If You Aren't Fishing In Stardew Valley 1.6 This Way, You're Doing It Wrong

Summary Stardew Valley's 1.6 update makes fishing a more lucrative profession with new features and bonuses available for players to optimize their catch.

Using the Fish Smoker, Artisan, and Angler professions, players can multiply the sale price of fish, setting up a profitable fishing operation.

New accessories like Deluxe Bait and the Bait Maker, along with customizable bobbers and a Riverland Farm map, further enhance the fishing experience in Stardew Valley.

Fishing is better than ever as of Stardew Valley's 1.6 update, if only players know how to optimize their daily catch. Fishing has always been a part of the game; it involves a fun, if frustrating, mini-game, and can be a good way to make some money while farming takes a backseat in winter. But in previous versions, fishing was mostly a distraction from the real game of growing crops and cozying up to villagers. It had its own endgame goals, like catching all the legendary fish in Stardew Valley, but it wasn't as viable as a source of income.

That all changed with the release of version 1.6. This massive update brought sweeping changes to the game, introducing new dialogue, new events, and new hidden features to Stardew Valley. Many of these changes are focused on making fishing as good - and as lucrative - as it's ever been. With a little bit of know-how and a lot of planning, players can take advantage of these new features to turn their Stardew side hustles into high-paying jobs.

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How To Make Millions Just By Fishing In Stardew Valley

Combining 1.6's New Items & Perks To Exploit Fishing Prices

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As detailed by YouTuber Swyte, a unique combination of perks, equipment, and farm infrastructure can raise the sale price of Stardew Valley's fish into the thousands. In order to achieve this, players will first want to purchase the recipe for Stardew Valley's Fish Smoker from Willy's bait shop. The recipe costs 10,000g, but the crafting is much easier; players simply have to combine a single piece each of Sea Jelly, River Jelly, and Cave Jelly with ten pieces of hardwood. Each jelly can be easily caught in the body of water it's named for.

The Fish Smoker is nice enough on its own, as it doubles the sale price of any piece of fish that goes into it. However, players can extract more value out of every fish by combining this with a couple of Stardew Valley's Professions. Players will want to choose Artisan when they reach level ten in Farming, and Angler when they reach level ten in Fishing. These increase the sale price of artisan goods by 40%, and of fish by 50%, both categories that apply to smoked fish.

But together, these bonuses are more than the sum of their parts. They're compounded in order - first the Artisan bonus, then Angler, then the Fish Smoker - and each bonus stacks on top of the last. As a result, with all these bonuses active, each fish will sell for 420% of its base price. This is a monumental increase, and makes fishing much more viable as a primary source of income in Stardew Valley.

How To Catch Rarer Fish More Easily In Stardew Valley

Stardew 1.6's New Bait & Tackle Types

Now, optimizing the sale price of fish is all well and good. But players can also use a few tricks to improve the rarity of the fish they catch, while also making them easier to reel in. The first new fishing accessory is Deluxe Bait. Much like regular bait, it reduces the time it takes for a fish to bite, albeit by a greater margin. But more importantly, it also increases the size of the fishing bar by 12 pixels, which means it's easier to keep a fish on the line and reduce its stamina.

The Deluxe Bait recipe is unlocked once the player reaches Fishing level four.

Deluxe Bait can be crafted very easily by combining five pieces of bait with two pieces of moss, which can be found in abundance during Stardew Valley's new green rain weather event. It can also be purchased from Willy for 100g apiece, or, once the player unlocks the Deluxe Worm Bin at Fishing level eight, produced automatically. The Deluxe Worm Bin spawns four or five pieces of Deluxe Bait every morning, rain or shine, so a player can easily line their farm with them and produce more bait than they'll ever need.

If there's a particularly high-priced fish the player wants more of, they can also use the Bait Maker to attract it. Unlocked at level six of Fishing, the Bait Maker allows the player to put any fish inside, and the morning after, it'll spit out a stack of bait specially designed to catch that type of fish.

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And by using Stardew Valley's new Mastery system for post-game progression, players can unlock a different kind of bait: Challenge Bait. With Challenge Bait on the line, players can catch up to three times the fish on every cast. However, each time the fish's sprite leaves the fishing bar, the total yield is reduced by one fish.

Ideally, a perfect fishing operation would combine all of the above: Deluxe or Challenge Bait to catch plenty of stacks of a rare fish, then a Bait Maker to increase the likelihood of catching it again, and a Fish Smoker to double (or quadruple) its price. Players will also want to select their tackle carefully: the Curiosity Lure, which increases the chances of rare fish biting, or the Cork Bobber, which increases the fishing bar by 24 pixels, can help optimize a fishing-heavy Stardew Valley playthrough.

Other Stardew Valley Changes Make Fishing More Fun

New Farm Maps, Fishing Rods, & Customizable Bobbers

There are a couple of other changes in Stardew Valley's 1.6 update that, while not necessary for an optimized fishing loadout, can make the process a little easier and a lot more fun. For one thing, there's the Advanced Iridium Rod. Unlocked as part of the Fishing Mastery, this new tool allows the player to use two pieces of tackle and one piece of bait at the same time. This is a step up from the regular Iridium Rod, which only had space for one of each.

There's also Stardew Valley's new Riverland Farm. This is a new map that players can select for their farm layouts when starting a new game. As its name implies, the farmhouse here is surrounded by rivers. Players can fish to their hearts' content here without ever leaving their front step. However, they'll be somewhat limited to river fish, so they'll have to venture into town to maximize profits.

The Riverland Farm's total land area is greatly decreased by the amount of water surrounding it, so this map isn't recommended for players who want to balance fishing and farming.

Finally, there are a wide variety of customizable bobbers in the latest version of Stardew Valley. These Bobber Styles include simple variations in color alongside things like cat heads, baseballs, and Joja Cola cans. They don't actually change any of the mechanics of fishing, but they do look cool.

With all that in mind, it's safe to say that fishing has seen the biggest revamp of any Stardew skill. While farming, foraging, and mining are still just as viable, fishing may provide the greatest profits in the end, even if optimizing it requires a lot of complicated preparation. Fishing is more lucrative than ever, making it another excellent option for the player's primary profession in Stardew Valley.

Source: Swyte/YouTube