Animal Crossing New Horizons – How to Catch a Stringfish

Let's take a look at everything you're going to need to know how to catch a Stringfish in Animal Crossing: New Horizons! This is one of the harder to track down fish in the game due to the timing of its spawns and the rarity of catching one. Never fear though, we've got some tricks you can utilize that should help you catch one faster.

How to Catch a Stringfish

First, we'll take a look at the Stringfish's Critterpedia information because it's vital to know when you can actually catch this thing. It only shows up in certain times of the year, so don't go fishing for it unless you fall into the precise months it is available.

• Northern Hemisphere: December - March
• Southern Hemisphere: June - September
• Active Hours: 4pm - 9am
• Shadow: Large
• Location: River Clifftop

We'll start by looking at the location which is at a River Clifftop. That means you will at the very least need a ladder, because what qualifies as a clifftop seems to be any part of the river that is above sea level on the island you are on. So, you shouldn't need to reach the highest part of the island, just a higher part of the island. I have seen scattered talk about people catching the Stringfish in the pond that is above sea level on your island, but I haven't been able to verify that completely.

There's a couple of different methods you can employ to catch the Stringfish. The first one is to head to a mystery island and hopefully come across one with quite a bit of river that is up on a cliff. If you find an island like one of these, you can run around scaring fish away until you find a Large shadow. Cast for the fish and see what you get and repeat until you catch one. Mystery islands are great for this sort of thing because the fish seem to spawn a lot faster. If you scare away more fish, you will spawn new fish that could potentially be the Stringfish. Here's how you can scare fish away:

• Sprint (hold B-button) and run along the river to scare them
• Pole vault across the river near the fish
• Cast towards a fish, get them to bite, and reel it in without catching the fish. This scares away the fish you got to bite and other nearby fish!

Fish will also be scared if you climb up a ladder near their spawn, so if you see a large shadow make sure not to climb up too close to it.

Another method is a bit of a cheat way to do things, but it could be effective if you don't want to farm too much Fish bait. What you do is gather up around 10 Fish Bait or so. This can be obtained by digging up clams on the beach. The little dark spots that spout out water is where you want to use your shovel. Use those to create Fish bait at your crafting table. Now that you have that, save your game by using the minus button. Enter back into the game and run up to a nearby clifftop. Throw in Fish bait until you see a large shadow. Catch it and see if you got yourself a Stringfish or not. Repeat this until you run out of Fish bait! Once you're out, you can hit the Home button on your Switch and close out of Animal Crossing without saving. Open up the game again and you will have all your Fish bait back and you can repeat the process until you catch the fish!

If you don't like that method, you can always just farm Fish bait and try it without reverting your saved game! That is pretty much all the tips we got for you on how to catch a Stringfish. You are mainly hoping to get lucky, so good luck to you anglers out there!