Loading Rig Studio — pick a species, choose a venue, then build hook to leader to rod to reel while the compatibility engine checks every spec against every other spec and the underwater sim shows how your rig actually presents.
Rig Studio The Rig Studio is an interactive builder and needs JavaScript to run. Everything it knows is also published as static pages — no script required.
Build stages Hook — The only part that actually touches the fish.Beads — Knot armour, spacers, and noise.Swivel — Kills line twist. Also your weakest link if you cheap out.Weight — Gets you down, holds you there, or ruins the presentation.Float — Suspends the bait and telegraphs the bite.Leader — The invisible, abrasion-proof last few feet.Mainline — Everything on the spool. Diameter matters more than test.Reel — Line capacity and drag. Everything else is nice-to-have.Rod — A rod is a lure-weight range and a line range, printed on it.Bait — What the fish thinks it is eating.Storage — Boxes, sleeves, and the pliers you will absolutely need.Apparel — Dressed for the water temperature, not the parking lot.Waders — How deep you can go and how hard you slip.Vessel — Kayak, tube, or hull — matched to the water.Tech — Sonar, cameras, and yes, bait-dropping drones.Target species Largemouth Bass — The default North American gamefish. Lives in cover, eats anything it can fit in its bucket mouth, and will bury you in a laydown given half a second.Smallmouth Bass — Cold, clear, rocky water. Pound for pound the hardest fighting freshwater fish most people will ever hook, and far more line-shy than its cousin.Rainbow Trout — Stocked everywhere, wild in the good places. Soft mouths, sharp eyes, and a hard preference for the lightest presentation you can get away with.Brook Trout — Small water, small fish, tiny tolerances. A tight brushy creek where a six-inch cast error is the difference between a fish and a snag.Walleye — Bottom-oriented, low-light, and famously subtle. Half of walleye fishing is detecting that you have already been bitten.Northern Pike — A mouth full of razors attached to a torpedo. The only fish on this list where skipping the correct leader is not a preference, it is a guarantee of loss.Muskellunge — The fish of ten thousand casts, and every one of those casts is with a bait heavy enough to hurt you. This is a heavy-tackle build, no exceptions.Channel Catfish — Hard bottom, smelly bait, and a fish that finds your line with its whole body. Not remotely line-shy, extremely good at abrading things.Blue Catfish — Big-river heavy tackle. A 40 lb blue in current pulls like a moving vehicle and will empty a small reel before you get the boat started.Crappie — Paper mouths suspended over brush. The fish that punishes heavy drag and rewards a light, slow, vertical presentation.Bluegill & Panfish — The best possible first fish. Aggressive, everywhere, and completely satisfied with a #8 hook and a worm under a bobber.Common Carp — Wildly underrated. Spooky, huge, and capable of long unstoppable runs in water you can walk to from a parking lot.Striped Bass — Surf, rocks, and moving water. Everything about a striper build is a corrosion and abrasion problem before it is a strength problem.Redfish — Shallow, tailing, and hard-charging. Sight-fishing a red in a foot of water is as close as inshore gets to hunting.Speckled Trout — Soft-mouthed inshore predator with two prominent fangs and a real dislike of heavy leader in clear water.Snook — Structure-hugging ambush predator with gill plates like a bandsaw. They will run you into a piling on purpose.Flounder — Flat, buried, and entirely bottom. If your bait is more than a few inches off the sand you are not flounder fishing.Tarpon — The silver king. Bony mouth, aerial fights, and a build where every single component is being asked for everything it has.Bonefish — Grey ghosts on a white flat. The most spook-prone fish here, and the one that will show you what a 100-yard run feels like.King Mackerel — Sharp, fast, and equipped to bite a bait — or your leader — cleanly in half at speed.Yellowfin Tuna — Bluewater, offshore, and the point at which "gear" becomes "equipment". Nothing in a freshwater box survives contact.Salmon (Coho / King) — Anadromous, seasonal, and fought in current. Half the battle is the river pushing on a 20 lb fish that is already annoyed.Steelhead — Cold rivers, long drifts, and light leaders under heavy fish. The most technically demanding build on this list.Worked example builds 101 components in the catalogue. Browse the gear index .