Many fans of the classic Zelda games have noted the curious lack of a traditional fishing minigame in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and its predecessor. Considering games like Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess boasted surprisingly robust fishing minigames, it seemed strange to many that the big new open-world Zelda titles decided to forgo this fan-favorite activity. In actuality, though, both games do allow you to fish; you just can’t use a fishing rod to do so. In particular, Tears of the Kingdom contains a few noteworthy tricks that significantly streamline the process of fishing.
How to fish efficiently in Tears of the Kingdom
Normally, fish tend to swim away if you try to catch them in the water by yourself, so as morbid as it sounds, you’ll have an easier time if you kill some first before retrieving them. Shooting arrows at them works fine in this regard, but if you want to catch several at once, tossing a Bomb Flower or another type of explosive in the water can give you quite a hefty haul.
Having said that, if you want the absolute best item for fishing, look no further than the Shock Emitter. If you activate a Shock Emitter and submerge it in water, it will have a significantly wider area of effect. Any fish that swim even remotely close to the Shock Emitter will die as a result, which lets you collect entire schools of fish at once. And since the Shock Emitter can remain active for an incredibly long time before vanishing, you can massively save up on resources through this method. In my experience, attaching a Shock Emitter to a boat, makeshift or otherwise, let me catch fish almost effortlessly while traversing large bodies of water.
As for more obscure methods, a Reddit user by the name of CodyK17 shared an incredibly ingenious solution for maximizing the efficiency of fishing in Tears of the Kingdom. Essentially, the method involves killing a large amount of a certain type of fish before attaching them all together with Ultrahand and saving them in Autobuild as a re-creatable schema. From there, the next time players encounter these fish, they can select the Autobuild schema to automatically gather them all into one place.
Screenshot via PC Invasion
