The Boreal Pines update in Fisch quietly added two of the strongest late‑game rods in the game: Cryolash and North Pole. Both are gated behind level 500 and some of the grindier content Fisch has right now, but in return, you get huge luck, resilience, and powerful progress‑speed passives that trivialize a lot of high‑rarity fish.
Cryolash rod requirements and location
Cryolash is the “reward rod” for mastering Boreal Pines. You do not craft it; you buy it once you have proven you can fish out the entire region.
Requirements to unlock Cryolash:
- Account level 500 or higher.
- 100% completion of the Boreal Pines Bestiary, including the exotic Frostwyrm.
- 3,500,000C$ for the purchase.
Once you meet those conditions, Cryolash appears on Boreal Pines itself.
Where to find the Cryolash hut
The rod is on a bed inside a small camping hut on the back side of Boreal Pines Island.
Step 1: Use the portal to travel to the Northern Expedition, then select Boreal Pines. After you load in, look for the Marvin NPC; this is your main orientation point on the island.
Step 2: From Marvin, walk to his left and continue straight until you reach a ledge on your left. Climb this ledge to reach the upper level of the island.
Step 3: On the second level, you will see a small hut in front of you. Enter the hut to find Jack Merchant seated inside and the Cryolash rod lying on the bed.
Step 4: Interact with the rod. If you are at least level 500 and have a fully completed Boreal Pines Bestiary, you will be allowed to purchase it for 3,500,000C$ and it will be added to your rods.
Instead of navigating by landmarks, you can also use the in‑game GPS and walk to the precise coordinates around (21470, 186, 4065) (or 21480.2, 188.9, 4052.1, depending on your readout). These sit on a raised section at the rear of the island where the hut is placed.
How Boreal Pines Bestiary completion works
Unlocking Cryolash means finishing every entry in the Boreal Pines Bestiary, which is relatively compact compared to other regions but has a few pain points.
Players report roughly a dozen fish entries in Boreal Pines. Most of them can be caught by cycling through the island’s main fishing spots: the shoreline, the central pool, a pond higher up the mountain, and a cave interior. The crab‑cage fish tend to slow progress down, since they demand crafting and placing cages in the right spots rather than standard casting.
The real gate is Frostwyrm. It only appears during a dedicated hunt and, on top of that, is strongly tied to the winter season. In practice, this means burning through Sundial Totems waiting for winter to roll around, then spamming hunts until the exotic finally appears. Some players have seen the hunt trigger quickly during winter; others report dozens of Sundials in non‑winter seasons before a single spawn.
Once Frostwyrm is safely in your Bestiary and every other Boreal Pines entry is filled, Cryolash becomes purchasable in the hut.
Cryolash rod stats and icy passive
Cryolash is tuned as a high‑resilience, high‑luck late‑game rod with deliberately weak baseline control.
| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Lure Speed | 87% |
| Luck | 149% |
| Control | -0.1 |
| Resilience | 75% |
| Max Kg | 150,000kg |
The combination of very high resilience and luck makes Cryolash ideal for hunting the last few elusive entries in a region. You are less likely to lose a difficult fight and more likely to roll into exotic or secret fish.
The rod’s defining trait is its passive. Cryolash periodically hurls icicles at the hooked fish, which cause sharp, temporary spikes in progress speed. The trade‑off is that the progress bar feels unstable, and the already low control stat becomes more obvious. Used well, those bursts let you bulldoze through otherwise grindy progress‑locked fish.
Cryolash can also roll cold‑themed mutations on your catches. It has chances to grant Frozen (1.5× value) and Glacial (8×) mutations, and players routinely use it as a quick way to generate ice‑type mutation fish for crafting and profit.
Best enchantments for Cryolash
The base rod is powerful, but because of its negative control and spiky progress, it benefits a lot from enchantments that stabilize the bar without sacrificing speed.
Well‑synergizing options include:
- Herculean, which raises max capacity by 20,000kg, adds +0.2 control, and another 10% progress speed. This directly counters Cryolash’s low control and lets you lean into its heavy‑fish niche.
- Steady, which grants +20% progress speed and +0.05 control. It is a smaller buff than Herculean, but it stacks nicely if you want smoother fights without going all‑in on capacity.
- Mystical, which adds +25% luck, +45% resilience, +15% lure speed, and +10% progress speed. On Cryolash, this turns already strong luck and resilience into overkill and accelerates your rolls for exotics and rare mutations.
- Quality, with +20% luck, +10% resilience, +20% lure speed, and +5% progress speed. It is a lighter alternative to Mystical that still improves nearly every important stat.
- Controlled, which adds +0.15 control. If you simply want Cryolash to feel less erratic when those icicle bursts land, this is the cleanest fix.
Because Cryolash already leans into progress spikes through its passive, stacking multiple progress‑speed enchants quickly turns it into a general‑purpose late‑game rod that can handle most fish in the game with minimal downtime.
North Pole rod requirements and crafting recipe
The North Pole rod takes the opposite path. You do not buy it from a vendor; you build it at Ancient Archives using some of the rarest winter‑themed drops in Fisch. It is only available during the Fischmas 2 event.
Requirements to craft North Pole:
- Account level 500 or higher.
- Access to the Ancient Archives crafting station.
- 15,000 Bells.
- 1× Frozen Frostwyrm.
- 2× Essence of Starfrost.
- 1× Frostbitten Northstar Whale.
When you have all four inputs plus the Bells, you can craft the rod at Ancient Archives, and it is added to your rod collection. The grind lies in getting each ingredient to drop with the correct mutation or rarity.
How to get Frozen Frostwyrm
Frostwyrm is tied to Boreal Pines in the same way that Cryolash is, but for the North Pole, you need a specific mutated version.
Step 1: Travel to Boreal Pines and reach the Crystal Fissure cave area, around coordinates (21708, 136, 3942). Frostwyrm hunts happen inside this fissure.
Step 2: Trigger the Frostwyrm Hunt event at night. This hunt is heavily associated with the winter season; most players lean on Sundial Totems to cycle the in‑game day until winter, then spam hunts until a Frostwyrm appears.
Step 3: Hook and land a Frostwyrm during the hunt. This step can take multiple nights depending on RNG and how often the hunt actually spawns.
Step 4: Take the Frostwyrm to an appraiser and repeatedly appraise it until you receive a copy with the Frozen mutation. That specific fish – the Frozen Frostwyrm – is what the North Pole recipe consumes.
Appraisal fees add up quickly here, especially with an exotic fish, so make sure you have Bells on hand before you start rerolling.
How to get Essence of Starfrost
Essence of Starfrost is a rare event drop tied directly to the Starfrost Moon, which is itself a limited event condition.
Step 1: Travel to Northstar Village and locate the igloo vendor around GPS (-7053, -149, -17935). Inside, buy a Starfrost Moon Totem for 5,000 Bells. This item forces the Starfrost Moon event when used.
Step 2: Activate the Starfrost Moon Totem on your server to start the event. During this window, certain fish and items become much more common, including Essence of Starfrost.
Step 3: Fish continuously during the event for the Essence itself. It has roughly a 1‑in‑150 drop chance under normal conditions. Some players use the Scavenger enchant, which effectively turns that into about 3 rolls per 150, or about 1 in 50, and dramatically cuts the grind.
Step 4: Repeat the event until you have at least two copies of Essence of Starfrost. Expect this to take multiple totems and a lot of casts; getting two essences in one event is possible but not guaranteed.
Because the totems cost Bells, it is worth planning these sessions and stacking as many drop‑rate boosts as you reasonably can.
How to get a Frostbitten Northstar Whale
The last ingredient, Frostbitten Northstar Whale, combines a rare fish with a specific mutation. You need both the species and the Frostbitten tag on the same catch.
Step 1: Equip the Maelstrom rod. This rod has a 30% chance to roll the Thruster mutation on your catches, which is central to how Northstar Whale is farmed.
Step 2: Travel to the Cryoshock Cellar. This location concentrates the right kind of high‑tier fish and interacts well with Maelstrom’s mutation perks, giving you frequent Northstar Whale attempts.
Step 3: Fish until you land a Northstar Whale. This species can technically be caught in many places on the map, but in practice, players focus on Cryoshock Cellar or Winter Village‑style zones because the mutation odds are better and the density is higher.
Step 4: Continue fishing in the same conditions until a Northstar Whale rolls the Frostbitten mutation. This is the version you feed into Ancient Archives for North Pole.
Some players lean on bows or other gear that boosts mutation chance to accelerate this step. Others rely on sheer volume of casts. Either way, expect this to take longer than just getting a single whale species entry.
North Pole rod stats and passives
Once crafted, North Pole stands alongside Fisch’s most specialized late‑game rods. On raw stats alone it can look underwhelming compared to the grind required, but its passives are where it breaks open the game’s economy.
| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Lure Speed | 90% |
| Luck | 177% |
| Control | 0 |
| Resilience | 25% |
| Max Kg | Infinite |
On top of that, the rod has two critical passive behaviors:
- Permafrost mutation access – North Pole has about a 35% chance to apply the Permafrost mutation to your catches. Permafrost is a 10× multiplier mutation, making even ordinary fish dramatically more valuable and turning exotics into serious money makers.
- Forced progress speed – The rod adds a flat +50% progress speed and, more importantly, effectively enforces that baseline even on fish that would normally cripple your bar with negative progress modifiers. Players use it to trivialize exotics and secrets that list -90% progress speed by default.
North Pole also appears to bake in that 50% progress speed before any bait or enchant multipliers are applied. When stacked with mutation‑oriented baits such as Gingerbread or Peppermint and cosmic enchants like Eerie, it becomes possible to hit extremely high effective progress on fish that otherwise take entire event windows to reel in.
Unlike many other rods, North Pole drops with no enchants attached, leaving you free to build it as a dedicated progress monster, a mutation farmer, or a hybrid. Common builds pair Gingerbread for more mutation rolls with an Eerie cosmic relic for another chunk of progress speed and fish size, then add a general‑purpose enchant to taste.
One subtle but important detail: The North Pole is only craftable during the Fischmas 2 event. Once the event ends, new copies can no longer be built. Existing rods stay in player inventories, which means anyone who puts in the grind window now has a tool that will not be easily replaced later.
Are Cryolash and North Pole worth the grind?
Both rods are clearly tuned for players already deep in Fisch’s endgame. The level‑500 lock, the 3.5 million C$ price on Cryolash, and the combination of Frostwyrm, rare event drops, and mutation‑gated whales for North Pole guarantee that casual players will not stumble into them early.
Cryolash is the cleaner pickup: once your Boreal Pines Bestiary hits 100%, you walk into a hut and exchange currency for a rod that makes filling in every other region’s last one or two entries much easier. The high resilience and luck, paired with its icicle‑driven progress bursts, turn it into a reliable exotic hunter, especially when paired with control and progress enchants like Herculean or Mystical.
North Pole demands significantly more preparation and event timing, but in return it gives something no other rod currently matches: a combination of infinite capacity, top‑tier luck, a frequent 10× mutation, and forced progress speed that overrides the harshest fish penalties. For anyone who enjoys chasing exotic and secret fish or optimizing Bells, it is hard to argue against sinking time into crafting at least one copy while Fischmas 2 is active.
If you are already sitting at level 500 and spending nights cycling Sundial and Starfrost Moon totems, both rods slot naturally into that loop. Cryolash stabilizes the route toward North Pole’s ingredients; North Pole then becomes the rod you reach for whenever you want progress‑locked exotics, Permafrost‑boosted payouts, or late‑game Bestiary clean‑up with far less frustration.
