Panludia
COMMUNITY INTEGRATION
POOLSArchipelago randomizer mod
Give the quiet poolrooms a multiworld progression loop. Explore pools, slides and unusual spaces while other worlds supply the licenses and movement upgrades needed to turn your discoveries into checks.
Maintained by nbrochu / SerpentAI
- Reviewed build
- 1.0.0
- OS
- Windows
- Last reviewed
- 9 Sept 2026
- Installation
- Manual installation
How the game changes
- Entering pools, taking slides, standing on diving boards, sitting on chairs, touching props and triggering special events provide checks. The maintainer documents roughly 198 to 333 locations depending on the optional categories.
- Six main levels are supported. The separate Level 0 prologue is optional and disabled by default; enabling it adds a different mix of props, chairs and slides.
- Level licenses, pool-depth permissions from one to eleven tiles, slide colors, diving boards and chair types unlock their corresponding checks. These permissions govern check eligibility rather than physically rebuilding the poolrooms.
- A starting level is chosen from Levels 2, 4, 5 and 6, with Level 0 added to that pool when enabled. Its license is supplied from the start; other level licenses arrive through the room.
- Run, Progressive Movement Speed and Progressive Water Speed change actual movement. Land and water upgrades are tracked separately, with maximum speeds capped by the client.
- Collect forty of fifty Rubber Ducks and complete Level 6 to finish by default. Both the required count and the total pool can be changed from one to fifty; a requirement above the available total is automatically reduced.
- Chair checks are enabled by default and introduce chair-type items. Turn them off for fewer checks and less fine-grained exploration. This also avoids relying on nearby-chair discrimination for those checks.
- Four optional traps affect camera control, movement, rewind or the wet-lens effect. Trap frequency defaults to zero; weights and duration are adjustable. Universal Tracker can be embedded in the client if separately installed.
Before you start
- Use the standard Steam game on Windows with Archipelago 0.6.7 or later. The VR version is explicitly incompatible. The base game's Linux and macOS availability does not establish compatibility with this Windows memory-reading client.
- Install pools.apworld, launch POOLS to its main menu, then open POOLS Client in the Archipelago Launcher. Connect the correct room and slot and wait for the process-found message. The POOLS tab shows the integration's current information.
- No separate game-mod installation is required: the client attaches to the running process. It must stay running and connected while you play; the APWorld alone does not modify a normal offline session.
- The guide identifies a 912,512-byte POOLS.exe and its hash. Runtime access also uses fixed offsets in GameAssembly.dll, so later game updates may require a matching client update even if the small executable appears unchanged.
- You can physically explore an area before receiving its license, but its checks will not count yet. Return once the required level and interaction permissions have arrived.
- Zoom checks also require touching a nearby railing. Special event checks may wait for the game's autosave, up to ten seconds. A short delay does not necessarily mean the room is disconnected.
- Sitting at an exaggerated angle can make adjacent chairs be mistaken for one another. The maintainer documents this positional limitation; disabling chair checks is an available simpler configuration.
- Rewind traps can move you out of bounds around long slides, elevators or gravity changes, requiring a level restart. Very high movement speed can also cause out-of-bounds movement. Wet traps occasionally fail to trigger. Leave traps off for a more predictable first run.
- Reconnect the same room and slot when continuing, and keep normal save backups. The reviewed client tracks live interactions; it does not establish that every action performed while disconnected will later be recovered.
- The maintainer considers the release feature-complete and stable, but the documented quirks remain. Panludia has not independently completed a campaign, and this integration adds neither DeathLink nor native co-op.