Tidewrack

Tidewrack sits at the bottom of your screen while you work on something else.

The tide runs on a real clock — twenty minutes out, twenty minutes back — and leaves things on the sand. Shells, sea glass, a bottle, a ship’s nail, a sailor’s medal. Some of it comes up crusted and has to be cleaned before you can tell what it is. Everything you find goes in a cabinet.

You don’t have to watch it. That is the point. Glance down, pick up what the sea left, go back to work.

A pet lives on your beach. You make it yourself — animal, colours, markings, a name — and it wanders, swims, dives for things and brings them to you, naps in its hut, and remembers what it keeps bringing you. It never dies, never gets sick, and never asks you for anything.

Leave a spare find out on the sand and something may come for it. Twelve visitors, from a gull to a peregrine, each drawn by different things, some only by a combination. They come whether or not you are watching.

Storms are the reset. When you have finished a coast, a storm takes the sand and the duplicates and opens up somewhere new — six coastlines, and finds that only appear after the sea has been angry enough times.

What it will never do

No daily rewards. No streaks. No login bonuses. No energy bar. Nothing expires, nothing is missed, and being away for a week costs you exactly nothing. This is a calm incremental in a genre full of things designed to pull you back on a schedule, and every one of those was left out on purpose.

It is offline. No account, no analytics, no network calls of any kind. Your save is a file on your own disk.

What it is

Two to three weeks of things to find, if you leave it open while you work. It costs about 0.75% of one CPU core and 200 MB sitting there. Windows 10/11, 64-bit.

Version 0.9.0. Pay what you want above the minimum — around $5.99 if it is worth that to you.

Made by one person. The code, the pixel art and the text were made with AI assistance; the design, the writing and the testing are mine.