Big news, folks: Terraria has made its fish visible after 12 years

A screenshot shows a Terraria character fishing in blue water. — (Image credit: Re-Logic)

Playing Terraria usually means accepting the rules of its pixel world — killing bad guys makes you entitled to swollen bags of treasure, some fish live in honey, and, before you catch them, all fish are cryptically invisible. The 12-year-old action-adventure sandbox game has mostly held on tight to these basic rules, but this week things changed. This week, its developer Re-Logic announced one major change in a forum thread: Terraria will soon have visible fish as part of its 1.4.5 update, to be released in 2024.

“We are not sure how the fish in Terraria stayed invisible all this time,” Re-Logic developer Loki wrote in the thread, “but now you can see what you might be reeling in while fishing!” A brief, looping GIF demonstrates what this looks like in action.

In the rain, a player approaches a blue body of water. He drops in his fishing line and, as his lure dangles on the water’s surface, several fish start to congregate. Through the water, you can see their assorted silhouettes compete for the bait until one relatively tall one wins out. The player yanks his line, and the screen announces he’s caught some bass.

Previously, the fishing experience was more secretive than that. Players would plop their lines into totally opaque pools of water, honey, and lava, and they will continue to do so after the 1.4.5 update. But they’d experience exactly zero indicators of whether or not they had snared a fish or garbage, or, if they had caught a fish, what kind it was. While sonar potions (8-minute-long buffs that announced names of hooked fish) provided temporary reprieves from fishing obscurity, Re-Logic’s new decision to make all fish permanently visible should help players perform the mini-game more effectively.

Otherwise, Re-Logic also teased a CRT-style Terraria filter as part of its forthcoming update. As for the rest of 2023, the developer notes that “things will start to wind down for the year once we get into the second half of December, but we are planning to finish the year strong in order to give us a ton of momentum as we head into 2024.”

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.