Heavyweight Fishing Beginner Guide: Your First Two Hours

The loop

Heavyweight Fishing is a fishing game with a boss fight bolted to it. You cast, you win a reel minigame, you sell the fish, you buy a better rod. Everything else — skills, traits, orbs, banners — exists to help you win harder reel fights against bigger fish.

Two stats decide everything:

• Power — how fast you win the fight once a fish is hooked.
• Luck — how often a rare fish shows up at all.

New players over-invest in Power because it is the number that goes up on every rod. Luck is the one that decides whether you ever see the fish worth catching.

Your first hour, in order

1. Finish the tutorial and catch anything. The Fish buyer stands on every island and turns your catches into Cash. Favourited fish are not sold, so favourite nothing you intend to sell.
2. Buy bait before you buy your third rod. Basic Bait costs 100 Cash for +3% Luck. This is the cheapest stat in the game, and every rare fish you catch pays for hundreds more.
3. Work up the rod ladder — but skip the traps. The Alloy Rod is a Power upgrade and a Luck downgrade, from 22 on the Shadow Rod to 5. The Grandmaster Steel Rod does the same thing at 250,000 Cash, dropping you from 30 Luck to 10.
4. Buy your first skill from Sage Yijiu on Beginning Isle. Skyfall Stomp’s 2-second stun is a placeholder. Taiji Quan Technique — a 10-second stun with damage every second — is the first skill worth keeping.
5. Do the daily Ticket quests. They are the free path to banner summons, and the 7/11 update explicitly reduced their difficulty.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Buying an orb before you have a skill line to put it on. Each orb boosts exactly one skill category — a Maoshan Orb does nothing at all for a Cloud Ascension build. Decide which line you are running first, then buy the orb that matches it.

The same applies to traits. Each skill holds one trait, rerolled at Nanjiang on Beginning Isle for 5 Crystals a go. Do not burn Crystals rerolling a skill you are about to replace.

What to aim at

• Short term: the Shadow Rod (22 Luck, 60,000 Cash) and Ancestral Bait (+50% Luck, 100,000 Cash). Together that is more Luck than anything you will hold for the next several million.
• Medium term: the Grandmaster Golden Rod at 1M — the first rod with 30 Luck — and a Legendary trait on your main skill.
• Long term: the two crafted 100-Power rods, and Level 1000 for Enzo.

Where the data on this site comes from

Every number quoted here is from the game’s public Trello board, checked against gameplay footage published in the last week. Where the two disagree — and they do in three places — both figures are printed and the disagreement is named on the relevant page.