How to Un-Cook a Weapon in How to Fish
Last verified August 27, 2026 · Game version 1.0.9
How to Fish’s grills do not judge what you put on them. Leave a gun next to the sizzle, drag it up Mount Inferno, or drop it in lava and the game will char it like yesterday’s catch — complete with the burned model. Players keep discovering this the hard way on the volcano island, where simply carrying a weapon through the crater can leave it roasted.
The annoying part is not the look — a cooked weapon still shoots — it is that skins can no longer be applied, so your cosmetics are stuck behind the char until you clear the burn state.
First, triage which loss you actually have:
- Item in inventory, blackened model, skins blocked → you have a burn state. This page fixes it.
- Item gone completely (despawned, under the map, missing after a crash) → different problem: switch to the items disappeared guide.
Is There an Official Fix?
No — through Patch 1.0.9 there is no in-game way to un-cook an item, and buying a replacement means re-buying every upgrade and attachment on top of it. Community threads asking for a proper solution have been running since launch week.
The Community Fix: Reset Cookness to 0.0
Saves store the burn level on each item as a value called Cookness, and saves are plain text — which makes the burn state a two-minute edit. This is the workaround players use while waiting for an official solution:
- Quit How to Fish, then quit Steam entirely so nothing rewrites the file mid-edit.
- Open the saves folder: press Win+R and paste
%userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\Dazed Games\How to Fish\Saves(Steam Deck/Linux equivalents are covered in the save file location guide). - Make a backup first. Copy the entire folder somewhere outside the game directory. Thirty seconds here beats regretting it later.
- Pick the newest file. Sort by date modified and open the most recent save in Notepad or any text editor — no special tools needed.
- Find every Cookness value (Ctrl+F) and set each one to
0.0. Change only those numbers — rename nothing, delete nothing. - Save the file and launch the game once. Check the weapon visually and test whether skins apply again.
- If anything looks wrong, restore your backup rather than experimenting further against the live file.
Playing co-op?
Sessions write through the host, so run this on whichever machine hosts the world — after making one deliberate manual save first so you know exactly which file just changed. Guests should coordinate with the host instead of editing their own copy blindly.
Alternatives Worth Knowing
- Buy a replacement — the straightforward route, but you inherit the rebuy cost for all upgrades and attachments. Fine early, painful late.
- Wait for an official solution — the ask has been loud enough since launch week that a dedicated anti-burn feature (community suggestion: a cooler) would not be a surprise addition. This page gets updated when patches change the answer.
- Mods — a Nexus Mods page called “No More Roasted Guns” disables weapon-cooking altogether. Officially unsupported; the same cautions we list about unofficial mods in the FAQ apply.
Keeping Your Gear Un-Toasted
- Treat the Mount Inferno climb as a hands-free section: leave spare guns on the boat and carry what you must.
- Cooking food batches? Park weapons a healthy distance from the station first — the grill can’t tell dinner from defense.
- The same Save → Main Menu → Quit discipline from the save file guide protects you here too: if something bad happens with gear, a controlled exit keeps the damage from being auto-committed.
Cooked Weapon FAQ
Is there an official way to un-cook weapons?
Not yet. Through Patch 1.0.9 the developers have not shipped an in-game way to clean a charred gun or rod, and the request threads asking for one — some players suggest a “cooler” station — remain open. The save-file method below mirrors what the community uses today.
Does the Cookness fix work on fishing rods too?
Yes. The burn state is stored as a Cookness value on the item itself, so it applies wherever that value appears in your save — guns, rods, anything the game decided to cook. After editing, confirm in-game that the item accepts skins again or looks un-charred before relying on it.
Can this corrupt my save or get me banned?
Save files are plain text on your own machine, and there are no reports of punishments for touching your local save values. The real risk is human error: a bad search-and-replace can wreck a file faster than the volcano ever did. That is why the steps below insist on a fresh folder backup first, and why you should change only the Cookness numbers — nothing else.
My weapon fell into lava and vanished entirely — will this bring it back?
No. This page fixes items that still exist in your inventory but carry a burned state. Gear that despawned — dropped off a cliff, lost under the map, gone after a crash — is a different problem class, and needs the items disappeared recovery flow instead.
Sources & Verification
- Steam Discussion: “Uncook a weapon” (answer marked by the topic author) — source of the Cookness = 0.0 method
- Steam Discussion: “PLEASE make it so I can un-cook my weapons” — feature-request thread referenced above
- Nexus Mods: No More Roasted Guns — community mod alternative
- Official patch notes feed (app 4001890) — baseline for the Patch 1.0.9 status described here
Data on this page is re-verified against the sources above after each official patch. See our editorial policy for how we source and correct game data.