Animal Crossing: New Horizons Fish Guide

Fishing is one of the main pastimes in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and living on an island presents many opportunities to catch a wide range of fish. Fish can be sold, handed into the museum, given as gifts to villagers, or displayed as furniture. What you do with them is up to you.

To catch a fish, find a fish-shaped shadow in the water around the island and equip any kind of fishing rod. While facing the water, press A to cast your line–though you will not cast properly if you are too far away from the edge of the water. Wait for your fishing rod’s floater to submerge under the surface of the water and quickly press A again to reel in the fish. Pressing the A button too quickly or too slowly can result in a failure, scaring away the fish.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a total of 80 fish–that’s eight more than Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Below, we’ve broken down everything that can affect how and when fish spawn. We also have a table listing every fish we’ve caught so far in both the northern and southern hemispheres, their spawn locations and dates/times, and the number of Bells you get for selling them.

Equipment

In order to catch any fish, you will need a fishing rod. The first rod you get in the game is the flimsy fishing rod, which can be upgraded to the fishing rod at a DIY bench. Don’t be thrown off too much by the various fishing rod types; it just determines how many times the tool can be used before breaking. Once a fishing rod breaks, just craft a new one at a DIY bench with resources found around the island or purchase a new one at Nook’s Cranny.

Location

There are three types of environments for fish on the island: ocean, river, and pond. The river is further split into three categories–river mouth, river clifftop, and general river–and the ocean also includes the more specific pier location, which is the wooden pier somewhere on your island (but not the one leading to the airport). Fish like salmon can only be found at the river mouth, which is where the river meets the ocean, while others, like the cherry salmon, can only be found at parts of the river on your island’s cliffs, for example.

Weather

Weather has less of an effect on fish than it does bugs, but it does still affect the spawn rate of fish. It is generally believed that rain and snow encourage rarer fish to appear; for example, you can only catch the rare coelacanth in rain or snow. It’s also worth noting that rain and snow also increase the spawn rate of fish, so rainy days and the winter months are a great opportunity to stock up on fish.

Shadow

Fish shadows come in all different sizes, and each type of fish appears as the same size shadow each time–either extra small, small, medium, large, or extra large. Longer, skinnier shadows in the ocean are eels, which can be caught like any other fish.

Sometimes you will find a fish shadow in the ocean that has a fin. This can be a shark in the water, which requires a much quicker reaction time to catch. Most fish shadows with a fin are worth a lot of bells, so you’ll want to try catching them the moment you see them.

Time And Date

Since time in Animal Crossing is synced up with the real world, or whatever time you have entered into your Nintendo Switch, the time you choose to play matters. The game goes through all the stages of a 24-hour period in real time, with different fish appearing at different times. Fish also vary depending on what month it is, which the game refers to as seasonality. If you want to collect every kind of fish, you will need to play the game at all different hours and throughout the year. The seasonality of fish changes depending on which hemisphere you chose, too.

For reference, you can always check what time and months the fish that you have caught will spawn in your Critterpedia.

All The Fish We’ve Caught So Far

The list below contains the time of year, locations and price for every fish we have found so far. This is divided into two separate tables, as the months of the year will be different for each hemisphere.

Northern Hemisphere

Southern Hemisphere