Laptop Mode

How to Fish at 10–15 FPS on your laptop? This got it to 30+ on an Intel HD 5500.

Laptop Mode cuts How to Fish's most expensive rendering work while keeping it looking like How to Fish. It's a client-side BepInEx plugin, so it works with your other mods and in multiplayer.

Presets: press F8 to cycle (it remembers your choice)

• Balanced (default):
  • renders at 75% resolution and upscales with AMD FSR sharpening
  • one cheap 1024 px shadow cascade instead of the game's four 8192 px ones, with a shorter shadow distance
  • no SSAO, bloom, motion blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration, film grain or lens effects
  • FXAA instead of heavier anti-aliasing, lighter LODs, no realtime reflection probes
  • FPS cap 60. If you set a lower cap in the game's menu, that one is kept.
• Potato: 50% resolution, no shadows, no HDR or post-effects, lower-detail LODs and textures, no grass or decorations.
• Off: back to the game's own settings, instantly.

F9 shows or hides an FPS counter (top right).

The game's own graphics menu still works, and Laptop Mode re-applies its preset on top of whatever you change there.

Works with

• Multiplayer: everything happens on your own screen only and nothing is sent over the network. Host or join as normal, and friends don't need the mod.
• Comprehensive Optimization by mexico_nini pairs well with it: that mod handles stutter and garbage collection, Laptop Mode handles the GPU.

Settings

BepInEx/config/LaptopMode.HowToFish.cfg: default preset, hotkeys, FPS counter.

Made with AI

Honest disclosure: I was too dumb to mod this by hand, but it needed to be done. My laptop was running How to Fish at 10–15 FPS, and I figured other craptop owners were suffering too. So I had an AI coding assistant (Anthropic's Claude) build it with me.

• Who did what: I chose what it should do and how much visual quality to trade away. The AI read the game's graphics code, wrote the plugin and tested it in the real game. That meant checking each preset on screen and measuring FPS: 10–15 FPS before, 30+ with Balanced.
• Why it's marked AI Generated: it's listed under that category so you know how it was made.
• If something breaks: report it on the package page. Every preset can be turned off instantly with F8 → Off.

MIT licence.