A great way for you to hunt a reliable food source in Valheim is to find fish. Because the world is broken up into several islands, you can find water almost everywhere. There are also small rivers flowing between a few of these islands, filled to the brim with fish.
Before you can catch these fish, you need to visit the trader named Haldor and purchase his fishing rod. Haldor will be at a random location somewhere in your Valheim world. However, they always appear somewhere in a Black Forest biome, so if you’re still searching for him, make sure to investigate any of these regions. Once you find him, a small bag of money will appear on your map, indicating Haldor’s location so you won’t lose him.
The fishing rod costs 350 gold coins, so make sure to have those ready when you approach him. You also need to buy bait, which costs 50 coins. You need to have bait selected in your inventory as if they were arrows in a quiver when using a bow.
When you have your fishing rod, all you have to do is treat it like a ranged weapon. You need to click the right mouse button to line up your shot and then click the left mouse button to fire it out. You won’t receive fish merely by waiting for them to appear. You need to see if there are fish in the water. We primarily see fish swimming around in the Meadows and Black Forest biomes.
You can do this by approaching the side of any river or lake you want to try fishing. If there are fish swimming around here, you can try your hand at trying to catch them. When you don’t see any fish nearby, your best bet is to move to a different location. From what we can tell, the fish do not appear over time. They show up at random locations in the water, and we have the best success of double-checking there are even fish in the water before we cast our line.
If you’re having trouble finding fish, try to find shallow water that is not too deep or close to the ocean. You can find plenty of fish appearing in the middle of rivers and streams closer inland than the ones next to the open sea. That’s not to say they don’t appear in these areas, though.
