the achievement counts the final sale value after multipliers, not the raw price. A high-tier catch that has eaten a 360 trick-shot bonus and come off the Grill hot can cross the threshold in one transaction. The practical route is the same one the money guide teaches: save a late-game trophy fish, launch it skyward for the airborne multiplier, cook it, and sell the whole package in one hit. The shortcut most players never consider is the Island 4 Lucky Bait Casino: roulette green pays 35x on any item you carry, so a $3,200 cooked catch wins $112,000 on a single spin — with a 36-in-37 chance of losing it instead.

The Hidden Mini-Bosses Behind Three Achievements

Three achievement families reward counting rather than story progress — collection entries, style/combat counters, and economy thresholds — and six creatures exist purely to feed them. None of the six is mentioned in any quest dialogue. Every one of them is summoned by throwing a specific boss lure into open water, which is why completionists who "finished the story" often sit at half the kill list without understanding why.

The summon pricing is deliberately lopsided and worth reading before you commit. The $40 Beginner Boss Lure is the only cheap ticket on the list, and it is a coin flip between two 1,000-plus HP fights — one of which drops an $80 fish and the other a $50 fish. At the other end, $5,800 buys a Goblin Shark whose base value is $6,200, meaning one clean kill barely covers the bait. Four of the six also carry contact damage between 25 and 40, so the hidden tier is not a quiet checklist: arrive with a real weapon and cooked fish in the quick slots.

Every boss lure is consumed 100% of the time on cast — unlike ordinary lures, which are lost only 20–40% of the time — so treat each summon as a one-shot purchase. If an achievement counter is the goal, budget the baits in order of cheapest-first and accept that the Bowhead Whale line runs through story progression rather than shopping: the Fish Bucket is a quest reward, not a shelf item.

The loot rules matter for the collection entries too. Boss trophies — the Albatross head, Giant Piranha skeleton, Pufferfish fin, Spider Crab shell and Whale fin — all carry a sell value of zero because they are quest objects, while the meat cuts are real money (Whale meat at $5,000, Albatross meat at $1,000, Pufferfish meat at $200). Selling a trophy early breaks the quest chain silently; the Fishipedia checklist tracks what each entry still needs. For the full trigger list — including the six summons disguised as ordinary fishing spots — see the secrets and easter eggs roundup.

FAQ

How many achievements does How to Fish have?

The full count lives on the official Steam achievements page; launch guides highlight named standouts like 360 No Scope and Terrorizing Bird rather than publishing complete lists.

What is the hardest achievement?

Community consensus points to the one-hour final boss completion — it demands route knowledge, disciplined spending and clean boss execution under a timer.

Do achievements unlock in co-op?

Yes — lobby members earn progression achievements together, which makes co-op the efficient route through kill and story families.