Extract text from Anno saved games (SWW)
To convert SWW saved games to another format, you need Anno 1800 or other Game software.
To convert other file formats to the "Saved Game File" file type, you need software like Anno 1800 or a similar tool.
The .sww file extension is predominantly used as a saved game file for the popular Anno strategy video game series, specifically Anno 1404 and Anno 1800. These files store complex player progress, city layouts, economic states, and AI behavior. Secondarily, the .sww format is utilized to store shallow water simulation data by scientific software like the ANUGA Hydrodynamic Modelling software and Surfer, as well as saved worlds in the game Stormworks: Build and Rescue.
Games like Anno 1800 are developed by Ubisoft (Blue Byte). Scientific simulation tools like ANUGA are often open-source Python packages used by researchers. Users typically want to convert or open .sww files to modify save game parameters (modding) or to extract simulation data for visualization in external GIS applications.
However, .sww files pose significant challenges. They are proprietary binary formats or specialized data arrays that are not supported by standard web browsers, text editors, or image viewers. Attempting to open a game save in a standard text editor will yield unreadable characters, and editing them without specialized tools usually corrupts the save data. There are no generic "target formats" for a game save, though simulation data users might try to extract data into CSV or XML.
This file format is exceptionally difficult to open or convert. It is a closed, proprietary format. Often, only the original software can properly read or export the data. Standard online converters will fail to process it. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format (like NetCDF in ANUGA files), viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your SWW file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted FOS, D2S and SGS files.
If you want to convert SWW file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Anno 1800 or similar software from the "Saved Game & Simulation Data" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to SWW, try Anno 1800 or another comparable tool in the "Saved Game & Simulation Data" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our SWW converter.