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Animal Crossing Salmon and King Salmon: How to catch a salmon or a king salmon at the river mouth in New Horizons

How to add these September-only fish to your Critterepida.

Salmon and king salmon are two of the more elusive fish to catch in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, due to them both only appearing throughout September.

This is because September is when the salmon run starts to occur, which is when salmon swim upstream to find gravel beds to spawn in.

Below you'll find everything you need to know about salmon and king salmon in New Horizons, including their time and location, so you can donate them to the Museum before they leave your island for a full year.

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Where and when can I catch a Salmon in Animal Crossing: New Horizons?

Below you'll find everything you need to know about salmon in New Horizons:

  • Salmon months - September
  • Salmon times - 24 hours
  • Salmon location - River mouth
  • Salmon selling price - 700 Bells
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Where and when can I catch a King Salmon in Animal Crossing: New Horizons?

Below you'll find everything you need to know about king salmon in New Horizons:

  • King Salmon months - September
  • King Salmon times - 24 hours
  • King Salmon location - River mouth
  • King Salmon price - 1,800 Bells

The Animal Crossing 2.0 update and Happy Home Paradise is here! We can help you with the new additions - including where to find Brewster, Gyroids, new villagers, ordinances, new fences, storage shed, new hairstyles, Froggy Chair, group stretching and Kapp'n boat tours. Cooking is now unlockable, so you need to know how to make both flour and sugar, as well as how to grow carrots, potatoes and tomatoes. Meanwhile, if you're new to Animal Crossing, our New Horizons tips can help with the basics. From the off, there's fish and bugs to catch, flowers and fruit to grow with. One long term goal is building your Happy Home Academy score. Finally, you need tools such as the new ladder and vaulting pole to fully explore.


Where is the river mouth and how do you catch Salmon and King Salmon there?

The river mouth is where a river for your island meets the sea, being a wide patch of water that breaks the flow of the beach and is surrounded by a number of rocks. There will be two separate river mounths on your island that are fixed in its landscape, as, even with terraforming, you can't create your own river mouth.

Much like when searching for sturgeons, the easiest way to fish for salmon or king salmon is to stand on the beach next to the river mouth and throw your line out into the water, since these fish will only appear in the section between the land and the sea.

The only issue is there's no guarantee that a fish will be present in the river mouth. Thankfully, you can easily use fish bait to make one appear - just make sure you throw the bait into the river mouth.

Both salmon and king salmon appear throughout the day, so you don't need to appear during a specific time to catch one. The downside is that both fish only appear during September, which means that you need to catch both in this month or wait till next year.

Like all rare fish, catching salmon and king salmon requires a certain amount of patience, as you simply have to keep fishing until you catch one. For this reason, we recommend having shorter, more frequent, fishing sessions, rather than spending a whole day searching for them. This will, hopefully, prevent you from becoming too frustrated during your fish quest.

Once you've caught both a salmon and king salmon, there's a number of fish you should try to catch during September, including the giant trevally, blue marlin and sturgeon.

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