How to Fish from Dazed Games starts with a boating accident - you and up to three friends wreck on a small island with no gear, no weapons, and no way home except one thing: learning how to fish. From there it’s a full physics-based fishing sim built around progression - catching and selling fish, buying better gear, taking on quests and bosses, unlocking new islands, hunting down rare fish variants, landing trick shots for cash, and gambling your catch away for more.

It’s a great hook for a co-op run with friends. But like most 1-4 player games without dedicated servers, it has the same catch survival and sim co-op always has: whoever’s machine is running the session owns the save. This guide covers exactly where that save lives on PC and how to share it so the group doesn’t depend on one person’s schedule.

How Does Saving Work in How to Fish?

How to Fish writes your progress automatically as you play - gear purchased, money earned, quests completed, islands unlocked, and every rare fish you’ve landed. There’s no manual “save game” menu to dig through. The game just keeps the save folder on the host’s machine current while the session runs.

That means the save is tied to whichever PC most recently hosted it. If that player is offline, busy, or between them and you is a bad week, the island run you were making progress on sits exactly where they left it - inaccessible until they’re back at their keyboard.

Where Is the How to Fish Save File Located on PC?

On Windows, How to Fish stores its save data under your user profile’s LocalLow folder, same as most Unity-based titles. Paste this into File Explorer’s address bar or the Win+R Run box to jump straight there:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\Saves

A few things worth knowing about that folder:

  • AppData is hidden by default. If you browse to C:\Users\<YourName>\ and don’t see it, that’s normal - the path above opens directly regardless.
  • Saves are written as plain .txt files inside the Saves subfolder. That’s a friendlier format than a binary blob, but it’s still tied to whichever machine wrote it - copying it correctly (and not mid-write) is what actually matters.
  • This is the exact folder that has to move to another player’s PC if you want someone else to be able to pick up hosting where you left off.

Finding the folder is the easy part. Getting a current copy of it onto every player’s machine, every session, without someone loading a stale file over a fresh one - that’s the part SaveSync exists for.

How SaveSync Frees Your Group From One Host

SaveSync syncs your How to Fish save across every player in the group automatically. After a session ends, the latest .txt saves are distributed to everyone. Next time anyone wants to go fishing, they pull the current save and host themselves - no messaging one specific friend to ask if they’re free to open the game.

Your gear stays bought. Your rare catches stay logged. Your islands stay unlocked. The save just stops being one person’s responsibility.

How to Set Up SaveSync for How to Fish

Every PC that might host needs SaveSync installed.

  1. Click How to Fish in the list on the left. You’ll see How to Fish’s save management page.
  2. Click “+ New Save” in the top right.
  3. Select your save from the dialog of available saves.
  4. Click “Create Save”. The save starts syncing.
  5. Wait for the green checkmark.
  6. Click the share icon on your save.
  7. Search for your friend’s Steam username and click Share.
  8. Your friend clicks “Activate” on the shared save, which shows as shared by you. The save is ready, they can host it, and it syncs automatically after that.

SaveSync also keeps a full save history: who uploaded which save and when, with the option to revert to any earlier one.

Why Use SaveSync Instead of Manual Copying

  • No built-in save transfer. How to Fish gives you no way to move progress between players’ machines on its own. SaveSync fills that gap.
  • Manual folder copying is fragile. Zipping up the Saves folder and sending it over Discord works fine until someone copies it mid-write or loads an older version over a newer one, undoing a session’s worth of catches.
  • No dedicated server to fall back on. Like most physics-based co-op sims, How to Fish has no server rental option - the host’s save is the world state. Sharing that save directly is the only real fix.
  • One purchase, every game. SaveSync isn’t How to Fish-specific - the same setup covers every other supported co-op game your group plays.

Keep the Trip Going

How to Fish is built around a long progression loop - better gear, harder islands, rarer fish. That shouldn’t reset to “wait for the host” every time someone’s unavailable. With SaveSync, the save lives on every player’s machine, and anyone can be the one who casts the first line next session.

New to the tool? Start with Getting Started with SaveSync. Want to know what to do when your usual host can’t play? See how to continue How to Fish when the host is offline. Rotating who leads each trip? Check the How to Fish host rotation guide.