When most people think of Final Fantasy XIV’s most dedicated players, they probably think of one of a few archetypes: the players who have maxed out every class, the catgirl-filled roleplay communities, or the 24-person raids packed with so many status effects and particles that they’re genuinely overwhelming.
But, for a small but dedicated community of players, there’s an unlikely chunk of side content that’s considered the real endgame: fishing.
Aside from its combat classes, FFXIV has a few side disciplines: things like carpentry, botany, and alchemy. Its fishing class has been part of the game since launch, and it’s especially fleshed out. FFXIV has well over 1,500 fish to catch, and its fisher class unlocks access to Ocean Fishing, a duty that’s basically just a very laidback raid.
But FFXIV’s fishing system isn’t just really, really massive. It’s also incredibly complicated! Instead of a simple fishing minigame that mirrors the classics like Stardew Valley’s, FFXIV’s fishing leans heavily into the game’s MMO qualities. To fish, you’ll need to unlock and utilize 41 hotbar buttons alongside different gear. Also, some fish are only available during certain windows, and many have requirements for weather conditions, bait, and status effects. Some even have prerequisite fish that need to be caught first and then “mooched,” or used as bait.
The thing about FFXIV’s fisher class, though, is that it’s not technically useful in the grand scheme of things. Other gathering classes can collect resources that can be turned into valuable gear by crafting classes. Yes, there are a few recipes that can be cooked with the fish caught in the game, but other than that, FFXIV’s fish mostly just exist for achievement hunters, completionists, and people who want a neat little fish tank in their in-game houses.
Despite being largely disconnected from the main goals of FFXIV, though, fishing is a mechanic that a lot of people just find endearing enough to get hooked.
“I’ve always been a biology nerd—especially for native wildlife. As a kid [I] spent most of my time outdoors exploring, hunting for critters—mostly fish, reptiles, amphibians—which also developed fishing into a real-life hobby,” fisher Emiach Raethwind said. “As I got into fantasy roleplaying games, I was thrilled to find that so many of them have a fishing component, and FFXIV takes the crown for me with its engaging system.”
But a lot of these players who came solely to fill out their fishing logs realized that FFXIV’s fishing actually offers several massive challenges that require a lot of math, collaboration, and creativity to complete. Basically, players come for the cool little fish and stay for the decade-spanning collaborative statistics research project.
“There is so much nuance in how players can approach fishing in this game,” ChaosComposer, another fisher, said. “At the end of the day, it is RNG, yes, but the game provides so many options to help us increase the odds and push RNG in our favor which, as a statistics major, was a very appealing form of skill expression to me.”
A Home For Every Fish
FFXIV’s fishing system is fairly enigmatic, but quite a few of its players have still caught every fish in the game. Of course, there’s no better way to celebrate the community’s dedication to completion than an aquarium, which is exactly what a team of fishers started with a house that shows off every single aquarium fish in the game: the Eorzean Aquarium.
Fruity Snacks, who’s likely the most well-known fisher in FFXIV, founded the Eorzean Aquarium in 2022 thanks to a pretty clever workaround. Unfortunately, in-game apartments and houses can only hold a few aquariums, so players have never been able to display more than a handful of fish at a time. However, Free Companies (the game’s player guilds) are able to purchase houses and offer individual rooms to Free Company members, and these rooms each have their own tank limits. Each Free Company can have up to 512 rooms, and since the limit in each of these rooms is four tanks, that’s…a lot of fish.
Despite the fact that players had to spend quite a bit of time leveling up alt accounts to be able to join the Free Company and purchase private rooms, Fruity Snacks was able to assemble a team of eager volunteers (a lot of whom gave their new characters very charming fish-themed names like Sea Urchin and Vegetarian Bait) to take on the challenge. It was an instant success.
In fact, the original aquarium (hosted on the Malboro world in the Crystal Data Center) was so well-received that its volunteers decided to open two more: one on Spriggan in Chaos and another on Sophia in Materia. Now, all of the Eorzean Aquariums have become a go-to virtual date spot for a lot of players, in part thanks to the events they host and their ability to keep up with new fish added in patches.
“Over the past few years we’ve added ~100 new aquarium fish, a dozen or so new exhibits, and have hosted events like our upcoming Pride Event, All Tanks Wake which is our Halloween ‘murder’ mystery event where players have to solve a crime by talking to suspects (played by our volunteers), or our yearly FishFest which is a big global festival of fishing where players from all regions travel to fish together, do in-game fish-themed activities, and more,” Fruity Snacks told me.
The Eorzean Aquarium is just a really neat feat of coordination and interior design. The original aquarium currently boasts 39 rooms, and each one has a unique theme. Most rooms match the regions they’re from—Prism Lake, for example, features the coveted rainbow Warden of the Seven Hues, so its room is decorated with both rainbow crystals as well as flora from Prism Lake’s region.
Outside of the aquarium’s regional rooms, there are a few fun bonuses. One room boasts a touch tank with a little sink to wash your hands in. Another offers a cage next to a shark tank for a “shark encounter.” The Annex, a bonus building with original exhibits, takes this creativity to another level with an underwater photo studio, a dining room that explores fish used in cooking recipes complete with its own Google Doc, and a factory that imagines what the birthplace of the mechanical fish Aquamaton might look like.
Possibly the coolest thing about the Eorzean Aquarium, though, is its guestbooks. Most rooms are equipped with one, and they’re all packed with goofy jokes and earnest compliments from visitors.
“Almost cried for real when my partner and I came here for a date! Aquariums are so special to me and I can tell these rooms were made with love,” one player wrote.
Fishing For Advice
The Eorzean Aquarium has inspired a lot of players to get into fishing, but fishing is also a pretty unintuitive mechanic with a lot of depth—this is FFXIV, after all. For the past five years, Fisherman’s Horizon (a Discord server that’s been affectionately dubbed Fishcord) has aimed to lower the job’s high skill ceiling for newer players.
Fishcord is packed with experts who seem especially eager to answer questions right away. It’s also a bustling hub for resources, with an FAQ about how fishing works, channels dedicated to sharing spreadsheets with info on every fish in the game, news about upcoming events like FishFest, and bots that ping players when rare fish become available.
Resources you’ll find shared inside of Fishcord are just as impressive as the server itself. There’s Carbuncle Plushy’s Fish Tracker, a site that shares data on upcoming fish windows and their requirements that’s likely the most well-known resource in the community. Fruity Snacks makes guides on catching individual fish, and expert fisher Tyo’to Tayuun owns a website that tracks boats for Ocean Fishing duties. There are even resources for specific niches in fishing, like this one called Feesh Seeing that lets interior designers preview aquarium fish in tanks.
But the best part about Fishcord is that it’s also seemingly the headquarters of the game’s top fishers, many of whom are eager to share their progress on some very absurd challenges.
Above And Beyond
On its own, catching the more than a thousand fish the game has to offer is already a massive challenge, but there’s still a handful of players who have decided to go the extra mile by adding extra constraints to their fishing journeys. One popular way to make fishing trickier is by size hunting, or aiming to catch the largest possible size of each species. Size hunting is tedious, its most notable devotees tell me, and also it’s even less rewarding than filling out the already inconsequential fishing log.
“I think for me the charm of it is the peculiarity of the size system existing at all, up to and including a record book tab that many fishers don’t even realize exists,” Emiach Raethwind said.
“It feels very old-school RPG to me—an in-depth system developed that gives no in-game rewards. Not many game developers dare to do that these days. You won’t find pages of questions online of players asking how to get a size record, because the game does not acknowledge it as something to reward with an item or title. There aren’t YouTube guides about size hunting (yet?). Most fishers couldn’t care less about it—that makes it more interesting to me.”
There are goofier challenges, like the one Fruity Snacks took on to hoard a species that’s basically the chopped liver of the fishing world: the Momora Mora (Fruity Snacks currently has 18,401).
But other challenges seem like what I can only describe as “mild forms of psychological torture.” Caduceator is one of just two fishers to complete a no GP challenge, or catching every fish without ever using Gathering Points, from A Realm Reborn (the base game) to Endwalker (the second most recent expansion). Gathering Points are essentially the fishers’ “mana” system, and forgoing all the GP skills makes catching specific species incredibly difficult.
“Definitely the biggest requirement is patience! (but not the Patience skill that you need to spend GP for, haha),” Caduceator said. “No GP Challenge is proof that any level of RNG can be defeated if you try again, and again, and again, and again…”
Still, Caduceator managed to tackle the challenge in around two and a half years. They told me that the no GP challenge is full of surprises—certain fish that are taken for granted by regular fishers can become especially difficult to catch without GP, and some that are already rare become really tricky.
“The Greater Serpent of Ronka, which is what most fishers would consider the ‘final boss’ of No GP Challenge, involved me catching well over 13,000 fish over the course of all my attempts,” they said. “When I had finally caught every type of fish there was to catch, I was so overjoyed and relieved!”
Caduceator plans to continue the no GP challenge as new fish are added (although the latest expansion, Dawntrail, has several fish that require GP, which has halted their progress). It’s yet another demonstration of the incredible things FFXIV’s fishers will push themselves to do, even when there’s no in-game rewards.
Somehow, though, the biggest challenge in FFXIV fishing is still figuring out how it actually works.
A Decade-Spanning Research Project
Because FFXIV fishing is so vast, and because datamining its content is difficult, there’s a lot of information players don’t know about it. (Head to a fish’s page on the fanmade wiki, and more often than not, there will be quite a few question marks). Really, FFXIV fishing is its own game, and its most dedicated players are still figuring out the rules.
Over 12 years after FFXIV’s release, players are still organizing to figure out availability windows, bait, and max sizes, especially for fish added in new patches. Tyo’to Tayuun, who’s seemingly considered the most knowledgeable expert in Fishcord, has become the de facto leader of figuring out fishing data. Currently, he runs the server’s testing system. Players can sign up to become testers, and they receive pings with instructions whenever a fish’s presumed window goes live. They then send their findings, often including the bait they used, the weather, the bite strength, and the in-game time of their catch. This data is then added to a massive spreadsheet and analyzed to figure out the optimal conditions for catching new fish. I’m not overusing the word massive here, by the way. This is just one tab for a single fish added in Patch 7.5 (and it’s not even everything because Google Sheets wouldn’t let me zoom all the way out to see the last few rows):
Tyo’to Tayuun also analyzes this information and sends out these pings manually, which is apparently pretty taxing.
“People assume that more than one person is managing everything so I guess that says enough,” he said. “The hardest thing is not sleeping a lot, but I’m good at that so it works out.”
But to Tyo’to, the knowledge gained through this research is worth it. Figuring this stuff out is especially important because fish have set windows of availability, some of which can be incredibly rare. One fish, the Purse of Riches, is set to become unavailable for 92 consecutive days starting in August. (Fruity Snacks even peeked several thousand years into the future and found out that it’s set to disappear for 224 days starting in the year 3,627.)
Luckily, fishers have…plenty of time to prepare for that, but knowing everything about each fish in the game makes the class more accessible to new players. And, for experienced players who have already filled out their fishing logs, being able to understand every fish allows them to define the rules of the bonus challenges they take on.
Some of the challenges themselves are even rooted in testing. ChaosComposer, an avid size hunter, recently organized Push For Problem, an event dedicated to figuring out the maximum size of the fish with the largest size range: Problematicus. 33 fishers chipped in, and they caught 286 Problematicae to figure out the species’ max size. (ChaosComposer also told me that if stacked up, 286 Problematicae would nearly reach the height of Mount Everest!)
Size hunting, like most of FFXIV fishing, is steeped in uncertainty, and that’s why players are so eager to join in on testing events like these.
“We don’t truly know what the maximum size of any fish actually is,” ChaosComposer said. “The game doesn’t actually give us any indication that we’ve achieved the highest we can go. The best we can do is catch so many that it becomes statistically unlikely that there is any higher size.”
Outside of ocean fishing, fishing itself isn’t a very collaborative mechanic, but the community that cares about it enough to make spreadsheets and guides and charts has made it into a collaborative effort through events like this.
Tyo’to Tayuun, who describes himself as “an extremely asocial person,” told me that he appreciates the fishing community because everybody else in it is also so analytical.
“I like doing my work, doing it alone, and having the only ‘gain’ from it be whatever knowledge was acquired at the end,” he wrote. “However, fishing has continued to become more and more complex, and the need for collaborative efforts has increased. I continue to be surprised, and glad, that this necessity has not ‘ruined’ fishing for me, and that is entirely due to the character of the people who you interact with most often in the community.”
The Future Of Fishing
FFXIV is on the heels of turning 13, and its fishers just still keep coming back for more. Really, its fishing community is actively growing. At the latest iteration of FFXIV’s Fan Fest in April, Fruity Snacks hosted an unofficial fisher meetup at an aquarium, and around 175 fishers showed up in person (around 55 more than the last fisher meetup).
Thank you EVERYONE for coming to the Aquarium of the Pacific for the #FFXIV aquarium meet up!
I hope you had fun and enjoyed fish seeing! pic.twitter.com/kr3jJYbjjn
— Fruity Snacks🎣 (@fisherfruity) April 24, 2026
Fishing, however, hasn’t undergone any especially notable reworks since Ocean Fishing was added in 2020. Patch 7.5, which came out in late April, introduced quite a bit of new fishing content (including a really adorable whale shark minion that everyone won’t stop talking about) for players to analyze, but players still don’t really know where fishing is headed. After all, it’s rarely brought up when news is shared at events like Fan Fest. Still, a lot of FFXIV’s fishers are optimistic about recent and upcoming changes to the class.
“I think fishing is in a great spot,” Emiach Raethwind said. “Endwalker and Dawntrail were massive boons to the fishing tools available, and really rewarded the fishing community for years of making the job their ‘main’ with an ever-deepening system that rewards thinking and resource management. More players are fishing than ever and we are in a really sweet spot of being able to minimize the RNG without killing off what makes fishing infamous in FFXIV.”
But others feel like they don’t even need to be optimistic. Fishing still has plenty of mysteries to solve, and it doesn’t really need to change at all to stay relevant. As long as the servers are up, FFXIV’s most dedicated fishers will stick around to share their catches, build guides, take on new challenges, and figure out how fishing even works to begin with.
“There’s something new being discovered all the time,” Fruity Snacks said. “New ideas for catching fish, new conditions, new strategies, new combinations for skills… It’s a job that’s been around since the launch of the game and we’re still learning new things about it. It’s never really solved; there’s always something new to learn and test. And you don’t really see that anywhere else.”
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