Journey to 100 Fishing, a levelling guide

Tired of staring at the screen while waiting for your bobber to dive? Let me help you save some time.

Intro

Welcome to my first ever guide written exclusively for the Steam Community.
This is just going to be a quick step-by-step guide to help you waste less time staring at the screen and get that Fishing skill maxed out in record time. Let's dive right in.

Fishing, how does it work?!

The simple answer, you get a fishing rod, locate a body of water, tap right click while holding the rod and then you wait for the notification before pressing right click again and you either pulled up something that isn't a fish (great!), or you get pulled into a mini-game of struggle with a random fish (booo!).

Now why is the latter bad? Isn't the goal of fishing to catch fish? Yes! If you want to waste time grinding your precious XP and not speed-running to lvl 100.

Here's the crux of the problem, the game doesn't care what you catch, you get the same amount of progress for catching some kelp as you do fishing up the legendary Starlight Nautilus, so why waste time battling a fish when you could be filling your chests with stinky kelp and your skill tree with skill points. For that purpose, it's important to make our catches hook faster, and to minimize our chances of hooking a fish, while also ensuring that if we do hook a fish, we can fish it up as fast as possible. Oddly enough, increasing our Fishing skill doesn't make us better at fishing either, all it does is allow you to fish in higher difficulty biomes.

Gearing up

Time for a checklist.
1) Fishing rod, use whatever you have and go fish wherever you can.

2) Glowing Bait, plant and harvest a ton of Glow Tulips and use the Bait Workbench to craft this bait and then equip it in your off-hand slot, that'll keep those darn fish off your hook, most of the time.

3) Rings, namely 2 Goldfish Rings, using the bait from step 2, go fishing in the Forgotten Ruins until you pull up 2 of these and equip them, they'll make things get caught on your hook faster and will save you a lot of time.

Technically these items are already sufficient, but there's a few more things you can use to help deal with those nasty fishes.

4) The Kelp Mantle, fish in the Mold Dungeon, a sub-biome of Azeos's Wilderness for one, don't forget to reinforce it at a salvage station to make fish a tiny bit easier to reel in.

5) The Diving Helmet, highly optional but you'll find it useful later, fish in the Sunken Sea for one.

6) The Scuba Fins... would do the opposite of what we want, catching more fish, but for completions sake, it can be gotten by fishing in the Underground, the dirty place you began your journey at, again, you don't need it nor should you equip them, until you DO want to catch fish, pfft, lunatic.

7) The Neptune Necklace, gives a boost to your fishing skill, either buy it from the Fishing Merchant or go fishing in the Clay Caves for one.

8) Consumables, Rare Astral Berry Pudding, If you (or a friend) has maxed out Gardening and can grow golden crops then I've got a secret for you, go fishing in Azeos's Wilderness in search of the rare Astral Jelly, cook it together with a golden veggie for a 5m long +79 boost to your fishing skill. Wait, weren't we supposed to NOT catch fish? Yes! That's why this is optional, but if you have it, good, if you don't have golden veggies, the non-rare variant gives a modest +63 fishing bonus.

9) The skill tree, for when you do get skill points.

Max out Angler's Advantage and Improved Bait, DO NOT put a single point into Fisherman's Luck as this will make you catch more fish, again, that's bad.

All set!

Armed with this knowledge you may now go fish wherever you feel like, knowing full well that you've saved precious time to become the best fisherman in the ruins... by catching as little fish as possible.
Technically I was going to figure out which area is the best for levelling fishing in, but that's going to be up to your own personal preference.

Feel free to upvote this guide so that the developer may take notice and hopefully rework fishing so it actually rewards you for catching fish.

Santa's Naughty List, or why you're going to Hell.

If all of this still sounds like too much work and you want to save even more time, there's apparently a mod out there called AutoFish by xiaoye97 which allows you to fully AFK, all you have to do is throw the line out once and it will automatically re-cast the line and perfectly micro the fishing minigame so that you can go watch a movie or take a nap. This is obviously cheating and you will be getting coal for Christmas. But I'm not your mother, do as you wish, I take no responsibility for what you do with this knowledge.

[Iteration Zero]

No, its all the same xp. doesn't matter which biome.

[Metam0q]

does fishing in harder biomes give more xp? should i just fish from my base with the glowing bait to lvl up?

[Feral Silver]

fishing is actually super easy, if you just fish at each of the active fish nodes (the swirling fishes in the water) you can keep fishing even with your other stats as you level. the fish nodes also majorly cut down on time waiting for fish to bite

[Og-the-Trog]

Does cast/throw range do anything?
Why is there a whole perk node dedicated to it??

[rparham685]

This is the last skill I needed to max out, really appreciate the info here. o7

[Aurani]

The time reduction from 2 goldfish rings win out in the long run compared to the little extra chance of not catching a fish.

[Lord Genom]

have u considered the lucky ring instead of the goldfishring for grinding? it gives 7% chance to get non fish items aswell

[X-Knight_3000]

how do you remove merchants

[Aurani]

Thanks, yup that is definitely my guide alright, seems they have some automated system that yoinked it as soon as I published it.

[Magz Out Loud]

Okay. Well, if you put a slash after each of these two in a search engine...
gameplay.tips
guides

and then add this...
core-keeper-journey-to-100-fishing-a-levelling-guide

I think you'll find it!

The struggle is real.