If you want to collect all the fish and earn that Golden Fishing Rod then you’re going to want to know how to catch a Mahi-mahi in Animal Crossing: New Horizons! While knowing where to go with this fish isn’t too difficult, catching it might be another story because it’s particularly rare. We’ll walk you through a few tips that will hopefully help you catch it faster.
How to Catch a Mahi-mahi
The Mahi-mahi is a fish you can only catch if it’s near a pier. This can be the pier that leads to the airport, the one on the side of your island, or one that is located on a mystery island. It doesn’t matter which, it likely just matters that you are standing on a pier when you cast for it or that the spawn is near the pier (haven’t confirmed this). Now, you’ll need to make sure it’s in seasons, so here’s a look at when the Mahi-mahi will show up:
- Northern Hemisphere: May - October Southern Hemisphere: November - April Active Hours: All Day Shadow: Large Location: Pier
Pier fish can be pretty hard to come by, so first you’ll want to make sure to cast for any fish when they are near a pier. You can catch Tuna, Blue Marlin, Giant Trevally, or Mahi-mahi depending on the season. These all sell pretty well, which makes them pretty rare.
If you want to farm for the Mahi-mahi, you will need to gather up a lot of Fish Bait. You can get this by running around the beach and looking for little dark holes that spout out water. Dig this location up with a shovel and you should end up with a Manilla clam. You can take that over to your crafting table and make yourself some Fish bait. You will want to farm this up quite a bit. Now that you have your bait, head to a pier and scatter it into the water. Each time you do this, you will notice a fish shows up. If it’s not a large shadow, you can safely just throw more bait into the water and try again. Keep this up until you catch yourself a Mahi-mahi.
Still haven’t caught one? Well, there’s one more trick we can try but it’s not super reliable. You can take trips to mystery islands for 2,000 Nook Miles each. Doing this will have you encounter various different islands. Some will be full of tarantulas (sometimes scorpions) or rare flowers, and one in particular will always spawn large shadow fish! This is the one we’d be looking to find, because you can then toss Fish bait off the pier of the island and hopefully find yourself a Mahi-mahi! This is one of the few ways you can really narrow down the pool of fish you can catch.
That’s everything we’ve got on the Mahi-mahi, good luck out there anglers!
