Hooked Inc: Fisher Tycoon is a fun and simple idle fishing mobile game created by Lion Studios.
In the game, you are a fisherman taking on the world of fishing.
You start out on the shallow coast, but make your way to deeper and more exciting waters as you progress through the game.
Hooked Inc: Fisher Tycoon is available on Google Play and the App Store.
Along your journey, you catch new fish, find vast monsters of the deep, upgrade your gear, and discover treasures.
Everyone can enjoy Hooked Inc: Fisher Tycoon, as it is a simple idle game with clean graphics.
In this guide, we go over tips and tricks to make you a great fisher in Hooked Inc.
Table of contents
- Swipe fish to catch them
- Expand your crew
- Upgrade your boat
- Daily catch and lucky wheel
- Rake in boxes and chests
- Complete your goals for gems
- Find the monsters of the sea
- Go to deeper waters
- Collect fishing experience
- Find and equip items
Swipe fish to catch them
Your fishing crew will automatically reel in a decent amount of fish, but if you manually catch fish yourself, you can significantly increase your earnings.
To catch fish yourself in Hooked Inc: Fisher Tycoon, swipe across areas of the water where silhouettes of fish are present.
Whenever you swipe over a silhouette of a fish, you instantly reel in that fish and receive some cash.
An excellent method for maximizing the amount of fish you catch is to swipe across the screen from one side to another quickly.
By using this method, you catch all fish who appear near your boat, or at least most of them.
Furthermore, when you see a school of fish on the screen, be sure to swipe on it as fast as possible.
Catching a school of fish gives a ton of cash and doesn’t appear too often.
Expand your crew
Expanding your crew is an excellent way to increase boosts, such as your chance of getting better fish or increase fish value.
At each new location, you unlock, two more crewmembers become available to purchase.
Right when you unlock a new location, you can purchase those two crewmembers directly if you wish to do so.
Otherwise, they are just added to the pool of random crewmembers you can buy.
You can see all your crewmembers on the left side of the screen, and upgrade them by spending gems.
Crewmembers cost gems to unlock, the premium currency in Hooked Inc: Fisher Tycoon.
However, because of the numerous ways to get gems in the game, you can get quite a few crew members in no time by just playing the game.
Some crew members’ boost affects all fish at all locations, while some only affect specific types of fish.
Upgrade your boat
Upgrades are essential in Hooked Inc if you want to make it to new locations.
However, you will probably find yourself with all your available upgrades maxed out quite quickly, at least at the beginning of the game.
That’s why you should upgrade your boat.
Each time you upgrade your boat, you unlock two more boosts you can then purchase.
Some of the upgrades waiting for you at higher boat levels include massive increases to fish value per upgrade, increased number of fish on the surface for you to swipe, and much more.
Besides unlocking new boosts, the boat itself also improves at some levels.
These upgrades to the boat include adding more fishing rods for idling, which means you catch way more fish passively, a major boost to your earnings.
In many cases, we believe it is worth it to save up for the next boat upgrade before you maxed out the boosts available to you.
Daily catch and lucky wheel
Players can earn some great extra rewards by catching a fish every day, which basically just means you have to log in.
Similar to other games, the more days you collect daily rewards, the better the rewards.
Therefore, even if you don’t have time to play, just logging in quickly to claim your reward is a good idea.
The lucky wheel allows players to spin for boosts and the jackpot.
All but one slot are boosts, which increases all your cash earned by 2x, 3x, or 4x for a given amount of time.
If you are lucky enough to roll the jackpot, you get some gems.
The amount of gems you get from the jackpot depends on how many spins you’ve done since getting the jackpot last.
Each spin that doesn’t land on the jackpot increases it by a couple of gems.
Every day, you get a free spin on the lucky wheel, but you can keep on spinning it throughout the day by watching ads.
Rake in boxes and chests
There are three different kinds of reward boxes you can find in the waters of Hooked Inc.
To pick up a reward box, swipe over it when it appears on your screen.
You’ll find a list of all your reward boxes in the menu on the right side of the screen, next to your mission and whatnot.
The first reward box is the simple cardboard box, which contains an amount of cash relative to your boosts and your progress.
You can open the cardboard box as soon as you get it, but have the option to double its value by watching an ad.
Chests are the second most common reward box you will find in the water.
Chests contain a random amount of gems within a range, and some xp.
To open the chest, you have to watch an ad.
There is no other way to open it.
Item boxes are not that common to find, at least not the ones of higher rarity.
To open an item box, you either have to wait its specified time or spend gems.
The higher rarity an item box is, the more time it takes before you can open it or the more gems you have to spend to open it.
Complete your goals for gems
The single best way to get gems as a free-to-player in Hooked Inc is to complete goals.
You always have a goal to play for, which you can find in the right side menu under the green icon.
Once you complete a goal, you unlock a new one.
Goals are essentially just missions, which ask you to complete a certain task.
A typical goal in the game is to catch x amount of fish or upgrade your boat 100 times total.
Each goal you complete gives you 10 gems, so you can quite quickly gather a bunch of gems by focusing on completing goals.
Find the monsters of the deep
All locations in the game feature their own monster, which rarely shows itself.
When it does, the sky turns dark and gloomy, and you see a huge silhouette swim through the waters around your boat.
Contrary to regular fish you can catch by swiping, monsters or bosses have a lot of HP. You can’t just swipe it once to catch it; you have to deal enough damage to it before it swims out of the screen again.
If you don’t bring it to zero HP before it’s gone, you don’t catch it and have to wait for it to appear some other time again.
Each swipe doesn’t deal the same amount of damage; each swipe’s damage depends on your boosts, progress, and items.
Therefore, there will be times where you simply cannot deal enough damage to the boss before it’s gone, even if you spot it as soon as it spawns.
In this case, don’t wait for it to respawn before moving on to the next location.
You can always come back by claiming fishing experience, and it will be easier then.
Go to deeper waters
After staying at the same location in Hooked Inc for so long, it’s time to move to deeper waters.
New locations or deeper waters offer new fish, a new monster, and the opportunity to gather much more fishing experience.
When you unlock a new location, you will instantly see a major increase in your earnings as fish are worth much more.
Chances are, however, that you won’t be able to take down the location’s boss just yet unless you stay there for a very long time.
Therefore, a recommended earlier, aim for bosses on your later reruns after claiming fishing experience.
To unlock deeper waters in the game, press the compass icon in the bottom left corner and swipe up.
On the ocean map, you’ll find new locations.
You have to unlock locations in order, which means to unlock Paradise Bay, for example, you first have to unlock Red Waters and so on.
The only cost to unlock a new location is cash.
Each location costs more and more, with the specific price of each location being relative to the earnings potential of the previous location.
Collect fishing experience
Through the game, you earn fishing experience from sources such as catching new fish.
Fishing experience doesn’t do anything until you decide to spend it, at which point it makes a world of difference.
Similar to prestige in other games, when you collect your fishing experience in Hooked Inc, you start over, but keep your crew, crown, items, and gems, and get a huge boost forever.
Each fishing experience equals a 1% boost to your earnings.
This earnings boost is timed by the number of stars you have collected, which you get by catching a new species.
In the image below, you can see I have 10 stars and collected 384 fishing experience, which gives me a total earnings bonus of 3840% forever.
If I decided to collect the 317 fishing exp I have collected throughout this run, I would have a total earnings bonus of 7010% (10 stars times 701 fishing experience).
As you can tell, collecting fishing experience and starting over is very much worth it, even though it can be annoying to start from the beginning again.
However, because of the enormous boost you now have, you will get back to where you were before much faster than previously.
Find and equip items
Equipping items is another excellent way to become a better fisherman in Hooked Inc.
There are tons of items in the game of different rarities.
Some items give boosts similar to upgrades such as increase fish value or a higher chance of pulling rare fish.
However, with so many items in the game, they’ve come up with a lot of cool boosts, such as increased damage to specific species and bosses.
Furthermore, they’ve managed to bring a merge aspect into the game by requiring you to have multiple copies of the same item to upgrade it past level 2.
You get items by opening item boxes that appear randomly in the sea.
There are different rarities of item boxes in the game.
The higher the rarity of the box, the more loot it contains, and the higher the chance it has of giving items of higher rank.
Item boxes of higher rank do also require more time before you can open them, though.
To equip an item, head into the upgrade tab and press items, find the item you wish to equip and press Equip.
With all these tips and tricks, you are ready to take on the world of fishing in Hooked Inc: Fisher Tycoon and become the greatest fisher out there.
If you have any other tips you believe should be included in this guide, you can share them with us in the comments below.
