Aquaculture Simulator playtest

About Aquaculture Simulator

Build and run a working fish farm in first person. You carry the feed, net the fish, rinse the filters and stand behind the counter yourself. Start small and grow into a hall full of tanks, outdoor ponds, a farm shop, a show hall and your own staff.

Four species, four businesses

• Rainbow trout are volume. Sold by the kilo, thin margin, predictable as long as the water holds. They demand cold, oxygen-rich water and do not forgive mistakes.
• Eels are your second food fish. You buy in glass eels and raise them to market size, in the hall or out in the ponds.
• Koi are judgement. Value comes from pattern, colour and body shape, from pond quality to show quality. One fish can be worth a hundred trout, or almost nothing.
• Sturgeon are your luxury line. You strip the roe, the fish survives, and the caviar goes over your own counter in tins.

25 koi varieties to breed

From the common Kohaku to the rare Kin Ki Utsuri, with Ginrin and Doitsu forms of every variety and a Kumonryu whose pattern drifts with the seasons. Closed groups breed true, six crossing bridges lead to varieties that are hard to get otherwise, and the right breeding line makes rare koi far more common than buying them ever could.

The stud book keeps parents and grandparents for every fish, shows what a cross was expected to give and what it really gave, and leaves every variety you have not found yet as a silhouette.

Reading a young koi

A young koi does not show you what it will become. It shows you a range, and the younger the fish, the wider the guess. Keep it, and it eats every day at your cost. Cull it, and you may have thrown away the best fish in the building.

Water is the constraint

Every tank runs on the same three pressures:

• Oxygen has a corridor. Too little suffocates, too much causes gas bubble disease, and aeration costs you by the kilowatt-hour.
• Ammonia climbs when you overfeed. Filters clog, and you pull them, rinse them at the sink and put them back yourself.
• Temperature separates your species. Warm for koi, cold for trout.

Stock more fish and you earn more, until the water flips.

Four ways to sell

• Customer orders arrive as email on the farm PC, including stocking orders from angling clubs. Accept a price and a pickup date, net the fish and get them to the loading bay on time. Miss a date and you pay twice: in money and in reputation.
• Aquamart24 is your online market. You set the price, bag the fish at the oxygen cylinder and ship them.
• The farm shop sells what you process. Work the processing station, stock the cold room and the counter, serve walk-in customers and sell your caviar.
• The show hall is a conversation. Point out what is genuinely good about a koi, haggle face to face and keep the glass clean, because dirty glass keeps visitors away.

A farm that keeps running

Build tanks as a shell, mount the equipment and fill them from the tap. Harvest ponds with the seine net, add automatic feeders, and hire a counter clerk and a koi advisor when one pair of hands is no longer enough. At the end of every day a settlement shows what the farm earned and why.

Also in the game

• Day and night cycle, with pause and up to 10x speed
• Difficulty levels, an optional assistant and a complete in-game manual
• Seven languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese
• Co-op for up to four players, currently in testing

Developed by one person in Germany, with Godot 4.

From the game's Steam page.