How to Fish Receives Major Update With Private Lobbies and Eight-Player Support

Steam's latest breakout co-op sensation, How to Fish, has received a series of rapid updates from developers Dazed Games following a massive launch weekend. The macabre novelty game—in which players boat out to cursed islands, reel in angry sea life, and blast creatures with golden sniper rifles—racked up approximately 340,000 concurrent players over its opening weekend, drawing significant attention across the platform.

To address player feedback and stability concerns, the development team has rolled out several key quality-of-life improvements and features. Most notably, the game now supports eight-player lobbies alongside private, invite-only sessions. Matchmaking has also been cleaned up to eliminate fake servers titled "Game Name," and new anti-griefer measures prevent unwanted users from joining and instantly ending active game sessions. Players can now change session types while in-game, though a restart is required afterward.

Progress preservation has also been improved to combat unexpected crashes. In addition to a background autosave that triggers every minute, the game now saves whenever players manually select Save, Main Menu, or Quit. Other settings additions include the option to invert both the X and Y axes, while the minimum locked frames-per-second requirement has been lowered from 50 to 30.

Alongside these general features, the patches implement several targeted bug fixes and balance tweaks. Developers patched an exploit that allowed users to travel to un unlocked islands prematurely, and resolved a graphical issue where slot machine skins would turn invisible when playing in 4K resolution. On the balancing front, both the Pufferfish and the Whale have been nerfed, and the intended progression path leading up to the final island has been made easier for players to visually track.