Taskbar Aquarium

Taskbar Aquarium is a small idle game that sits in a thin strip above your Windows taskbar. Your fish swim, nap and grow while you work, study or browse, and you can look after them whenever you take a break.

What you do

• Hatch eggs and raise fish: feed them, watch them grow from fry to adult, and collect the gold they make.

• Discover 75 species across 8 kinds of eggs, plus 30 rare mutations and 6 inheritable genes bred in the nest.

• Play with your fish: Playtime has three little games. Ring Training teaches tricks, Food Chase has your fish follow your cursor to catch falling food, and in Hide and Seek you watch which decoration it hides behind.

• Watch them dance to your music: a fish that has learned three tricks dances to whatever is playing on your PC, in time with the beat.

• Feed them right: flakes, tablets or artemia. Every species has a favourite food, and a fresh meal from your own hand counts for more than the auto-feeder.

• Mind the water: wipe algae off the glass, change dirty water, set the temperature and upgrade 12 pieces of equipment. Every species has its own comfort zone.

• Decorate with 47 decorations and 12 tank themes. Some glow at night and some give bonuses.

• Bond with your fish: each one has a name, a personality, hearts, friends and a little diary of memories. Some ask you for things, and some ask you to play.

• Small surprises: plankton clouds, bubble chains to pop, sea creatures passing by, and now and then a fish that jumps out of the tank.

• Send an exchange student: share a code with a friend, and your fish spends a day in their tank and comes home with its memories and a little gift.

• Grow a real reef: release fish into the ocean to bring 8 reef zones to life and receive postcards from the fish you let go.

• Unlock automation: a 40-skill tree with a workshop branch adds auto-feeding, a gold magnet, crafting and offline progress.

• Long-term goals: 20 achievements, an aquarist's journal, seasons, elder fish, several tanks and a weekly timelapse film of your tank.

Made to stay out of your way

• Hides itself when a fullscreen app or game is running.

• Click-through outside the tank, so it never blocks your desktop.

• Follows your real clock: fish sleep at night and some of them glow in the dark.

• Reacts to your PC: music makes trained fish dance, typing speeds up the focus current, and on low battery the fish slow down too. It only reads the sound level and the time of your last input.

• A guided first session shows you every part of the game, and a level-up card tells you what just opened up.

• Fully offline, with no accounts, ads or energy timers. Saves are kept locally with automatic backups, and you can start over from Settings.

Install

• Download and unzip TaskbarAquarium-windows.zip.

• Run TaskbarAquarium.exe.

• Windows SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher. Click More info → Run anyway.

Your save is stored in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\ClickCat\TaskbarAquarium\.

Playable in English, Turkish and German (Settings → Language).

This is an early version and feedback is very welcome. Leave a comment if something feels off, too slow or too fast.

AI disclosure

The music and sound effects were generated with ElevenLabs. The pixel art (drawn as code), the code and the translations were made with the help of an AI assistant (Claude).