Guide to Fishing in Terraria

This guide will teach you how to fish in Terraria.

Requirements

Mandatory

bait
a fishing pole

optional/helpful
fishing potion
sonar potion
crate potion
angler armor
a cell phone
angler earring
high test fishing line
a tackle box

Getting started

To get started, you will need a fishing pole and bait. To get your first fishing pole, you must have a crafting table placed and 8 pieces of wood in your inventory. Purchase a bug net from a merchant, then break some rocks with your pickaxe and catch the worms that come out of them.

Now you have a fishing pole and bait. Now have the ability to fish!

How to fish

This is simple. To fish, you need to left click with a fishing pole in your hand and bait in your inventory. Let the hook fall into the water. When the hook starts bobbing, left click again and you will have caught a fish!

Angler

The Angler is an NPC that doesn’t sell anything, but rather assigns quests to players. Quest objectives generally involve fishing for rare fish from different biomes, which he gives you various rewards.

You will randomly encounter the Angler sleeping on the sand or on the water surface at an Ocean biome.

He will move to a house when:

There’s an empty house available for him.
You wake him up and talk to him.

Tips

A good way to grind for Bait is to create a jungle farm, to allow and break the plants that grow, due to the high odds of getting bait per plant. Possible drops are a Grubby, a Sluggy or a Buggy.
A good way to get money is to sell Bait to merchants
It’s a good idea to save up your crates until hard mode has been activated because of their chance to drop hard mode ore bars this can make your character much more survivable in expert mode
An easy pre-hardmode way to tell if it’s a full moon, would be to use a Deathweed’s blooming as an indicator. A Deathweed only blooms under either a full moon or a blood moon.