CustomIslandsLoader

CustomIslands Loader

Play custom, community-made islands in How to Fish.

An island comes with its own terrain and scenery, and the real game

working on top of it: NPCs that talk and trade, working shops with price

tags, the boat, creature spawns, even a casino. Built by players, played

like the real thing.

Two kinds of island, one mod

Replacement islands stand in for one of the game's five. The map says

which one it replaces. A map built from scratch borrows that island's

NPCs, shops and progression; a map forked from the game's own island

carries its own copies, and the loader makes those copies the real thing

at load (see below). Either way everything on it works exactly as the

original did.

Added islands are brand new places out in open water. They do not

replace anything. They appear on the radar in their own colour, you sail

to them like anywhere else, and they carry their own NPCs, shops and

wildlife rather than borrowing.

Added islands do not touch your progression. Reaching one needs nothing

unlocked, and nothing here writes to your save's island unlocks.

What the loader does to a map at load

A map cannot carry the game's items, bait cards, attachment cards or

NPCs: those live inside the game, and a copy of one in a map is a

different object as far as the game is concerned. So the map's json

carries its paperwork: which stand sells which item, which bait card

a bait stand holds, which creature a spawner spawns, and the prefab every

NPC is spawned from, all written down when the map was built.

At load the loader does the one thing the game itself does: it loads

those assets from the game and hands them to the map, and it stands the

game's own NPCs where the map put them. Nothing is opened beside the map,

nothing is matched by name, nothing is guessed. The casino, the slot

machine and the grill are scene objects of the game's islands rather than

loadable assets, so those alone are lifted out of the island the paperwork

names and put where the map's copies stand.

Older maps have no paperwork. They keep loading the way they always did:

the loader opens the original island beside them and takes what the copy

could not carry.

None of this needs a setting. If something on a map still looks wrong, the

log says what the loader found and what it changed.

Installing islands

An island is two files that share a name.

• Replacement: somemap.bundle and somemap.json in

BepInEx/plugins/HTFMaps/

• Added: somemap.island and somemap.json in

BepInEx/plugins/HTFExtraIslands, install the island pack with your mod manager and it

lands in the right place on its own. There is nothing to configure: the

json carries the island's design, including which island it replaces or

where in the world it sits.

Installing this mod

With a mod manager (easiest)

• Install r2modman or

the Mod Manager.

• Select How to Fish, search for CustomIslandsLoader, click

Install. BepInEx comes automatically.

• Install an island pack, then press Start modded.

Manual

• Install BepInEx 5 x64

into the game folder, run the game once, quit.

• Copy HTFMapLoader.dll into How to Fish/BepInEx/plugins.
• Drop island files into BepInEx/plugins/HTFMaps/ or

BepInEx/plugins/HTFExtraIslands.

Seeing where you are

This used to have a full screen chart on M. It has been dropped: the

game already has a radar for direction, and a map that has to draw

islands bigger than life to make them visible has to bend the sea around

them to match, which is a lot of machinery to end up less accurate than a

camera pointed at the ground.

Minimap is that camera. It is a separate download and it shows the

world under you live, with your boat in it, on any island including

custom ones.

Switching an island back to the original

No file deleting needed. The config has an on/off per island:

[Maps]

UseCustomIsland1 = true...

UseCustomIsland5 = true

Set one to false and that island loads the ORIGINAL next launch, with

the map files left installed fo