Games Like Shrimpscape

One berried female. An empty tank. Thirty-one morphs you haven't bred yet.

Shrimpscape is a shrimp keeping sim about the two things that actually decide whether a tank works: what's hidden in your shrimp's genes, and what's dissolved in your water. Everything else — the scape, the shop, the money — is built on top of those two.

Genetics that keeps secrets from you

Every shrimp carries a full genotype across a dozen loci: recessive Taiwan Bee, a red base, the blue locus behind Blue Bolt, four additive loci for white coverage, four more for spot density, the Tiger locus behind Pinto, and a three-allele eye locus where orange eyes are recessive and have to be carried on both sides. Nothing is rolled from a loot table. Two plain-looking shrimp can hold a morph between them for generations before it shows, and when it finally does, it's because of what you actually paired.

Water decides whether any of it happens

GH, KH, pH, TDS and temperature aren't a scorecard. They set clutch size, survival rate, whether a molt succeeds, how often your shrimp pair off, and how likely an adult is to die. Genetics tells you what you could breed. Water tells you whether you get to.

Build the tank, not a menu

Lay the substrate, place hardscape rock and driftwood in real 3D, glue plants where you want them, aim the light, and step back to see it from any angle. Photo mode is there for the moment when it finally looks the way you pictured.

The shop is a place, not a popup

Walk out of your tank and into the aquarium store: livestock in the showcase tanks along one wall, plants and hardscape on the shelves along the other. What you buy goes into your inventory, and you carry it back and place it yourself. The shrimp you saw in the showcase is rendered with the same system as the one in your tank — the colour in the shop is the colour you get.

A journal that works the routes out itself

The breeding journal lists every morph, its grading tiers, and the crosses that lead to it. Those routes aren't written down anywhere in the game — they're computed from the genetics model on startup. If the genetics say a path exists, the journal shows it. Nothing in there can lie to you.

A market with a memory

Prices come from real hobby pricing, split across morph and grade. Sell the same line often enough and the market saturates and the price drops. Today's rare is tomorrow's ordinary, and that's a mechanic, not a slogan.

In the box