Fishing can be done either manually or automatically. Auto-fishing uses one energy per five rods. Manual fishing does not use any energy.

To start fishing manually, you can click on your ship to make the menu appear, then click fishing. To start fishing automatically, click the hook icon near the bottom left corner of your screen. In either case, you must select a rod to fish with, and then can optionally add a fishing paste.

When fishing manually, click the button near the bottom right corner of your screen to cast your rod. After a while, a fish will approach your hook. When this happens, a yellow bar around the fishing icon will start blinking. If you click the button while it is only blinking, you will chase away the fish. If you wait until it starts flashing more brightly, it will hook the fish. Hooking the fish is very easy to do, and more a way to reject fish of sizes you don't want or prevent macroing than an actual challenge.

Once you hook a fish, there will be a large blue bar with a vertical, yellow bar in it that moves back and forth. Part of the large bar will be dark green, and the center of the green portion will be light green. Click the fishing button again to stop the yellow bar. If you click in the dark green section, you make progress toward catching the fish of two times your fishing skill. In the light green section is a critical hit, which gives you progress of three times your fishing skill. I'll explain where your fishing skill comes from in a later secdtion.

You get three clicks to reel in the fish. The total amount of progress toward catching the fish depends on the grade of the fish icon. The grade is visible from the fish, with higher grades using larger fish icons. This guide uses the icon for the S-grade fish as its picture, and the grade of the others will be obvious with a little bit of experience. The number of points needed to catch each grade of fish is:


When fishing manually, hooking the fish happens automatically and will always succeed. The game will click automatically for you when reeling in the fish, but will probably tend to do a worse job of it than you would do yourself.

If you have accumulated enough damage within three hooks, then you catch the fish. If not, then you fail and the fish escapes. You still consume a fishing rod in the latter case. If you reject a fish by clicking the icon before the fish bites, then this does not consume a fishing rod.

If you catch a fish, then there are three possible rewards. One is some food to supply your fleet. This is commonly about half of catches, and far more than that in some areas. The second is 1-5 old chests. This is relatively rare and maybe 10% of the fish that you reel in.

The third possibility is a named fish species. The first time you catch a given species, it gives you a discovery for that type of fish. On subsequent times, it gives you some resource. Each fish species has a corresponding resource, generally of the same grade as the fish, except that D-grade fish give C-grade resources. Certain buffs could cause you to get two or even three of the fish resource rather than one.

The seas are divided into many zones. Each zone has 2-7 corresponding fish species. You can partially find zone maps by clicking on resources in your inventory, then clicking the pin to see where they can be caught by fishing. This will mostly give you a clear idea of the boundaries of various zones, except for when the same resource can be caught in two adjacent zones.

When you start fishing in a given zone, the only fish icons that you can catch are those that range from the lowest grade fish species in the zone to the highest. For example, if a hypothetical zone has an A-grade fish species and a C-grade one, then you could see A, B, or C grade fish icons in that zone. You could not see S-grade because that is too high, nor D-grade because that is too low. You could see B-grade in spite of there not being a B-grade named fish species because that is between the lowest and the highest grade.

When you catch a fish and get a named fish species, it can be any species in that zone of a grade no higher than the fish icon that you just caught. In the example above, a C-grade fish icon could only give you the C-grade named species. A B-grade fish icon would also only give you the C-grade named species. An A-grade fish icon could give you either the A-grade or C-grade named species. Any grade of fish icon could still give food or old chests instead of a named species.

There are three sources of fishing skill. The first is the rod that you use. Fishing rods are generally bought in item shops, though some shops only sell low grade rods. Capital cities sell all grades of rods. If buying a lot of rods, it is recommended that you buy them from an item shop in a city for which you have a high level of the local language, as this will give you the best discount. The fishing rods available are:


The second source of fishing skill is mate skills. Some mates offer the Angler or Legend of Fishing skill. These are listed as offering 3 and 5 fishing skill points, respectively. They stack across mates, but not in the obvious, linear manner. The amount of fishing skill that you get from each skill as a function of the number of mates is given below. The amount gained from the two separate fishing skills do add in the obvious manner.


The third source of fishing skill is various buffs. If your country has a prime minister, you'll probably having a +5 fishing skill buff most of the time. The Shoal of Flying Fish event gives +50 fishing skill, which makes it easy to catch everything with any rod. There can occasionally be other buffs, too, such as a +5 fishing skill buff during the first anniversary event.

Higher fishing skill means you do more damage with each hit. It also makes the yellow bar move more slowly when trying to time clicks to catch fish manually.

When auto-fishing, it increases the probability that the clicks will be successful. The probability of a successful hook when auto-fishing depends on the grade of the fish icon. The probability is (fishing skill) * (grade constant)/960, truncated at 1 if it would exceed this. The probability of a critical hit does not depend on fishing skill, both only on the fish grade. The grade constants and crit probabilities are are:


What you really care about when auto-fishing is the probability that you catch a fish, not that each hook succeeds. The percentage chances of catching various fish grades at various fishing skill levels, rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent, are given below:


Note that there are large jumps at particular thresholds, such as when it only takes two successes rather than three to catch a fish. It's possible to have fishing skill levels that are not a multiple of 5, but those are not included to keep the table from getting way out of hand. Fishing skill 80 or higher makes auto-fishing guaranteed to succeed.

The seas are divided into many fishing zones. I list the zones below, together with the fish contained in each.

Fishing zones don't have canonical names given by the game. As such, I supply my own names. If there is any port in the zone (that is, you'll be in the zone immediately upon leaving the port if you don't move), then I'll use such a port as the name of the zone. If there is no port but there is a village, then I'll use a village. If a zone contains neither a port nor a village, I'll just give as descriptive of a name as I can.

Fishing zones often cross boundaries between level, seaworthiness, and other requirements to enter the area. In several cases, a fishing zone contains a port with high requirements to reach the port, but part of the zone has much lower requirements. For example, the zone that contains Whanganui (which requires level 75, 140 seaworthiness, and 80 momentum) extends to the eastern coast of Australia, where it only requires level 55, 95 seaworthiness, and no momentum. Such zones have the port name marked with an asterisk.

Nearly all fishing zones contain multiple fish, apart from some exceptions listed later in this section. I list the zone name on the same line as the first fish in the zone, and subsequent lines list other fish in the same zone. Certain villages have very long names, so in some cases, I split the zone name across two lines for the sake of cleaner table spacing. There are also three fishing zones that correspond to the high seaworthiness areas where white elite fleets spawn, which is what "elite zone" refers to.

For fish, I list the name of the fish, the grade of the fish, the resource that repeated catches give you, and the big catch requirements. The big catch requirements are generally a range of months and/or a collection of weather conditions. D-grade fish never have big catch requirements, but higher grade fish tend to have more stringent big catch requirements.

Some data are missing. The name of any fish that I haven't caught personally via normal fishing is marked with a question mark. In some cases, I can get fish names from elsewhere (usually voyage.tw), but if I don't have an English name at all for the fish, I just leave it as three question marks.

If I don't have the big catch requirements, I just leave the boxes for month and weather requirements blank.

Weather requirements for a big catch are generally sets of weather conditions that allow the big catch. As a shorthand, I assign a letter to each possible weather status. In addition to the letter, I give the name of the weather, a text description of the icon, and the speed debuff (as a percentage) for your fleet that it applies. The speed debuff is irrelevant to fishing, but I figured that I might as well list it if I'm listing all the weather conditions anyway.


There are several species of fish that are caught in special, tiny zones. Let's dispense with those first before moving on to the main list.

Four species of fish are caught as part of a particular admiral's chronicle. As best as I can tell, those four can only be caught as part of a chronicle. The chronicle takes you right to the exact spot to catch the fish, but if you go back after the chronicle is over, you'll only catch food and old chests, not named fish species. With repeat catches impossible, the resources and big catch conditions are irrelevant. The fish in question are:


There are also four species of fish that each have several tiny zones. All four fish are S-grade, and always the only fish species in its own zone. Each has several zones, so I won't try to state the location. You'll have to find them by checking maps, whether resource maps or conspicuous holes in the zones of other fish.


Finally, we reach the main list of fish zones. It's broken into several sections because Steam has a maximum length of sections of a guide. All fish zones with a requirement larger than company level 70, 130 seaworthiness, 80 ice breaking, or 60 momentum are in the "high end" section. All zones in the other sections are reachable with those stats or lower--and often much lower. in some cases, most of the zone has higher requirements, but a small chunk is more accessible.

Suva is just outside the "southeast of Fiji" zone, so you barely have to move after leaving port to reach the zone.

The Antarctica zone is almost entirely not yet accessible, but there is a small chunk of it south of Whanganui that requires company level 75, 140 seaworthiness, and 75 ice breaking. The zone technically does not require momentum, but you must pass through a zone that requires 80 momentum to reach it, so it effectively does.

The Chersky and Barrow zones are probably in the game now, but the ones below them probably are not yet. They redid the arctic fishing zones in the latest patch to add what they wanted to add.

I'm not entirely convinced that the Wels Catfish is catchable by normal fishing, as opposed to being restricted to a quest or no longer accessible. If it is still catchable by normal fishing, it's much rarer than any other such B-grade fish.

The Mediterranean Spearfish is caught as part of Pilly Reis's chronicle. It may not still be catchable by normal fishing, though it used to be.

The Brunei zone is weird and possibly broken. Sometimes, you can catch the Striped Ponyfish, but not the Bigeye Trevally or Black Pomfret. Other times, you can catch the Bigeye Trevally or Black Pomfret, but not the Striped Ponyfish. This can be the difference between catching large numbers of the fish versus getting nothing out of several hundred rods. I'm not sure what you can catch is dictated by month, season, or what.

The data on voyage.tw for the Antarctica zone is weird and at least partially wrong. Both B-grade fish have the wrong names. It lists two A-grade fish, one of which has the name Right Whale, and the other of which has the picture of a Right Whale. Only one A-grade resource is available in that zone. Furthermore, if a second A-grade fish exists there, it's extremely rare, so I list the Right Whale as the only A-grade fish.

The Manta Ray is probably uncatchable by normal fishing, as its zone only offers C and D grade fish icons, even with S-grade paste. If the S-grade fish were available, it should not just offer S-grade fish icons, but also A and B.