Yuna’s Guide to Catching Rare Fish

This guide focuses on catching all the rare fish in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and completing your FishDex and museum collection.

Intro

So you want to fish ‘em all? This guide outlines all the rare fish in the game, gives you the ideal months to fish for them and shares with you my experiences when I was completing my FishDex.

Time Traveling

Will you have to time travel if you want to get this done today? Yes. All the fish can be caught in one calendar year, so if you are anti-TT, then you’ll have to wait. If you TT smartly and plan out your months and schedule, you’ll only have to TT for one year. Please read on.

Fish Bait

Let’s get the money out of the way first. To complete my FishDex, I used around 600 fish bait (60 stacks). Fish bait spawns a fish instantly in front of you, and is a huge timesaver in spawning/catching fish. Can you finish the FishDex without using bait? Absolutely. But be prepared to run around, A LOT. Sometimes a fish can take up to 5 seconds to spawn after you toss bait, just wait.

Fishing Technique

Everyone has their own ways, but I actually prefer looking away from my screen/closing my eyes, turning the volume up and just listening for the fish bite sound. It sounds like a big “water splash” sound. I find we often over-rely on the visual cues of the fish biting the rod and this leads to pulling the rod up too early. Sometimes you can do everything and time the catch perfectly but the fish will still escape. Nothing you can do about that.

Fish Size

There are 8 fish sizes: Tiny (1), S (2), M (3), L (4), XL (5), XXL (6), Fins and Narrow. Anchovies are size 1, tuna are size 6, sharks are Fins and eels are Narrow, etc. See the diagram below for fish sizes:

Now you’ll notice Fins and Narrow aren’t there but they’re both pretty obvious. For Fins, you will see an obvious fin sticking out of the water and for Narrow, it’s a large fish shadow that’s very narrow and skinny.

How do you determine the fish size using just the shadows? Experience my friend, and mistakenly catching a lot of fish that you thought were a size bigger or smaller. That’s fine, rather be safe than sorry. The most difficult by far is telling apart size 5 and size 6 fish. The 6 shadow is just slightly longer and bigger than 5 and I was often thinking: “Yes a XXL fish when it was just a sea bass”. LOL

Locations

Ocean- all the water along the beach including the pier. Contains only “ocean” fish.

Pier- any water next to the pier (wooden deck). Stand on the wooden deck and cast into the ocean. There should be two piers on your island (next to plane and another one somewhere on your island). Every mystery island has a pier too (where your plane lands). Contains “ocean” and “pier” fish.

River- all water that cuts through your island from one ocean to the other. One side of the river must always lead to the ocean. Contains “river” fish.

River Mouth- an area of the water between the river and the ocean. Also known as estuary or shallow ocean. See picture and imagine an imaginary line between the sand/grass boundary of the beach and the first round of waves from the ocean. Fish anywhere within this area.

Contains “river” and “river mouth” fish.

Clifftop River: any rivers or ponds that are found on level 2 and level 3 elevation. These are abundant. Basically any river area that’s on an elevated platform. Contains “river” and “clifftop river” fish.

Pond: any water that is completely landlocked. Rivers must lead to an ocean, ponds are 100% landlocked. Contains “pond” fish.

How to Determine Best Month/Time of Day to fish.

This is done via process of elimination. I always set a target of what type of fish I want to fish first. Then, I see which month and what time of day spawns that fish while simultaneously spawning the fewest amount of other fish. I use this link: https://animalcrossing.fandom.com/wiki/Fish_(New_Horizons) to see where/what/when each fish spawn.

Example:

We want to fish Tuna. Tuna spawn in the months of Nov - Apr and it spawns all-day and in the location pier. Start seeing what month spawns the fewest fish aside from Tuna in the ocean (remember pier spawns ocean fish too). By using the process of elimination we can determine that the two best months to fish Tuna are November (no squid!) or December (no seahorse). Aside from no squid and no seahorse in the two respective months, Nov and Dec also don’t spawn a lot of other ocean fish.

What about time? Well, Tuna spawns all-day, but the best time is between 9pm - 4am since Anchovies (a common ocean fish) don’t spawn between that time. Look at the link above and decide using the process of elimination which times are best. Or just look at my cheat sheet below, LOL.

List of Rare Fish and when to Catch them

I’ve listed the months when the fish are available and also my recommended month you fish in (Best month) and my recommended time (Best Time). This table is accurate for Northern Hemisphere only. Southern Hemisphere table to come. SORRY!  For all bolded fish, read notes at the bottom.