FISH FEAR ME: How to Edit Your Save File

By default, saves are stored in

If you’d like to find it really easily, you could search for “FISH FEAR ME” (or the save.boat file we’re actually looking for) using Voidtools’ application “Everything” (I just can’t resist pointing out just how much time being able to search my whole PC in seconds has saved me, haha. It’s kinda absurd that Windows doesn’t ship with the ability to search using the NTFS index, because it’s just so much faster than Windows Search), but if you’ve used Windows for a bit, navigating here shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.

If you’re struggling to find the AppData folder, make sure you have View > Show > Hidden Items checked.

This is also where your log files are stored, if you need to see those for any reason.

Your save file is located in the folder that’s named with a bunch of numbers, and is called save.boat!

(I think there can be multiple “bunch of numbers” folders if you have people using multiple Steam accounts to save data on your PC, but I haven’t checked that.)

Now that you’ve found your save file, it’s always a good idea to make a copy of it before editing it, just in case you make a mistake and need to revert to the earlier version. Feel free to keep the copy in the same folder, just make sure it’s named anything except save.boat. (The default “save – Copy.boat” name when copy-pasting the file into the same folder works fine) If you break anything, just change the name of your backup back to save.boat in order to reset your save back to the point you backed it up at.

Open save.boat in any text editor (notepad works well, but go for whatever you prefer).

Okay, now we’re looking at a whole lot of data, which thankfully is stored in a pretty readable format!

The most important item for most players will probably be the “knowledgeTotal” variable, which is located right at the top of the file. Just change the number following it to whatever you want, save the changes, re-open the game, and buy some upgrades!

Here’s what every part of the save file (as of save format V4) does!

The two to look at are knowledgeTotal, for skipping the grind on knowledge, and upgrades, for playing around with cheats.

• version – Don’t edit this! It tells the game what version of the save file system the save was written for, so that it knows what information will need to be added to it (such as the unlock status for all the items introduced in the future WOMEN WANT ME expansion) when the game gets updated to a new version.
• debt – The amount of your billion-dollar cosmic debt that has yet to be paid off.
• knowledgeTotal – The amount of knowledge (the fish hook icons) you have available to spend on permanent upgrades. Getting the last couple can look a bit grindy (if you can complete every altar ritual in a run, that will get you really far towards those last few though!).
• numRoundsPlayed – Number of rounds you’ve played.
• cheapestAvailableUpgradeCost – Used to determine if the menu should notify you about being able to afford new upgrades.
• luresUnlocked – Unlock status for each of the lures. You can change any lure’s lureUnlocked entry from false to true to unlock it prematurely, but personally, I recommend discovering them yourself in-game.
• fishCaught – Stats on the fish you’ve caught, viewable in the bestiary.
• upgrades – Records how many tiers of each permanent upgrade you have purchased. It’s possible to cheat in game-breaking ways by increasing the tier of upgrades beyond their usual cap! You can start with tons of money, deal thousands of extra damage, make your boat impossible to control because it’s too fast, tank your framerates by creating hundreds of nets every frame, etc. When you’re done messing with cheats here, you can check what the normal max value for an upgrade is by opening the upgrade menu.
• boats – Stats for each boat, and their unlock status.
• weapons – Unlock status and max level achieved stat for each weapon.
• challenges – Unlock status for each challenge.
• vars – Miscellaneous things to be tracked by the save file that don’t fit into any of the other categories. These track stuff like whether you’ve seen each of the cutscenes, how many altars you’ve used, and how many fish you’ve caught in total.

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• FISH FEAR ME: How to Catch Each Fish