About This Game

We hope you enjoy your time here detecting!

The Detectorist Guild is a village-life, cosy, RPG/simulator set in England in the year 1999.

Free-roam a quintessential British village collecting artefacts and studying local history. Solve a dark mystery that draws in you and your family. Complete quests for villagers who have a habit of losing their treasured possessions. Donate, trade and sell your ‘finds’ to build impressive collections and upgrade your equipment.

Features

• An accurately simulated metal detector, including frequency, ground balance, and sensitivity controls

• Explore a historical village in the heart of the English countryside at the turn of the new millennium, with a distinct British, 1990s feel

• Uncover hidden secrets and find the best places to detect by piecing together clues in the village police station database

• Learn about the history of your finds by donating to the local museum

• Enjoy a relaxing experience with low-pressure RPG gameplay emphasising exploration and collecting

• Take in the retro-modern 2.5D visuals, blending pixels and voxels

The Detectorist Guild started in 2023, after a conversation down the pub with my son, who (being very much into history and archaeology) suggested I make a game about metal detecting. It was either that or make a VR survival horror game in which your character is in a wheelchair. I might still make a prototype for that, but for now The Detectorist Guild won out.

I wanted to create something that reminded me of home. Something with a distinctly Northern feel. Something cosy. Something that might keep Stardew Valley players going whilst they wait for the Haunted Chocolatier... 

I also wanted to evoke a bit of '90s nostalgia. At 41, I am officially middle aged - where peak nostalgia hits and midlife crises emerge... Seen as '80s nostalgia gets most of the attention, especially thanks to the cyberpunk aesthetic, a turn of the millennium time setting felt like something a bit different. Massive CRT monitors, early broadband, minidiscs, PlayStation 1, Windows XP, and so on... 

It was also important that the game be very simple to pickup and as engaging as possible right off the bat, without much of a learning curve beyond figuring out how the metal detector works.

The game also had to have some kind of depth to its story. Whilst allowing the player to relax and enjoy collecting artefacts, something to ground the interaction and push things forward was important. In making games aimed at a younger audience, I always got frustrated with the way a lot of media talked down to kids. They would oversimplify far too much, shy away from any concepts that might be challenging, and generally assume young people to be shallow and best served with shiny objects and loud noises. I wanted to get away from that and so The Detectorist Guild features a difficult story about coping with loss. It it very much intended to be a positive story, but not one that avoids what can be the darker sides of growing up.    

I do hope you enjoy your time detecting.

How the detector works..

The detectorist Guild features a (relatively) accurate simulation of a real metal detector. Players have to understand about frequency bandwidths and ground balance in order to calibrate the detector and find specific materials. 

Players need to adjust their sensitivity carefully. Set it too low and you risk missing valuable treasures. Set it too high and you'll pickup all kinds of rubbish, from 'hot rocks' to rusty nails. After that, you'll need to consider frequency. Not all materials can be found with the same bandwidth setting and you'll need to know what material you're looking for and it's associated frequency bandwidth in order to find it. Lastly, successful detectorists know how to adjust for ground balance. The ground you're detecting on can affect the reading and ground balance helps filter the signal. Sand, mud, grass, gravel, and bark all have different effects on the electromagnetic field, so think about where you're walking...

To help you, the village hardware store has all the guides you'll need, and some villagers might even know what their precious lost item is made out of (don't bank of that though...).