Getting Started
Everything you need before your first descent: how the AV-1 answers to you, what the first few minutes in the water look like, and exactly where your progress lives before you ever make an account.
01 First launch
Before your first dive there’s one screen: the AV-1 hangs fuelled in the hoist, lamp already lit, and two things are yours to choose — both cosmetic, both free, and both skippable in a single click.
- Name her. Up to 18 characters, stencilled onto her nameplate as you type. Leave it blank and she ships as Lumen.
- Pick a lamp hue. One of four — Lantern (the stock warm amber), Tideglass, Deepwater or Nightbloom — previewed live on the drone hanging in front of you. It recolours the lamp lenses, the beacon and the light cone thrown into the water; it changes nothing about how she flies.
In a hurry? “Skip — use Lumen” takes the stock name and the stock amber hue and puts you in the water immediately. Nothing here is ever asked again.
02 Controls
The AV-1 answers to two inputs at once, and you can mix them freely — nothing about piloting requires a keyboard, and nothing requires a mouse.
- WASD or the arrow keys — eight directions. Hold two at once and they blend into a diagonal; the drone always moves at the same top speed no matter which keys got it there.
- Press and hold anywhere in the water — mouse or a finger on a touch screen — and the drone steers toward that point on its own. Let go and it eases to a stop.
- There is no separate collect or interact button underwater. Crystals, creatures and places are all read the same way: the drone simply passing close enough. Piloting is the whole verb.
Two ways to steer the same drone
Keyboard — WASD or the arrows
Pointer — mouse or touch, held down
The same keyboard also opens the instruments you’ll meet in later chapters, and fires the abilities and stations covered in the next section — none of it pauses the water, the drone drifts while you read.
03Every key, and the “?” panel
Press ? at any time and the full control list opens on top of the water, grouped the way a pilot actually thinks about them — piloting, screens, actions — with Esc (or ? again) to close it and go straight back to flying. It draws the same keycaps as the controls themselves, so the panel teaches the HUD instead of duplicating it.
If you played an earlier build: assigning an auto-drone used to sit on E. E now belongs to an ability — Magnet Sweep, see Abilities — and assigning moved to F.
Every binding
Piloting
Screens
Actions
I, K, L, P, R and ? all deep-link into the same full-screen Console — a tab rail on the left, one exit chip, one Escape — rather than six separate screens; press the key again (or Esc) to close it from any tab. M opens the Chart on its own, next to the Console’s own tile.
Q, W and E — which class fits what, and the full cost/cooldown/levelling picture — are covered in Abilities, alongside the Level 5 Calibration that unseals them (see also Pilot & Classes); B in Beacons & Travel; T’s cover-opening case and C in Concealment and The Ledger; and X and Z, which only ever do anything inside the Sealed Grotto, in The Breachstone. A few more keys only matter with a specific screen open: the arrow keys page the Ledger or step between radar marks on the Chart, and Space advances a line of dialogue.
04 The guided arc
From the moment you’re in the water, a single chip sits top-centre — one step of a short, ordered arc: haul reef crystals by hand, put an auto-drone on a charted field, open the Hold, reach the Twilight Zone, record a creature, open the Ledger, travel to the Berth, trade with Quartermaster Bell, then dispatch the fleet before you go. Each card carries the key it needs, drawn as the same keycap you’d see on the HUD, and a small progress meter for anything counted. Finish one and the next slides in behind it a moment later.
It only ever completes against something you actually did — no chip claims a step is done that isn’t. Finish one, or dismiss the whole arc (see below), and the chip hands off with one line pointing you at the Chart’s own NOW rail — see Sonar & Chart — which keeps surfacing whatever’s worth doing next from there on.
Tap or click the chip itself and it expands into a small card: the objective restated plainly, one line on why it actually matters, and two buttons. This is the direct answer to “I don’t know what to do next” — press Show me and, for an objective about a place, the drone flies itself there on a soft dashed ribbon with a live ETA ticking beside it, easing to a stop and pulsing a ring with a short coaching line the instant it arrives. For an objective about a control rather than a place — opening the Hold, opening the Ledger, arming the fleet — Show me skips flying altogether and opens that Console tab directly.
It never takes the wheel away for good: touch the stick or a key while it’s flying and the flight cancels on the very next frame, handing control straight back exactly where you are. It also refuses outright, honestly, in two cases rather than dragging you somewhere you can’t survive or reach — an objective sitting on a different map than the one you’re in (“the Chart can take you there — autopilot only flies water you’re already in”), or one sitting deeper than your hull’s own rating. The card’s second button, Dismiss guidance, is the same “drop the whole arc” choice this manual used to call “Skip guidance” — it just lives inside the card now, and still asks you to confirm once before it’s gone for the rest of the session.
05 Your first dive
Every dive begins in the Sunlit Reef, the band from the surface to 600 m — bright water, a gentle sway, and nothing in it that means you harm. The passage sets you down at 250 m, not the surface itself, so the first thing you see is already open water.
Your depth and current zone read out top-right the moment you’re in the water; your crystal and Parts counts read out top-left. Nothing else is on screen until you ask for it.
Nothing stops you swimming straight past the Reef and into deeper water on day one — there is no gate. The only things holding you back that far down are your own light and your nerve.
06 Collecting crystals
Crystal fields are small clusters seeded into each zone. Swim into a crystal and it is collected the instant you touch it — no click, no key. A collected crystal reappears after a short wait, so a field is never emptied for good.
Deeper water pays better. The same field, worked the same way, is worth more the further down it sits:
Crystal value by field
Collect from the same field enough times and it becomes charted — the first step toward an auto-drone working it without you. More on that in The Bay and The Economy.
07 Saving
You never see a save button, and you never need an account to keep your progress. Your expedition is written to this browser’s own local storage automatically — every ten seconds while you play, and again the instant you switch tabs or close the page.
That save lives on this device, in this browser, alone. Clear your browser data, or open the game on a different phone or computer, and it will not follow you — there is no account yet to carry it anywhere else.
When accounts do arrive, the plan is for this same local save to merge straight into one, never to be discarded by it. For now, this is the whole system — honestly described rather than promised early.