Bean Achievement in How to Fish: 1 Hour Speedrun Route

Updated 2026-09-02 · Steam How to Fish

Bean is the achievement for finishing the whole game within one hour, and the How to Fish Bean achievement is the one players consistently call the hardest of the 28. The only route that still works is a rehearsed speedrun on a fresh save: clams on the lighthouse island, one gun carried through the middle of the game, and both whales killed before the timer hits 60 minutes. Two shapes of run are documented by players. One buys an SMG and shoots the bosses, the other pre-places dynamite and detonates each boss on the spot. Everything below is player-tested and player-reported, not official.

What Bean actually asks for

Bean unlocks when you complete the story inside one hour, which means handing the Mutated Bowhead Whale's tail to the boat NPC. The Fandom walkthrough frames the main route as five island stages and ten boss encounters, from the Spider Crab to the Mutated Bowhead Whale, so a Bean run is that whole chain compressed.

Players who own it report finishing times of roughly 54 to 57 minutes. The author of the solo 1.0.5 guide finished in about 54 minutes; the author of the all-achievements guide logged 57 minutes and 22 seconds with five attempts at the final boss. Treat one hour as a hard wall with about three minutes of slack. Keep a separate save file just for the run, never your normal playthrough. The game already autosaves every minute, and patch 1.0.6 changed what happens around a crash: it no longer saves when the application crashes, saving instead when you press the Save, Main Menu or Quit button, with that one-minute autosave still limiting how much you lose. Patch 1.0.11 then added save corruption checks and save backups.

Settings to set before you start

Setting	What players use	Why
Difficulty	Easy	Patch 1.0.9 added Easy: all creatures have 25% less health and do 50% less damage
Friendly fire	See the warning below	The 1.0.10 dynamite route relied on it being off
Party size	Solo, or a practised duo	Bosses scale up in co-op; solo is the usual pick
Aim and sprint	Toggle	Patch 1.0.11 added toggle aiming, toggle sprinting and hold-to-attack

Difficulty became changeable in the main menu and in-game with patch 1.0.9 (24 August 2026). Hard mode is not a mirror of Easy: creatures get 25% more health and do 25% more damage, where Easy cuts health by 25% but damage by 50%.

One change matters enormously for the explosives route: patch 1.0.11 states you will now die from your own explosives even with friendly fire disabled. The dynamite guide was written on 1.0.10 and told players to switch friendly fire off so they would survive their own stacks. That protection is gone.

Solo route, island by island

This is the gun route, from the player-written "Bean 1.0.5 Guide (Solo)" and the solo half of the updated v1.05 guide. The author finished in about 54 minutes on his second attempt.

Island	Boss	What you buy	Player checkpoint
1 Lighthouse	Spider Crab	Knife $45, crabbing rod $3, beer $12	Leave around 5 minutes
2 Leech	Giant Piranha	Dynamite, pistol, inventory slot	Straight through, no upgrades
3	Pufferfish	Standard lure, SMG, extended mag, bullet damage	Clear around 21 minutes
4	Tuna, then Albatross	SMG compensator $600, professional boss lure	At island 4 by 30 to 32 minutes
5 Volcano	Bowhead Whale, Mutated Bowhead Whale	SMG suppressor, scientific lure, damage upgrades	Both whales inside the hour

Island 1. Collect clams only, no fishing, until you have $60. Buy the knife, the crabbing rod and the beer. Hand the beer to the old man on the bench, use the empty bottle as bait, and cut up the Spider Crab. Eat clams if you drop health. Sell every drop, buy the radar, sail out.

Island 2. Use dynamite on fish, which players report reaches about $50 in one or two throws, and buy the pistol plus the inventory slot upgrade. Drop the radar in the boat every time you dock so you keep a free slot, and drop the knife once the pistol is in hand. Three leeches to the woman on the rock, then the Giant Piranha dies to a stock pistol.

Island 3. This is the money island. Buy the inventory slot and the standard lure, reel catches toward the centre of the island, and finish kills without aiming down sights, since the no-scope multiplier pays more per sell. Buy the SMG, take extended mags before damage, then push bullet damage to around 27 to 28. Keep fishing until an endangered species appears for the pufferfish lure. If a shark bites before you have the SMG, players say to die rather than fight it; get one afterwards and you sell it rather than unlocking the grill.

Island 4. Farm to roughly $1,200 for the SMG compensator and the professional boss lure, keeping only the SMG and rod in your inventory. Dynamite fish near the beach for healing first. Kill the Tuna, and if you are hurt, pick it up quickly so the albatross does not spawn while you recover. Fight the bird from the weapons shack, peeking out and stepping back inside for its ranged attack and its swoop. Keep the boss meat.

Island 5. Cook the three chunks of albatross meat, buy the SMG suppressor, at least one scientific lure and as much weapon damage as you can afford; players say the second-to-last bullet upgrade at 60 damage is enough with good aim. Dynamite fish for the hazmat scientist's whale bait, and dynamite more to cook in the lava as heals. After the first whale, lava-cook footsnails for healing and drop the rod for inventory space, then start the Mutated Bowhead Whale. Full detail is on bowhead whale.

The duo route

The v1.05 guide's second method is a two-player run. Island 1 has too few clams for two, so both players grab about $3 for a rod, fish for cash, skip hot dogs, and summon the Spider Crab once both have brass knuckles, baiting it into the lighthouse wall. From island 2 the duo buys a shotgun and maxes its damage instead of the SMG, which clears the piranha adds faster.

Co-op boss health is higher, so this route leans on explosives at island 4: about 17 dynamite in the weapons room, one player reels the Tuna in, then detonate. Players report the Tuna survives on 1 HP, so finish it with a gun, since killing it outright with explosives cuts the payout. For the Albatross they place around 25 charges and aim the Tuna at the landing spot. That pair left island 4 at 48 minutes and still made it, though they call 45 the target.

The dynamite route

The "Under One Hour Tips" guide, written on 1.0.10, kills almost every boss with pre-placed charges instead of a gun. The core trick is to light a stick, hold it until the fuse is nearly gone, swap to another slot to freeze it, then swap back at the moment the boss is over the pile.

Boss	Charges players place	Note
Giant Piranha	5 by the anvil, 4 to 5 by the slot machine	Second pile is for phase two
Pufferfish	8 near the slot machine, 9 near the big motor	Shoot the second pile when it rolls over
Tuna	15 on the gun shop floor	Reel it into the shop still hooked
Albatross	16 in the centre of the island	Drop the Tuna, light your own stick when the health bar stops shining
Bowhead Whale	18 on the floor at full health	Stand still and let it dive onto you
Mutated Bowhead Whale	15 and 20 in two piles	The guide's author admits this stage often fails

That last row is the honest part of the guide: the writer says the mutated whale repeatedly detonated the charges without taking damage, and he ended up buying and upgrading an SMG to finish it. Read the explosives route as a way to bank time on the early bosses, not as a complete plan, and remember that 1.0.11 makes your own charges lethal to you.

Where runs die

Failure is concentrated at the end. Guide authors allow themselves two or three losses at the Pufferfish, one loss across the two whales, and say a second whale wipe usually ends the attempt. Killing the Mutated Bowhead Whale at the same moment it kills you also fails, because the corpse despawns and you never get the quest item to hand in. Patch 1.0.4 nerfed both the Pufferfish and the Whale, and patch 1.0.10 nerfed the anglerfish, so older guide footage shows tougher fights than you will face.

What patches changed for speedrunners

Patch 1.0.5 (22 August 2026) fixed a bug that let players travel to any island without unlocking it, with "sorry speedrunners" written into the notes. Every pre-1.0.5 Bean route built on skipping islands is dead, which is why the guides used here are all dated 1.0.5 or later. Patch 1.0.11 also removed iron sights as a purchase and blocked downgrading a suppressor back to a compensator, so shop steps written before 1 September may not match your menu. Full history is on patch notes.

A save-file editing method for Bean exists and is posted publicly. This wiki does not cover it. For the other 27 achievements, most of them far easier, see achievements; prices and upgrade order are on weapons.

Sources and last check

Checked on 2 September 2026. Patch behaviour, the difficulty percentages, the 1.0.5 island-travel fix and the 1.0.11 explosives change come from the official Dazed Games patch notes on Steam for 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.0.6, 1.0.9, 1.0.10 and 1.0.11. The five-stage, ten-boss framing comes from the How to Fish Fandom walkthrough page.

Every route step, price, dynamite count, timing checkpoint and failure allowance on this page is player-reported, from four Steam Community guides: "Bean 1.0.5 Guide (Solo)" for the roughly 54 minute solo run and its island-by-island steps, the "Updated Bean Achievement Guide, How to Fish v1.05 Sub-1-Hour Speedrun Guide (Solo and Duo+)" for the duo route, "Under One Hour Tips/Guide 1.0.10" for the dynamite counts, and "How to Fish - All 28 Achievements + Post-Game Route" for the 57 minute 22 second finish with five attempts at the final boss. None of it is developer-confirmed, the guides disagree in places such as what you hand the hazmat scientist for whale bait, and the prices were gathered on older patches and not re-tested on 1.0.11.