How to Fish Weapons: Prices, Attachments and Upgrade Order

Updated 2026-09-02 · Steam How to Fish

How to Fish weapons run from bare fists up to the assault rifle, and the three purchases that matter most are the Knife at $45 on island 1, the Shotgun at $150 on island 2 and the SMG at $650 on island 3. Every gun takes four attachment slots and a stack of bullet and damage upgrades, and the shop stock expands as you unlock islands. Prices below are player-reported from Steam Community guides written on versions 1.0.4 to 1.0.10, so treat them as close rather than exact; anything the developers changed is cited to the patch that changed it.

Every weapon and what it costs

Prices in this table come from player guides, not from an official list. The 28-achievements guide notes its prices were recorded in a multiplayer run and that weapon upgrades appear to cost less solo, while lures and guns cost the same either way.

Weapon	Price (player-reported)	First seen on	Notes
Fists	Free	Island 1	Needed for the Handyman achievement, which only requires the killing blow
Brass Knuckles	Not confirmed yet	Island 1	Upgrade sharpness to max before the spider crab
Knife	$45	Island 1	Players report far better damage than Brass Knuckles on crabs and lobsters
Dynamite	$25 each	Island 2	Crowd control and free fish, not a combat weapon
Pistol	Not confirmed yet	Island 2	Two guides say skip it, one speedrun route buys it as a stopgap
Shotgun	$150	Island 2	Best value early gun; carries several islands once fully upgraded
SMG (some guides call it the Uzi)	$650	Island 3	The one gun a Bean run keeps to the end
Sniper Rifle	Not confirmed yet	Island 4	The recoil-free answer to the Albatross
Assault Rifle	Not confirmed yet	Island 5	RubenS calls it mandatory for the high-health endgame bosses, but a solo Bean route clears both whales on a maxed SMG

Player guides disagree on the Pistol. The RubenS boss and weapon guide lists it as a usable option against the piranha boss, the 28-achievements guide says outright to skip it and buy the Shotgun, and the solo Bean route buys it on island 2 purely to get through one boss cheaply. On killscore it is the weakest choice: players report a maxed Pistol still does not hit hard enough to trigger the Overkill multiplier, which the Assault Rifle does.

Upgrade order island by island

This is the order two separate speedrun and completion guides converge on. It is player-tested, not official.

Island 1: clams until you have about $60, then Knife $45, crabbing rod $3, beer $12. One sharpness upgrade on the knife is optional.
Island 2: Shotgun $150 and fully upgrade it. Dynamite unlocks here at $25. Skip the Pistol unless you are running a timed route.
Island 3: SMG $650. Buy the extended mag before damage, then push bullet upgrades.
Island 4: Compensator for the SMG, reported at $600. Players who still cannot tame the kick suggest putting that money into the Sniper Rifle and levelling it up in the SMG's place.
Island 5: Suppressor, remaining bullet upgrades, red dot, and the Assault Rifle for the whale and the lava whale. The solo Bean route is the exception here: it never buys the Assault Rifle and finishes both whales on the fully upgraded SMG.

If you are chasing the one-hour run, the route is tighter than this and skips most of it, so read bean-achievement before spending.

Attachments: four slots per weapon

Attachments are bought at the attachment stand, and the 28-achievements guide reports four slots on any weapon, with two of them being either-or choices.

Slot	Options	Notes
Magazine	Extended mag	The first buy on the SMG in every speedrun route
Sight	Laser sight	Also the setup for the 5x killscore achievement
Optic	Red dot, or sniper scope	One or the other, not both
Barrel	Compensator, or suppressor	Compensator for recoil, suppressor reported as the smoother of the two

Players report the sniper scope and suppressor entering the pool on island 4, and that the cheapest way to unlock the Fully Equipped achievement is to fit all four to the SMG for roughly $2,500 rather than waiting for the Assault Rifle.

Two things changed in patch 1.0.11 on 1 September 2026. The iron sight was removed as a purchasable, because players were only ever buying it by mistake and wiping their expensive attachments in the process. In the same patch you can no longer downgrade from suppressor to compensator, so pick your barrel deliberately. Older guides written on 1.0.4 to 1.0.10 still mention the iron sight; ignore that part. Full history is on patch-notes.

Which weapon for which boss

Boss	Recommended weapon	Player-reported trick
Spider Crab	Brass Knuckles or Knife	It stunlocks after its charge; get behind it
Giant Piranha	Shotgun on the boss	The swarm of small piranhas is the real problem
Pufferfish	Maxed SMG	Phase two trails a poison cloud you must not walk into
Tuna and Albatross	Maxed SMG or Sniper Rifle	Fight from inside a building, step out between attacks
Bowhead Whale	Fully upgraded Assault Rifle, or a maxed SMG	Hold the beach at distance and fire short bursts into its weak points
Mutated Bowhead Whale	Fully kitted Assault Rifle, or a maxed SMG	Stockpile lava-cooked fish first; phase two is a healing race

The two whale rows are the one place where player advice splits. RubenS and the 28-achievements guide both build a fully kitted Assault Rifle for the endgame, while the solo Bean route carries a maxed, suppressed SMG through Whale 1 and Whale 2 and never buys a rifle at all. Both are player-reported routes, so pick by what your aim is comfortable with rather than treating either as the official answer.

Guides conflict on the piranha adds too. RubenS treats dynamite as add control and has you drop a stick where the small piranhas bunch together in the water before returning fire to the boss; the 28-achievements guide would rather you left explosives out of that fight entirely, on the grounds that blowing yourself up costs more than the adds ever will. Patch 1.0.11 settles part of the argument: you now die from your own explosives even with friendly fire disabled, so the cautious reading is the safer one now. Per-boss detail lives on bosses.

Damage, killscore and selling weapons

Weapon choice feeds directly into money, because killscore multiplies the sell value of what you kill. The multipliers players documented that depend on your gun include Headshot at 1.25x, One Shot at 1.25x, Last Bullet at 1.25x, Overkill at 1.25x when damage dealt exceeds fish health plus 70 (and never on bosses), No Scope at 1.20x for hipfiring, Melee at 1.05x and Explosion at 1.50x. The full table is on killscore.

Two handling notes. Players report that every gun registers instantly, with nothing to lead and no arc to compensate for, which is why a 360 no-scope is more forgiving than it sounds. And when a boss bites, press your weapon hotkey instead of dropping the catch by hand: players report that drawing a weapon drops the fish for you, while dropping it manually leaves you on fists.

The grill's 1.5x cooking multiplier applies to weapons as well as fish, so cook a gun before selling it. Since patch 1.0.10 on 27 August 2026, weapons and tools are cleaned of cooking by dipping them in water, and the same patch made dropped items persist between sessions, up to 64 total, prioritising weapons, tools, quest items and creatures. Patch 1.0.11 also recoloured item dots so dropped weapons show orange and dead players turquoise. Skins survive all of this: see skins for the Reel of Fortune, which takes drip creatures or quest items and only rolls skins for weapons available on that island.

Weapon mods worth knowing

Thunderstore has weapon-adjacent mods, all of them needing the BepInEx pack. zPaulin's Weapon Arsenal adds a Desert Eagle and an FN FAL to the last island's gun store at $9,000 and $45,000, with extended mag and bullet upgrades only and no sight or barrel attachments; its README states every player in the lobby needs the mod at the same version. ADHDCory's Minigun adds a buyable minigun on some islands, with the caveat that not everything is guaranteed to work across the network. NoMoreRoastedGuns stops weapons and rods cooking, and AmmoCounter adds a magazine readout. Aimbot and cheat-menu style mods also exist on Thunderstore; this site does not cover them. More picks are on best-mods.

Sources and last check

Checked 2 September 2026. Weapon changes, the iron sight removal, the suppressor downgrade block, the explosives rule, item-dot colours and the cooking-cleanup behaviour come from the official Dazed Games patch notes for 1.0.11 (1 September 2026) and 1.0.10 (27 August 2026) on Steam. All prices, island availability, attachment slot counts, upgrade orders and boss loadouts are player-reported from three Steam Community guides: the RubenS Complete Boss and Weapon Strategy Guide (30 August 2026), the All 28 Achievements and Post-Game Route guide (written on 1.0.4 and updated for 1.0.5) and the Bean 1.0.5 Solo guide. Killscore multiplier values come from the community Detailed Killscore Multipliers guide and are player-tested. Mod details are quoted from each package's own Thunderstore README.