Borderlands 4 – Fishing Explained!

It's finally happened: Borderlands has a fishing mini-game. And oh hey, it actually makes sense in-universe, so it's not a ham-fisted arcade side-thing you'll do once and then ignore every single time afterwards!

No, Borderlands 4's fishing is a natural evolution of its core looting loop, and the way you participate in it is by leveraging your fancy new grappling hook movement tech! We'll go into more detail on the grappling hook in a separate article, but the gist of it is that it can both pull items towards you, and pull you towards items depending on the context. Are you getting where we're going with this yet?

Play Borderlands 4 right now on PC, via 2Game!

How to Fish in Borderlands 4?

Though you might expect to fish in Borderlands 4 by... uh, well, shooting fish in a literal barrel, this game isn't quite as hamfisted as that. It's close, granted, but it's not that bad at all!

Instead, the way fishing in Borderlands 4 works is that you need to be on the lookout for bubbles and commotion on the surface of the water, and then approach it from the shore. A grappling hook pop-up is going to appear if you look in the direction of the commotion, and you want to interact with it.

Doing so pulls up a can of sodie-pop (or beer, we're honestly not sure yet) and pulls up a fairly sizeable loot drop. Thing is, if you're not fast, all that loot's going to go to waste! What you want to do is to immediately throw the can away and then quickly pull as much actual loot to the shore as you can, using your grappling hook input. It's really easy to miss items, so you may want to time your pulls to grab the rarest items. Look for blue, purple, and orange-tier items specifically, as these will be the most valuable of them all!

You'll have several opportunities to "fish" whenever you come across a fishing spot in Borderlands 4, though not each instance may have quite as much loot as some of them do. We're happy to report that fishing spots do come up very often, even early on in the game, so don't fret if you miss some. They're an excellent source of loot, so make use of them whenever you can!

Play Borderlands 4 right now on PC, via 2Game!