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How to Un-Cook a Weapon in How to Fish

Last verified August 28, 2026 · Game version 1.0.10

How to Fish’s grills do not judge what you put on them. Leave a gun next to the sizzle, drag it up Mount Inferno, or drop it in lava and the game will char it like yesterday’s catch — complete with the burned model. Players keep discovering this the hard way on the volcano island, where simply carrying a weapon through the crater can leave it roasted.

The annoying part is not the look — a cooked weapon still shoots — it is that skins can no longer be applied, so your cosmetics are stuck behind the char until you clear the burn state.

First, triage which loss you actually have:

  • Item in inventory, blackened model, skins blocked → you have a burn state. This page fixes it.
  • Item gone completely (despawned, under the map, missing after a crash) → different problem: switch to the items disappeared guide.

The Official Fix (Patch 1.0.10): Dip It in Water

Patch 1.0.10 shipped on August 27, 2026 with the line players had been asking for since launch week: “Weapons and tools now get cleaned from cooking when dipped in water.” No save editing, no mod, no rebuy — the game itself now washes the char off.

  1. Take the cooked item in hand (or make sure it is the active tool).
  2. Find water — the sea next to your boat works, as does any lake or pond on the islands.
  3. Dip the item in. The burn state cleans on contact with the water.
  4. Inspect the result. If the model still looks charred or skins still will not apply, dip it again — then fall back to the legacy save method below.

Legacy Fix: Reset Cookness to 0.0 (Pre-1.0.10)

Before 1.0.10 there was no in-game way to un-cook an item, so players edited the save directly. Saves store the burn level on each item as a value called Cookness, and saves are plain text. The water dip makes this obsolete for most players, but it remains useful for old saves, stubborn burns, or anyone playing a pre-1.0.10 build:

  1. Quit How to Fish, then quit Steam entirely so nothing rewrites the file mid-edit.
  2. Open the saves folder: press Win+R and paste %userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\Saves (Steam Deck/Linux equivalents are covered in the save file location guide).
  3. Make a backup first. Copy the entire folder somewhere outside the game directory. Thirty seconds here beats regretting it later.
  4. Pick the newest file. Sort by date modified and open the most recent save in Notepad or any text editor — no special tools needed.
  5. Find every Cookness value (Ctrl+F) and set each one to 0.0. Change only those numbers — rename nothing, delete nothing.
  6. Save the file and launch the game once. Check the weapon visually and test whether skins apply again.
  7. If anything looks wrong, restore your backup rather than experimenting further against the live file.

Playing co-op?

Sessions write through the host, so run this on whichever machine hosts the world — after making one deliberate manual save first so you know exactly which file just changed. Guests should coordinate with the host instead of editing their own copy blindly.

Alternatives Worth Knowing

  • Buy a replacement — mostly obsolete now that the water dip exists, but still the route if an item is both cooked and lost. You inherit the rebuy cost for all upgrades and attachments.
  • Mods — a Nexus Mods page called “No More Roasted Guns” disables weapon-cooking altogether. It predates 1.0.10, so try the official dip first. Officially unsupported; the same cautions we list about unofficial mods in the FAQ apply.

Keeping Your Gear Un-Toasted

  • Treat the Mount Inferno climb as a hands-free section: leave spare guns on the boat and carry what you must.
  • Cooking food batches? Park weapons a healthy distance from the station first — the grill can’t tell dinner from defense.
  • Now that water cleans gear, a dunk after a volcano run is cheap insurance — but prevention still beats swimming after your shotgun.
  • The same Save → Main Menu → Quit discipline from the save file guide protects you here too: if something bad happens with gear, a controlled exit keeps the damage from being auto-committed.

Cooked Weapon FAQ

Is there an official way to un-cook weapons?

Yes, as of Patch 1.0.10 (August 27, 2026): “Weapons and tools now get cleaned from cooking when dipped in water.” Find any water source — the sea around your boat counts — and dip the charred item to clean the burn state. If a dunk does not clear it fully, repeat the dip. The save-file method lower on this page is now a legacy fallback, mainly useful for old saves or stubborn cases.

Does the fix work on fishing rods too?

The 1.0.10 note explicitly covers “weapons and tools”, and rods are tools in How to Fish terms. The burn state itself is stored as a Cookness value on the item, which is why the legacy save edit applied to guns, rods, and anything else the game decided to cook. After a dip, confirm in-game that the item accepts skins again before relying on it.

Do I still need the save-file edit?

Usually not. Try the water dip first — it is official, instant, and cannot damage anything. The Cookness edit is only worth reaching for if the dip somehow fails, you are on a pre-1.0.10 version, or you are restoring an old save. If you do edit, back the folder up first and change only the Cookness numbers.

My weapon fell into lava and vanished entirely — will this bring it back?

No. Both fixes cover items that still exist but carry a burned state. Gear that despawned — dropped off a cliff, lost under the map, gone after a crash — is a different problem class. Note that since 1.0.10, ground-dropped items persist in saves (up to 64, prioritized), so a “vanished” item may now be sitting where you dropped it: check the items disappeared recovery flow.

Sources & Verification

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.