The Swimcraft Demo is here!

Turn your favourite swims into virtual fishing venues

Swimcraft launches on Steam this autumn. Wishlisting is the single biggest thing you can do to help, it decides whether Steam shows the game to anyone in October.

Wishlist Swimcraft on Steam

The pond you knew growing up. The lake you keep meaning to get back to. The stretch of canal you walk past every day and have never fished properly.

Swimcraft lets you build it.

Photograph a water you know. Paint its depths, its gravel bars, its weed and its snags. Stock it with what should be in there and use your own fish images or the game default ones. Then fish it — and the records on the boards are set by the people who fished them.

It is a simulator, not an arcade game. Fish come to a swim you have worked on, not to a timer. Feed a spot properly and it wakes up. Read the water, get your rig right, and the difference shows. Get it wrong and you will know about it — line strength, hook pattern and drag setting all matter, and a fish beyond your tackle will take your hook with it.

This is the demo

Not a slice of one. Not a preview. This is the Swimcraft demo that is now open on Steam.

It is a complete piece of fishing. Three venues, two guided walks, a full progression from your first roach to unlocking the venue creator, and an ending when you get there. Everything in it is finished and meant to be played.

You are among the first people outside the developer's house to fish it.

What you catch now is permanent

This is the reason you are being asked to fish it rather than test it.

The records database was wiped clean today and the boards are empty. Every record set from here stands.

When the demo opens on Steam, the names on the world, national, venue and peg boards will be the names of the people who set them this month. There is no second wipe. Catch a good fish now and it is still there when the first Steam player arrives.

Fish it like it counts, because it does.

Before you download

Windows will warn you. You will get a blue box saying it doesn't recognise the file. Click More info, then Run anyway. That happens because the build isn't code-signed yet, not because there is anything wrong with it. There's no installer — unzip it and run Swimcraft.exe.

Read the Tester Pack first. It is the second download on this page and it takes about ten minutes. It covers the install, the pegs worth your time, and where the demo ends.

What is in it

Three venues, and they fish differently. Jimbo's Farm Lake is a runs water and the place to learn. Westbere is bigger and moodier. Durdle Door is the sea, and it wants sea tackle — the game will tell you if you turn up with the wrong hook.

Water that moves. Surface ripple on the fishable water, drawn from the peg photograph itself, with a five-level control on the top ribbon so you can set it per peg. A branchy margin wants almost nothing; open water carries far more.

A fight worth the name. The strain meter is a force reading: what the fish is pulling, plus what your winding adds, against what the drag and the rod absorb, over the breaking strain of your line. It moves when you wind, spikes on a run and eases when you back off.

Tackle with the details left in. Real hook patterns, rigs, leads, lines and baits, and the combination matters. Feed the swim to build its confidence, or overfeed it and watch it back right off.

The venue creator, which unlocks once you complete the venue creation tutorial. Turn a photograph into a fishable water: set the pegs, paint the depths, stock the fish and use your own fish pictures or the system default images.

What comes later

Swimcraft goes into Steam Early Access after Next Fest, and these are on the way rather than absent by accident:

• Sharing venues. You can build a water in the demo; publishing it for other anglers to fish is Early Access work.
• Lure fishing. Marked Coming Soon in the tacklebox. Float, ledger, feeder, pole and beach casting are all here now.
• Achievements, Tacklesmith, and the community side of the game.

What would help most

Anything at all — but especially the moment you stopped and thought "what am I supposed to do now?", even if you worked it out ten seconds later. Those moments are invisible to the person who built it, and a Next Fest player gives a demo about thirty minutes before deciding.

Feedback to swimcraftfishing@gmail.com. One message per problem beats one long message about six.

This build is 0.111.471 The number is on the home screen — quote it in any report.

Where this came from

Swimcraft is made by one person, it owes an obvious debt to FishSim 2 — the venue creator, the photographs, the not knowing what you've caught until it's in the net. Nobody has rebuilt that in twenty years, and it deserved rebuilding.

Coming to Steam. The demo goes live on 25 September, and Swimcraft is in Steam Next Fest from 19 to 26 October. Wishlist here

Install Instructions

There are two downloads on this page and they are the same game, same build. Take the installer — Swimcraft-Setup-v0.111.473-win-x64.exe — unless your antivirus won't have it, and there's a zip underneath it for exactly that case.

1. Download Swimcraft-Setup-v0.111.473-win-x64.exe.
2. Run it. Windows will show a blue box saying it doesn't recognise the file. Click More info, then Run anyway. The build isn't code-signed yet — that's the only reason it asks, and it's the same box you'd get from any small studio's first build.
3. The wizard will offer you a folder. The default is fine. It installs for you rather than for the whole machine, so there's no administrator prompt.
4. It makes its own Start Menu entry and desktop shortcut, and offers to open the game when it finishes. To put it on your taskbar, find Swimcraft in the Start Menu, right-click, Pin to taskbar.
5. Make an account. Use a real email address; password recovery goes through it.

To remove it later, it's in Windows Settings under Apps like anything else.

If it won't start at all, that's worth an email on its own before you try anything else.