The rare fish in Animal Crossing: New Horizons will be the bane of your completionist career. Whether trying to fill out your museum or critterpedia, or to just make stacks of bells from C.J., there’s bound to be a finned friend or two that’ll stop you in your tracks.

Animal Crossing doesn’t throw every fish at you at once. They often show up during certain months or even at specific times of the day. Knowing when and where each rare fish spawns can save you a lot of time and frustration. To help, here’s a list of the rarest fish in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, when and where they spawn, and how many bells you can expect to get for them from the Nook twins.

When beginning your Animal Crossing: New Horizons adventure, you’re asked whether you want an island on the Northern or Southern Hemisphere. The idea is to choose the one to match where you live, but you’re free to choose whichever you like.

Your choice of hemisphere dictates seasonal changes, ultimately affecting the months in which fish and bugs spawn on your island, so it’s important to know which area your island is in.

Here’s a quick reference sheet of which months comprise the four seasons on both sides of the world.

If you were intrigued enough by those little spouts of water coming from your beach to dig them up, you likely pulled up a manila clam and learned how to make bait. Bait, crafted with a single manila clam, is used to spawn fish in nearby waters.

Stand near a body of water and sprinkle the bait from your inventory into the pond, river, or sea. A shadow should spawn almost immediately.

There are no secret spawn rates triggered by this particular item. Not that we can reliably claim with current data, anyway. It’s just a way to speed up random fish spawns.

What it can be used for, however, is to hopefully reduce the amount of time needed to catch something like the stringfish, koi, or golden trout due to their limited spawn points. Toss bait into cliffside pools, and you’ll dramatically speed up the fishing process, hopefully allowing you to reel in a rare fish in less time.

You also pick from a handful of island layouts when you first begin the game. These are randomly generated so no two look the same right off the bat. However, there are a few features every island has, even if the exact location varies. The important one for fishing is the pier. The pier can attract unique, hard-to-find ocean fish — namely the tuna, blue marlin, mahi-mahi, and giant trevally.