Fishing

Fishing is a calming job that takes you away from the hustle and bustle that is the Tycoon life. It lets you have thoughts about your next adventure or next lavish vehicle purchase and earn money while doing it! Does anyone smell fish?

Getting Started with Traditional Fishing

The speed of the quick-time event fishing bar is related to your FPS. If the bar is moving too fast, try enabling Vsync/Gsync/Freesync and lowering your monitor's refresh rate.

To start fishing, you need to navigate to any Job Center  (except for Life Invader) and select the Fisherman job. Navigate to the Boat Shop  that’s located at the Heliport, SW of Los Santos, and purchase a boat for your ventures. If you have a boat, navigate to the Watercraft Garage and you can spawn it there.

_{Note: A boat is not required to get started, as the river and lakes can be accessed by land.}

Once you’ve got a boat, you need to navigate to one of the many Fishing Zones, which are marked on the map by red fishhooks . When starting out, you are only able to catch certain fish. The best location to start out would be in a freshwater spot like the Zancudo River, Vinewood Hills, or the Land Act Reservoir. Details on which fish you can catch can be seen by selecting the individual fishing zone icons on the map.

Once you get to a Fishing Zone, stop in place and get out of your boat, hit the ( , ) key (if it fails, you can use the period key too) and this will anchor your boat in place. Now press E, you’ll get this quick-time event on your screen:

Press E when the red bar becomes green; it’ll repeatedly shrink and expand so if you miss it, you get more chances to catch it in time. The yellow bar is how long you have until time expires and the fish is off the hook.

Once you’ve caught enough fish, navigate to your inventory and gut them all.

M → Inventory  → Fish → Gut all fish

Or

M → Inventory  → Gut Knife → Gut fish

Once your inventory is full, and you've gutted the fish, put your fish meat in your boat's trunk. This can be done in two ways:

B → Trunk → Put → Left Arrow on fish meat (or use Put All option if no other weighted items are in your inventory)

Or

M → Car/Vehicle Options → Access Trunk → Put → Left Arrow on fish meat (or use Put All option if no other weighted items are in your inventory)

Assuming your inventory and your trunk are now full of fish meat, navigate to a Fish Importer and start selling the meat. In exchange for the meat, you will receive Money and Fishing XP, alternatively, you can sell the fish meat to other players at the Marketplace in exchange for more money, but no experience. If you do decide to sell to players it might be useful to store the fish meat in any Self Storage. Make sure to use Storage Cards to avoid massive fees.

The fish meat can also be used in the Trucking (Refrigerated) route.

The type/quality of fish you receive depends on location, a good rule of thumb is the harder to get to, the better the fish you receive will be. The Oil Rig is the best location for traditional fishing. It is also worth noting that fishing in rainy or stormy weather will yield the greatest amount of fish as the catch time is halved during these periods.

Gut Knives

Gutting with a knife can be bound to a key. For more info, check out the Binds page.

A Gut Knife (15kg) can be purchased at the Market(Fishing/Diving) for $13,500,000 ($13.5M).
The Gut Knife can gut all the fish in your inventory at once rather than manually gut each fish. (You still need the required level to gut the fish!)
When gutting fish, there is a roughly 1:100 chance of the knife upgrading to a StatTrak^TM variant.

A StatTrak^TM Gut Knife will track how many fish you gut, which can be seen in the item description.
When gutting fish with the StatTrak^TM Gut Knife, there is yet another 1:100 chance of the knife upgrading to a new form. When you upgrade to 1 (one) of the 4 (four) variants of the StatTrak gut knife, it cannot upgrade to a new variant ever again.

The different forms are:

• StatTrak^TM Gut Knife | Autotronic, which allows you to gut any fish regardless of level. It also has a doubled gut speed.
• StatTrak^TM Gut Knife | Tiger Tooth, which is twice as fast as the Autotronic and only weighs 10kg (from 15kg).
• StatTrak^TM Gut Knife | Weightless, which is five times as fast as the Tiger Tooth and as the name implies weighs nothing.
• StatTrak^TM Gut Knife | Grinder, which automatically guts fish as you obtain them.
  
  

Each new form is rarer to get than the previous one, making the autotronic a very common result.

The StatTrak™ Gut Knife can also be bought for 50 Skill Level Tokens, skipping the Gut Knife entirely.

Tackles and Rods

Tackles and rods can be used to speed up your traditional fishing. Tackles can be used for net fishing as well. These items are obtained through the Prospecting Job.

Name	Use
Fishing Tackle	Consumed when casting, improves catch rates by up to 10%!
Rare Fishing Tackle	Consumed when casting, improves catch rates by up to 30%!
Epic Fishing Tackle	Consumed when casting, improves catch rates by up to 40%!
Legendary Fishing Tackle	Consumed when casting, improves catch rates by up to 50%!
Shiny Rods	Automatically fishes for you for 5 minutes before breaking.

Net Fishing

Once you reach Fishing Level: 30, you can use a Reefer to do trawling. On the map, you will find green versions of the fish anchor icons . They become visible if you are in a compatible trawler boat. There’s a smaller amount of them, but once you get there you will see there is a large radius. As you navigate through the marked area with your boat, you will periodically get small bundles of fish - there will also be various checkpoints that appear within the circle (they appear randomly as long as you are within the radius), navigate through them to get additional bonus fish. After reaching Fishing Level: 70 you can start using Tug for net fishing. Everything that applies to normal fishing zones for converting and selling fish meat applies here too.

Pot Fishing

1. To start, head to Market(Fishing/Diving) and buy pots for skill tokens (1 pot costs 1 skill token).
   • You can buy crab pots, lobster pots and sand pots. Crab pots give more fish, but less immediate experience. Lobster pots give more immediate experience, but less fish. Sand pots will give out sand instead of fish
     • In other words, crab pots give more overall experience when the fish meat is sold at the Fish Importer, but are also the best option for players looking for more fish meat.
2. Place them on any open water (pools won't work) and wait for your meat and EXP while doing something completely different.

Keep in mind that you can only place 40 pots at the same time - there is one limit for all pot types.

Depending on your level, pots can stay in the water for a different amount of time - 3 hours at Fishing level 1 and up to 22 hours at Fishing level 100. After peak time you have about 24 hours to pick up your loot. After this period, pots will start to degrade one step every 12 hours.

Yield can degrade up to 50% of the max value if not collected on time.

You get 6 crabs for every hour the pot is in the water until you reach the maximum limit. The maximum timeframe is displayed, when you lay them on the ocean's floor.

You get 50x Fish Meat for gutting of 1 crab.

Fishing Watercraft

There are various boats to pick from. Boats come in all shapes and sizes, as well as prices.

Name	Seats	Price	Capacity	Fuel
Dinghy	2	$350,000	150kg	250L
Dinghy	2	$400,000	200kg	250L
Dinghy	4	$450,000	250kg	250L
Dinghy	4	$500,000	300kg	250L
Jetmax	2	$550,000	350kg	250L
Speeder	4	$600,000	400kg	250L
Speeder	4	$650,000	450kg	250L
Squalo	2	$700,000	500kg	250L
Suntrap	4	$750,000	550kg	250L
Toro	4	$800,000	600kg	250L
Toro	4	$850,000	650kg	250L
Tropic	4	$900,000	700kg	250L
Tropic	4	$1,000,000	750kg	250L
Sailboat	4	$5,000,000	1000kg	250L
Reefer (Req. L.30 Fishing)	1	$10,000,000	5000kg	250L
Tug (Req. L.70 Fishing)	1	$100,000,000	10000kg	250L

Name	Price	Fuel	Top Speed in mph
Seashark	$350,000	Unknown	Unknown
Lifeguard Seashark	$400,000	Unknown	Unknown
Seashark	$400,000	Unknown	Unknown

Whichever boat you buy, you will have an enjoyable experience all the same.

Milestones

Unlock	Fishing Level requirement
You can now use Trawlers for fishing	30
You can now use the Tug for trawling	70

Locations / Legend

	This is the standard Fishing Zone - come here to fish. There are several of them scattered on the map. You can see which types of fish are catchable in the zones by selecting the icon on your map.
	This is a unique Fishing Zone, designed for Net Fishing, there are 5 of them in the top half of the map.
	This is a Fish Importer, sell your fish here. There are 4 of them, one being at LS Docks, one in the Alamo Sea, another between Zancudo and Paleto, and the last at the San Chianski Airport.
	This is a Watercraft Garage, spawn your boat here. There are 4 of them. Three of them are at the top half of the map, the last is at the bottom. More garages can be unlocked by purchasing Businesses along the coast.
	This is the Boat Shop, purchase your boat(s) here. One is at the Helitours Helipad SW of Los Santos, the other can be found just north of the Alamo Sea in Galilee.

Fish Importers

Use the tabbers below to see the different fish importers:

Boat Shop

Use the tabbers below to see the different boat shops:

Fishing Zone

Example of the information shown when selecting a fishing zone icon.

Relevant Community Videos

Video made by community member catosaur explaining the Fishing Skill.

Video made by community member Schmoigey explaining the Fishing Skill.