InsaneSwim Dredge

The Insane Swim Dredge is a floating bucket-line gold dredge, built the way they were built a hundred years ago: a hull of 35 by 16 metres, a riveted bucket ladder 32 metres long, a lattice gantry over the bow and a lot of corrugated iron with rust running down it. In digging position, with ladder and stacker out, she is about 71 metres long, and the smokestack ends roughly 22 metres above the water.

The models are the old gold dredges of Alaska, the Yukon and Oregon. The proportions come from the public HAER documentation of the Coal Creek Dredge in Alaska, so we didn't make the size up. People really did put a house on a pontoon back then and send it out digging.

This is how she is meant to work. 72 buckets of 0.255 cubic metres each pull gravel up from under the water. On board it drops into a perforated trommel, 13.1 metres long and 2.4 metres across, which sorts it through holes of 12.7, 20.6 and 27 millimetres. The fine material runs over 12 gold tables with 432 riffles and on into the side and tail sluices.

Coarse stone rides the covered 28 metre stacker out over the stern onto the tailings pile. What stays caught in the riffles is concentrate. It goes to the gold room, then to the smelter, and ends up as gold bars on pallets at the loading deck, where a davit crane is already waiting.

The bars are the same ones as in the FSMW Gold Trader. The dredge brings its own pallet, so you won't need the Gold Trader to play with it. If you have both installed, the two are meant to get along instead of fighting over the gold.

Under the hood the dredge gets its own FSMW fill types and hangs on no other mod. When she is done, that means one machine and no shopping list.

The model is walkable: the deck, a gallery with a railing all the way round, outside stairs and a pilot house with a balcony. Below deck sits a six-cylinder marine diesel with a generator. 26 hanging lanterns and two searchlights on the end of the ladder are there for the night shift, because gold doesn't care what time it is.

Two spuds at the stern hold her in place while she digs. To move her, the plan is to haul the ladder up until it is level.

Everything on this page comes from our own Blender renders and from design sheets drawn off the 3D model. The game model with animations and sound is being built right now.

A beta for our members is set for Tuesday, 13 October 2026, at 18:00 German time, with the basic function: she floats, the ladder goes up and down, the bucket chain runs, and gravel you tip into the hopper with a loader comes out as gold bars on pallets. Digging on the lake bed and the full interior follow after the beta. The countdown is on our front page, in your own time zone too, and before that a 3D model you can spin will land right here on this page. Wishes and ideas go into the forum or the #swim-dredge channel on our Discord. The whole thing started as a forum idea, after all.