CustomIslands Loader

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

A custom island stands in for one of the game's five islands - 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.

Replace, not add. The game's world is exactly five island slots - only one island exists at a time, and travelling swaps which one is loaded. A custom island always takes the place of one of the five; adding a sixth is not possible.

Installing a custom island

A map is two files: somemap.bundle and somemap.json.

• From Thunderstore: install the map package with your mod manager like any mod - done.
• By hand: drop both files into BepInEx/plugins/HTFMaps/.

The json says which island the map stands in for - that is part of the map's design (it borrows that island's NPCs and shops), so there is nothing to configure. Install, play.

Installation of this mod

With a mod manager (easiest)

1. Install r2modman or the Thunderstore Mod Manager.
2. Select How to Fish, search for CustomIslandsLoader, click Install (BepInEx comes automatically).
3. Install a map (see above), press Start modded.

Manual

1. Install BepInEx 5 x64 into the game folder, run the game once, quit.
2. Copy HTFMapLoader.dll into How to Fish/BepInEx/plugins/.
3. Drop map files into BepInEx/plugins/HTFMaps/.

Switching an island back to the original

No file deleting needed. The loader's config has a simple on/off per island:

[Maps]
UseCustomIsland1 = true
...
UseCustomIsland5 = true

Set one to false and that island loads the ORIGINAL next launch - the map files stay installed for later. Mod manager users: edit it in the manager's built-in Config editor (yoxi.htf.maploader.cfg); manual installs edit BepInEx/config/yoxi.htf.maploader.cfg.

In co-op, everyone in the lobby should match.

Co-op

Everyone in a lobby needs the same maps installed - a player without the map sees the original island and stands in different scenery than the rest of the crew.

Make your own island

Get the CustomIslands Mapmaker Kit (a Unity project - download it manually from its Thunderstore page, it is not a runtime mod). Sculpt terrain, dress it with the game's own props, place working shops, and ship your island as those same two files.

Skies: players running Living Skies get the full day-night cycle and storms over every island, custom ones included.

Notes

• Contains no game assets - maps and tools are all generated content.
• A map's .bundle must sit beside its .json, both named the same.

More from Yoxi

• BetterIslands - an island pack: a hand-built custom first island, more coming
• CustomIslands Mapmaker Kit - build your own islands (Unity project, download manually)
• Living Skies - day-night cycle PLUS storms, rain, lightning and thunder
• HTF Day and Night - the calm-sky day-night cycle on its own

Built by Yoxi.

Changelog

1.5.0

The world map is gone, and Minimap replaces it

The chart on M has been removed. This is worth explaining rather than just announcing, because it was the whole of the last release.

The problem was never the drawing, it was the arithmetic underneath it. Islands in this game are tiny next to the sea between them, so a chart that shows the whole world shows five specks. The fix was to draw them bigger - and the moment you do that, an island takes up more room on the chart than it does in the world, so the water around it has to be stretched to make space, and your own marker has to be stretched by exactly the same amount or it is not standing where you are standing.

Every version of that was wrong in a different way: the marker jumped between islands, then it travelled backwards as you sailed away from one, then it moved at a fifth of your speed as you left. Each fix was correct and each one uncovered the next, because the real problem was that a model of the world can only ever be as good as the last thing somebody thought of.

A camera pointed at the ground has none of those problems. It is not a model, it is a picture, and it is right about things nobody thought to tell it. So the chart is out and Minimap is the answer instead: a separate download, live, and accurate everywhere because there is no arithmetic in it to get wrong.

The radar is untouched, extra islands still show on it in their own colour, and nothing about loading islands has changed.

Also

• An island you have not unlocked yet is no longer implied to be reachable. The chart used to draw it exactly like one you could sail to, so you would head out to an island the game had never opened and find nothing there. With the chart gone the radar decides, and the radar was always right about this.
• The startup survey is gone with it. Every island used to be loaded, photographed and unloaded at the main menu to have a picture to draw. Nothing needs that now.

1.4.0

A real chart, on M

The world map has been rebuilt from nothing. It was a diagram before: dots on a grid, in a style of its own, taking over the whole screen.

• The islands are drawn from the islands. Each one is photographed from directly above and that picture is what you see: its real coastline, its trees, its buildings, its paths. Nothing is hand drawn and nothing is a guess, so an island from any pack is charted as accurately as the game's own.
• Charted once, automatically. The first time you sit at the main menu, every island is loaded on its own, photographed and unloaded again. It takes a few seconds, it happens at the menu where it cannot disturb a game in progress, and the pictures are kept.
• The island you are on is live. Not a photograph but a view, redrawn every frame, so the boat moves on it while you watch.
• It looks like the game. The pause menu's dress: the game's own rounded panel art, white rules, white text and its own font, over a translucent panel rather than the whole screen.
• Zoom and pan like a map. The wheel zooms towards the pointer, drag pans, M or Escape closes. Your input is held while it is open, so panning the chart no longer walks you into the sea.
• Islands are drawn larger than scale so they can be seen, with the distances between them left true - and the exaggeration fades out as you zoom in. You and the boat are displaced with the island you are standing on, so where you are shown is where you are.
• A size slider for every island, on the chart, under "sizes". Drag it and watch the island change. Saved as you go.

Also

• The spacing slider is gone, and the chart tracks you properly because of it. It was never an independent choice: it had to match the island sizes or the marker moved at a different speed to you. Measured, over a trip from an island out to open sea, the marker used to move anywhere between five times and a third of a metre per metre sailed - a fourteen fold swing, which is the "it moves weird" everyone could feel and nobody could describe. It is now worked out from the island sizes instead, and the swing is under three. Set every island's size to its smallest and the chart becomes a single honest scale.
• An island you have not unlocked yet is greyed out on the chart. It was drawn exactly like one you can reach, so the chart would show you island four, you would sail out to it, and there would be nothing there and no explanation - because the game had never unlocked it and puts neither a radar dot nor a landing trigger in the water until it has. The chart now says so. Nothing here unlocks anything; your progression is yours.
• Your marker no longer travels backwards as you leave an island. Islands are drawn larger than life, so a marker on one sits further out than the open sea scale would put it. Sailing away used to blend between the two, which meant the drawn distance SHRANK while you were moving away and the marker slid back towards the island. The enlargement now eases off without ever reversing, so every metre you sail away from an island moves you further from it on the chart.
• The boat marker showed at the wrong island. It was reading the Boat component's transform, which never moves - the boat is driven through a physics body underneath it.

1.3.0

Added islands, not just replacements

The loader now runs BOTH kinds of island. As well as maps that stand in for one of the game's five, it runs brand new islands out in open water that replace nothing at all.

• Added islands appear on the radar in their own colour, from the start.
• You sail to them like anywhere else.
• They carry their own NPCs, shops and wildlife instead of borrowing from an island they replace.
• Save on one and you wake up there. The save itself records a normal island, so it still loads if this mod is ever removed.
• Press M for a chart of the world showing every island, its name and its true position.

Your island unlocks are never touched. Reaching an added island used to mean raising the game's unlock counter, which is a single number, so raising it far enough unlocked every island below it. Worse, the game writes that number straight into your save file, where it would have outlived the mod. Added islands now use their own way in and ask the counter nothing.

This is why MoreIslands is now an island pack with no code of its own. Extra islands used to need a separate mod; that work lives here. Both MoreIslands and BetterIslands are content only, and both need this mod installed.

Fixes

• Sailing up to an island no longer teleports you and your boat onto its spawn point. The game only places the boat when it is teleporting you somewhere, and sailing in is deliberately the case where it leaves you alone. This mod repeated the move without that check.
• Your map's own spawn points are used again when the game does bring you to an island. An earlier attempt at the above read the game's flag too late and stopped spawn points working entirely.
• NPCs and shop stands can be used up close again. The repair that tags solid ground so bullets mark it was also overwriting the tag on interact colliders, and the game discards any interactable blocked by something tagged as level geometry. Up close an NPC was being blocked by its own collider, so it only answered from further away.
• A shop stand with no bait or attachment assigned no longer throws every frame you look at it. That exception came from inside the game's interactable scan and stopped everything near it working, NPCs included. The stand is now skipped and named in the log so a mapmaker can fix it.
• The game's own crash while unloading decorations can no longer jam island loading.

For mapmakers

Everything above needs islands built with the CustomIslands Mapmaker Kit, which had a large update alongside this one: island scripts are now bound to the game automatically, so NPCs and shops arrive as working components rather than scenery, and the shop catalogue, quests, wildlife spawners and an island's own grass all come across properly.

Upgrading

If you installed MoreIslands 1.x by hand, delete MoreIslands.dll. Left in place it runs alongside this mod and both do the same work to the same islands.

1.2.6

• FIX: a shop stand with no bait or attachment assigned threw an exception every frame you looked at it, from inside the game's own interactable scan. That killed the scan, so nothing near it could be used - NPCs included - and the prompt was never placed. The game's Hover() guards against this; its OnStartHover() does not. Now skipped, and the stand is named in the log.

1.2.5

• FIX: your map's own boat and player spawn points are used again when you spawn into a world. 1.2.3 and 1.2.4 decided "did you sail here?" from OnlineIslandManager.TeleportPlayers, which the game only ever sets for the cheat key and the two Tp calls - entering a world does not set it. Loading a save at a custom island therefore counted as sailing, and the boat was left on the replaced island's spawn point, which on a sculpted map is dry land. Sailing in is now detected from the thing that actually means it: the island's trigger ring asking for the island. Every other arrival places you and the boat on the map's spawn points, as before.

1.2.4

• FIX: a map's own boat and player spawn points are honoured again when the game travels you to it. The 1.2.3 gate was read too late: borrowing gameplay, importing a casino and fetching goods each load an island of their own, and every one of those re-answered the question after the game had already cleared the flag. It is now read once, as the map's scene arrives, and carried down.

1.2.3

• FIX: sailing to a custom island no longer teleports you and your boat onto its spawn point. The game moves the boat and the players only when it is teleporting you to an island; sailing in is deliberately the case where it leaves you alone. This mod repeated both moves without that check, so the trigger ring around an island snatched the boat, and whoever was aboard, across the last stretch of sea.

1.0.3

• NEW: switch an island back to the original without deleting files. The config gains UseCustomIsland1..UseCustomIsland5 - set one to false and that island loads the shipped original, with the map files kept installed. Edit via your mod manager's Config editor or BepInEx/config/yoxi.htf.maploader.cfg.

1.0.2

• FIXED: maps installed through a mod manager were not found. Mod managers flatten packages on install - the HTFMaps folder inside a map package can vanish, leaving the map files loose in the package's own folder. The loader now recognises a map by its bundle + json pair wherever it lies, so mod-manager and manual installs both just work.

1.0.1

• Clearer docs: custom islands REPLACE one of the game's five islands (only one island exists at a time - adding a sixth is not possible).

1.0.0

First release.

• Custom islands stand in for the game's own, with working NPCs, shops, price tags, boat and player spawns, creature spawns and casinos.
• Maps are two files (bundle + json); the json declares which island the map is a custom version of, and the mod enforces it.
• Multiple maps load at once, one per island.
• Maps install via mod manager or by dropping files into BepInEx/plugins/HTFMaps.
• Contains no game assets - everything is generated content.

Built by Yoxi.