Ride A Fish: How to Equip Fish from Your Aquarium to the Hotbar

A fish you just hatched does not show up in your hotbar by itself. In Ride A Fish, a new hatch lands in your aquarium, and you make it ride-ready in three moves: click Unequip on its aquarium card to move it into your inventory, select that card in your backpack so it fills a hotbar slot, and then click the hotbar card only if the fish is not already equipped. Equipping is not the same as mounting — once your avatar is holding the fish, getting onto it and steering it around are covered in the guide to riding fish.

This walkthrough follows recorded PC footage and guides checked in October 2026, in an interface that was partly in Indonesian. If your game has been updated since, match the actions by their tooltips rather than the exact wording.

Find the fish in your aquarium

Walk back to your own aquarium. In the recorded session, the fish panel opened on the right of the screen while the player stood next to their yellow aquarium — no separate menu button was needed to bring it up.

The panel shows an occupancy count (recorded values include 2/5 and 5/5) and one card per fish, each with Feed and Unequip controls. Identify your fish by the name on its card before touching anything — the recorded player, for example, picked out a Pipefish this way.

Newly hatched fish arrive here directly. In one recorded hatch, a message announced that a Mackerel had been added and the panel count read 5/5. So if you just hatched an egg and the hotbar looks unchanged, that is expected — the fish is waiting in the aquarium. (If you are still at the egg stage, the guide to hatching eggs covers that part.)

Use Unequip to move the fish to inventory

1. On the fish's card, click the red Unequip button just below the card, beside the green Feed button. In the partly Indonesian interface it reads Lepaskan Perlengkapan, and its tooltip names the action Unequip and explains that it moves this fish into your inventory. Auto-translated captions sometimes render the same button as "Click equip to move this fish to your inventory" — the wording varies with translation, the action does not.
2. Watch for the two success signals: a transfer notification that names the fish, and the aquarium count dropping. In the recorded example, moving the Pipefish took the count from 4/5 to 3/5.
3. Note what did not happen: nothing was deleted. The fish's card now waits in your backpack inventory, ready to be chosen for a ride.

Select it in backpack or hotbar

1. Click the backpack control beside the hotbar. The recorded inventory opens on a view called SEMUA ITEM — All items — with a fish category alongside other item types.
2. Find the card of the fish you just moved; in the recording it was sitting in All items before it entered the hotbar. Select that card: it leaves the inventory grid, the fish appears in a hotbar slot (slot 1 in the recording) with a green outline, and your avatar is holding the fish.
3. Check whether the avatar is already holding the fish. If so, you are done — head for the sea. If the fish is in the hotbar but not yet equipped, click its hotbar card; the recorded PC tutorial says exactly that (Klik ikan untuk melengkapinya — "Click the fish to equip it") and then to take the fish to the water.
4. Confirm the final state: your avatar is seated on the fish you chose and the red Dismount control is on screen. From there, the riding guide takes over.

Video walkthrough: Watch the fish inventory selection and the following ride. The player starts at 7:15 in the original recording.

Watch this segment on YouTube from 7:15.

Don't mix up Unequip, Feed, and Dismount

These three controls sit in different places and do different jobs. Unequip moves an aquarium fish into your inventory. Feed is the green button next to it; it grows the fish inside the aquarium and has nothing to do with riding — the feeding guide covers it. Dismount appears only while you are riding and takes you off the fish; it is a separate action from Unequip, not another name for it.

The aquarium panel also has an Equip Best button. Its selection rule was never shown or tested in the recorded footage — a creator used it without revealing any criteria — so what it actually picks is unknown. When you specifically want to compare two fish on the same route, make the choice yourself instead of trusting it. The weight and coins-per-second values on a card describe that individual fish, not a ranking the button follows.

Troubleshoot a missing fish

If the fish you expected is not in your hotbar, work out which of the four states you have actually reached — displayed in the aquarium, sitting in your inventory as a card, selected in the hotbar, or being ridden. Each looks different, and the fix depends on where you are:

• Still in the aquarium (count unchanged, no transfer message): click Unequip on its card, then select it from All items in the backpack.
• In the backpack but not the hotbar: select its card so it fills a slot.
• In the hotbar but not equipped: click its hotbar card.
• Hatched just now and not in the hotbar at all: no automatic transfer for new hatches is known — the recorded hatch went straight to the aquarium, so collect it from there.

Two boundaries to keep in mind: no number-key mapping for hotbar slots and no touch controls are verified here, so click the cards themselves. And if an update has changed the labels on your screen, look for the tooltip that says it moves the fish into your inventory — that is the Unequip action this whole flow depends on.