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.
The Daily Gift. Once every real day, your first dive surfaces a sealed, glowing cache drifting near the dive start. Fly straight into it — no button, exactly like a crystal cluster. It always pays crystals, scaling gently from 550 early on past 2,300 as you rank up, and about one gift in four also carries a net or a small bundle of rockets. Come back day after day and a streak builds, paying up to 50% more once it reaches 7 days. Miss a day and the streak only eases back one step — it never starts you over. The HUD carries a Daily gift chip all day — press it for today’s status, your streak and what the next streak day pays. While it’s waiting, the card also offers Show me— autopilot flies you to the cache (travelling there first if you’re elsewhere), so you never have to hunt for it.
Sound. The game starts silent — press the speaker button on screen to turn everything on. Then press Nfor the mixer — Master plus three channels (Music & Ambience, Effects, Interface), each a fader with a live preview as you drag, and a Mute that dims all four at once. Volume lives on this device, the same as your key bindings — it never travels with your save. Nets, tools, the hull, the interface and the Trial Grounds’ fights are audible, every zone carries its own ambience that shifts with your depth, and a quiet motif plays while you cruise — all of it under the Music & Ambience fader. The game’s sound effects are public-domain (CC0) recordings and our own synthesis — sources are credited in the game’s audio credits file.
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 a drone to a charted field used to sit on F — that whole mechanic is gone. Charting a field still matters (it feeds Fleet Dispatch, see The Economy), but there is no longer a key that puts a drone to work on it while you play. Q belongs to an ability instead — Magnet Sweep, see Abilities. F now opens the Pearls tab instead.
Every binding
Piloting
Screens
Actions
I, F, K, 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 seven separate screens; press the key again (or Esc) to close it from any tab. P’s tab is the one exception with no button of its own on that rail any more — reached only by the key, or by the permanent Fleet chip in the HUD’s resource row, top-left, which explains what arming does before it hands you to the same screen. L is deliberately not one of them any more: it opens the Inventory on its own side panel instead, sliding in from the right over the live water — no dimming, no pause, the drone keeps flying while it’s open. It carries its own HUD rail tile, “Inventory · L”, top-right under Console. The rail beside the Console carries two more controls that are deliberately not Console tabs: M opens the Chart, and U opens the Shop — each its own full screen, its own icon, its own exit. The HUD eye-toggle, top-left (see Playing on Mobile), is H on a keyboard — click or tap it on a touch device.
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 seats them and the staggered Level 10/15 unlocks that follow (see also Pilot & Classes); B in Beacons & Travel; T’s cover-opening case and C in Concealment and The Ledger; U’s Shop and Workbench in The Part Catalogue & Workbench; F’s Pearls in Hardpoints & Pearls; 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.
None of the letters above are fixed. Open Setup (?) and every row shows its own keycap — click it, press whatever you’d rather use, and it takes over immediately, everywhere that key is drawn. A key already doing a job offers a swap instead of double-booking itself. The only exceptions are movement (W/A/S/D and the arrows, read straight off the engine) and Escape, which always closes whatever is open no matter what else you’ve rebound.
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, open the Inventory, 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 Inventory, 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. One small instrument sits docked to the left edge, vertically centred: a glass flask holding red fluid, reading your hull’s own integrity — not any single part’s wear (see Hazards, Wear & Repair for that separate meter), but the drone’s own life support as a whole. It sloshes with your own motion, glows and pulses once low, and cracks visibly at critical — small on purpose, a readout you glance at, not a centrepiece.
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 — that’s what makes it count toward Fleet Dispatch’s offline payout, the crystals waiting for you when you come back. 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 by default. Clear your browser data, or open the game on a different phone or computer as a guest, and it will not follow you — unless you sign in.
Press R for Pilot Registration and enter an email — no password. That sends a short code and a magic link to the same address; either one signs you in, and both land you in the same place. On a copy of the game installed to your home screen, the code is the one that actually works — that install runs in its own browser shell, cut off from whatever app opens the link — so the code box is what shows first there. Sign in with an address you’ve flown with before and that expedition comes back; a new address starts a fresh one; the same email reunites your save across every device you sign into.
Signed in, the Account tab keeps syncing on demand and shows when it last did. Signing out protects that progress with one last sync first, then wipes this device clean — the local save, the drone in the water, all of it — and drops you back on the very first screen, so whoever picks the game up next starts their own expedition, not yours. The same door closes on its own: if an open tab discovers your session has ended — signed out elsewhere, or simply expired — it stows the account’s progress safely aside and returns to that first screen by itself, and signing back in brings the expedition home. If a device is ever left in a bad state — stranded on someone else’s save with no way back to your own — Setup (?) carries a “Reset this device” control that clears the local save and any leftover pilot identity, reachable no matter what state you’re signed into. It never touches the account itself, only this device’s copy of it.