How to Fish Troubleshooting
Community-reported problems with official patch context. Every fix below starts by protecting your save data, because most losses in How to Fish get worse when players keep saving over them.
Error 0x11C7 — Game Will Not Launch
Windows Smart App Control blocks the game exe before it starts. Verify files, reboot, and only then touch the security setting.
Save Files: Location, Backups & Recovery
Exact save folder paths for Windows and Steam Deck, a timestamped backup script, rollback steps, and what Patches 1.0.4–1.0.9 actually changed about saving.
Items or Weapons Disappeared
Weapons, boat, radar, or quest drops gone after a crash, death, or disconnect. The safe recovery order — and why you should stop saving immediately.
Burned (Cooked) Weapons & Gear
Guns and rods char like fish near grills and lava, and skins stop applying. No official un-cook button as of Patch 1.0.9 — the community Cookness save fix, step by step.
Cannot Join Friends / Black Screen
The ordered fix list that clears most join failures, plus session types since 1.0.5 and the new 1.0.9 relay readout.
Fish Not Biting?
The regular rod only catches while you reel in slowly — the number-one cause behind “bait stopped working” reports, plus bait-tier checks.
Sound Duplicated or Robotic?
Audio stacking, slowing and crunching into a robotic drone mid-session. The clean restart sequence and the one-hour Windows audio service reset.
Stuttering & 100% GPU?
The in-game FPS limiter is unreliable — cap frames in your GPU driver instead. Tearing fixes, the 4090 stutter reports, and update-era checklists.
What Should I Do Next?
Progression troubleshooter by game state: still on Island 1, cannot find Island 2 or 3, or defeated a boss and nothing changed.
Stuck on the Loading Screen? Quick Fix
How do I fix the infinite loading screen (the boat animation never ends)?
The community-confirmed fix: from the main menu choose Host Game and set Session Type to Singleplayer, then start or load your game — the boat screen completes normally. This is the fix that works for players who already tried restarting Steam and verifying game files without success. One extra trap: opening the in-game menu while the loading screen is playing can keep it stuck, so let the load finish first. Official Patch 1.0.10 also increased the time allowed to connect, which targets the related instant-disconnect problem when joining friends — see our join-friends guide. If loading still fails after the session-type fix, protect your save first and follow the save-file recovery guide.
The Golden Rule for Every Bug
Stop creating new saves first. Close the game normally if possible, back up the entire save folder, and only then try a workaround. How to Fish writes saves on manual Save, Main Menu, Quit, and via an autosave roughly every minute — a crash does not create a fresh save, but reloading and re-saving repeatedly can overwrite the last good state. On Windows the save lives in%userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\Saves.
Patch context: 1.0.6 set the current save rules, 1.0.9 attempted a corruption fix, and 1.0.10 started writing dropped ground items into the save (up to 64). Player reports of missing equipment still appear after reconnects and deaths, so prevention beats recovery.
Sources & Verification
- Steam Discussion: “Infinite loading on boat - game won't start” — source of the Host Game → Session Type → Singleplayer fix, confirmed by multiple players
- Official patch notes feed (app 4001890) — Patch 1.0.10 “Increased time allowed to connect” — re-verification baseline for patch changes
Data on this page is re-verified against the sources above after each official patch. See our editorial policy for how we source and correct game data.