← The Pilot’s ManualChapter 19

Hazards, Wear & Repair

Read this first: a part that wears all the way down is never destroyed. It stays fitted, stays visible, stays yours — it just stops contributing anything until you bring it back. Nothing you own can be taken from you by the water. What follows is exactly what wears a part, what never can, and the three honest prices to undo it.

01 Inert, never destroyed

Every non-stock part you fit carries its own 0–100% condition — not a shared drone health bar, a separate number per part, worn down only by whatever hazard actually touches that part. At 0% the part’s stat contribution goes to exactly zero and the slot falls back to stock-equivalent performance — never below it, never gone. The part is never unequipped, never removed from your Inventory, and never at any point stops being yours.

100% — full bonus

0% — inert, still fitted

The one guarantee this whole system rests on

Nobody ever loses a part to wear. Zero is a floor, not a cliff.

02 Two floors under every pilot

Stated plainly

Stock gear never wears at allthe free kit every drone starts with is architecturally exempt — there is no code path that puts a stock part below 100%. A player who owns nothing else, ever, can never be worn down to helplessness. That floor is the same for every pilot on day one and day one thousand.

Wear is billed by use, not by the calendarevery rate in this chapter is a percent-per-second of actual hazard contact while you’re actively piloting — nothing here knows what a wall-clock second is. A parked drone, a backgrounded tab, a moored drone: all billed nothing. Close the game for a fortnight and your drone is exactly as you left it. Nothing rusts while you’re gone.

03 What wears what, and why some cost more

Every hazard targets one specific slot — never a shared pool — and the rate is deliberately not the same across sources. The one true mistake in the water (grinding the hull against a cave wall) carries the full rate; the sources that are closer to ordinary play than to a mistake are billed gentler. That’s the whole design: the multiplier tells you which risks are worth taking.

Fig. 1

Every typed wear source

Source	Wears	Rate	If you never let up	Why
Cave wall contact	Hull	1.0×	≈ 7h 35m	The one hazard with a collider — you have to physically touch it. Full rate on purpose: it's the single avoidable mistake in this list.
Kelp / silt exposure	Engine	0.6×	≈ 12h 38m	Continuous while you're inside the bed. Incidental — drifting through kelp is normal play, not a mistake.
Thermal vent proximity	Lamps	0.8×	≈ 9h 29m	Continuous while in range of the vent.
Electric fauna zone	Dome	0.8×	≈ 9h 29m	Delivered as a zap roughly every 6 seconds, not a steady drain — the multiplier sizes the per-zap amount.
Pressure past your hull's depth rating	Hull	0.5×	≈ 15h 10m	Slow and constant the moment you're deeper than your hull is rated for — the gentlest continuous source on purpose.
Hauling a wreck past arm capacity	Engine	0.4×	≈ 18h 58m	Only possible if the fitted arm's own lift falls below the haul's weight mid-reel — see §04. Gentlest of all: a high-value playstyle, not recklessness.

“If you never let up” is a hypothetical: continuous, full-rate contact with zero relief for the whole window. Nobody actually sits glued to a cave wall for seven straight hours — real, intermittent contact stretches every one of these numbers well past what’s shown here. Read the column as what the multiplier MEANS, not a forecast.

Placed hazards exist only where the fiction calls for them: kelp fouling in the Kelp Forest, the thermal vent in the Midnight Zone, cave walls and the electric shoal in The Lower Dark. The Sunlit Reef and the Twilight Zone carry no placed hazard at all — the only way to wear a part that shallow is pressure past your hull’s own rating, which can happen anywhere you’re deeper than your hull is built for.

Five cave walls sit in The Lower Dark, each a real, solid shape — no two of them the same size — and every one collides. Drive straight at one and it stops you rather than letting you clip through; the guarantee underneath that is tested from 24 angles, hundreds of frames each, against every wall in the water: however you approach one, the wall can slow you down, but it can never trap you inside it. What a wall doesn’t do any more is stand there forever — see §06.

06 Breakable rock — never a gate, always a shortcut

Every cave wall in the water can be broken now, and there are 33 of them standing — not only in the Lower Dark, but spread across every band from the Sunlit Reef on down. Fly within range, fire your fitted weapon at it, and it cracks — the surface splits into real plates as its integrity falls, and the killing hit throws them outward rather than the wall simply vanishing. The rule this whole feature is built around, stated as plainly as the manual can: a rock is never a gate. Nothing behind a wall is ever the only way through — a rocket buys you a shortcut and, sometimes, a payout, never progression you couldn’t reach some other way.

A rock’s integrity comes from its own size — the bigger the ellipse, the more HP — so the 33 range from a couple of solid hits to a real commitment:

Fig. 4

Breaking a wall, worked

22 to 65 HP, smallest wall to largest, across all 33 standing today — the Sunlit Reef, the Twilight Zone, the Midnight Zone and the Lower Dark all carry their own share.
The stock Single-Tube Flare Launcher takes 6 shots on the smallest wall, 17 on the largest.
A Leviathan Lance takes 1 shot on the smallest, 2 on the largest — a torpedo’s 35% wider blast doing real work.
A Siege Launcher’s full five-rocket volley, softened by the Salvo style’s own penalty, drops any wall at 97 HP or under in one pull; a single round chips 19 HP off for one rocket.
Press X — the same key that swings at the Breachstone — to fire, from a real stand-off (well clear of the wall’s own hull-wearing contact radius, so breaking one never costs you condition). See Weapon & Rockets for how blast and your ×1/×5 volley choice turn into that damage.

Breaking one pays out rubble on top of whatever it was hiding — depth-tiered materials, roughly an eighth of what the rock cost to break, credited through the same wallet every other faucet uses. A broken wall comes back in 15 minutes, so the map can never be permanently strip-mined and a rocket keeps a use even on a mature save.

What a rock is sitting on is authored per rock, never rolled — and said honestly, because it manages what a rocket is actually worth: most rocks hide nothing at all. Of the 33 standing today, 20 pay rubble and nothing more. That is the rule, not a bug — a rocket is a real spend of crystals, and the game would rather you know the odds than discover them the hard way.

The 13 that do hide something, in four kinds

Crystal pocketA random haul of crystals, paid once on the first break. The ceiling climbs with depth — up to 90 in the Sunlit Reef, 165 in the Twilight Zone, 300 in the Midnight Zone, and as much as 500 in the Lower Dark — but a pocket rarely pays near its own ceiling, so 500 stays a thing worth hoping for rather than the expected result.

A PearlRare, and always a high tier — Abyssal or better, with roughly a 3-in-10 chance of Leviathan — paid once on the first break, same as a pocket.

A Pearl shellBuried under the rock rather than a payout of its own — the one hoard kind that isn’t a one-time claim, because a shell is a repeatable faucet you can prise again and again once the rock is gone. Four rocks in the water hide a shell this way, and the pair travels together: wherever that shell’s own resting spot moves to, the rock guarding it moves with it. See Pearl Shells.

A sheltering creatureNothing is caged inside the rock — a shy animal shelters beside it, and the break simply startles it into the open. It was always reachable; the rock only ever hid the sighting, never the species.

Nothing drawn near a standing rock is ever reachable through it — a crystal, a pickup, a creature sitting behind solid stone stays exactly that, behind it, until the wall actually comes down. One rule governs both what you see and what you can touch, so the art and the collider can never quietly disagree the way an older pass once let them.

A broken rock doesn’t always reform exactly where it stood. Of the 33 standing today, 28 now keep a small handful of resting spots — two to five — in the same patch of seabed, and settle onto one of them when the 15-minute clock runs out. One rock has no safe second spot to settle into and always comes back exactly where it broke; that’s a real gap in that stretch of water, not an oversight. The four rocks paired with a Pearl shell (above) move with their shell instead of rolling their own spot.

The same three guarantees the Pearl shells keep apply here. A rock you’ve never broken never moves. A rock mid-countdown never moves either — it only settles on a new spot the instant it actually reforms, never partway through the wait. And closing the game, reloading, or coming back tomorrow reshuffles nothing: a save remembers exactly the layout you last saw, not a fresh roll. Every possible resting spot was checked before it shipped, the same way a shell’s is — none of them can ever bury a pickup, a landmark, a passage, or another rock close enough to squeeze past.

04 Two sources with no world object

Pressure and overload wear a part without a hazard placed anywhere — they’re rules about your own drone’s state, not a place on the map. Pressure bites the moment you’re deeper than your hull’s depth rating allows, for as long as you stay there. Overload is narrower than it sounds: it can only ever trigger while a wreck is actively being reeled in, and only if the fitted arm’s own lift capacity has already fallen below that haul’s weight mid-haul — which itself only happens if a claw or engine part fails under you while the line is out. That’s the loop closing on itself: neglected gear fails, the failure costs you lift, and the over-strained haul wears the engine further. Keep your claw and engine in good condition and this source never fires at all.

Heavy ability use wears gear too, at a flat 0.06% per cast, mapped to whichever part actually powers that ability — a Hauler ability leans on the engine bay, a Scout ability splits between thrusters and sensors, a Salvager ability overcharges the claw. It’s a secondary, flavourful contributor by design: spamming one ability at its own cooldown ceiling for the entire window above still only just reaches full wear.

05 Three prices, one outcome

Bringing a part back to full is never gated to the Berth — it lives right on the Drone tab’s own repair block, the same card every part already opens from inside your Rig (I), open mid-dive exactly like the rest of your loadout. A header chip up top counts how many fitted parts currently need attention and, pressed, jumps you straight to the first worn slot — you’re never left hunting the loadout for which part is the problem. Three paths exist there, and the only difference between them is price, never what they restore:

Fig. 2

The three doors, by rule

Ordinary repair — crystals only, and it owns the whole band from 1% to 99%: worn, but not exhausted. The cost is a small, fixed fraction of what the part is worth, prorated by exactly how much condition is missing — mend a scratch and it costs a scratch’s worth, not a full repair’s. Parts that aren’t for sale at any price (salvage, milestone and siege rewards) are valued through their own crafting material instead, so nothing is ever free to mend. Refused if the part is already full, if you can’t afford it, or if it has run all the way to 0% — a spent part is the next door’s business, not this one’s.
Failed restore — for a part that’s run all the way to 0%. Crystals plus a real chunk of that part’s own-tier crafting material, the same currency diving that tier already earns you — steeper than ordinary repair on purpose, because a fully spent part is meant to cost more than a scratch. Refused if the part isn’t actually at 0%, or you’re short on either leg.
Crystal buyout — the same 0% restore, paid entirely in crystals at a steep, tier-scaled rate instead of farming the material a second time. This buys time, never power — it skips a grind you’ve already earned the right to skip, exactly like the Workbench’s own craft buyout (see The Part Catalogue & Workbench). It never opens a repair early, never restores a part you don’t already own, and never touches anything but which currency clears the bill.

Open a failed part’s own card and a banner reading INERT — NOT DESTROYED sits above both its prices, restating the one guarantee this whole system rests on in the exact place it’s easiest to doubt mid-dive: the part stays fitted and listed the entire time, never pulled from your loadout while you decide how to pay. Every price on the card — the ordinary repair, the failed restore’s two legs, the buyout — is read live off your own wallet and this exact part, never a flat number pasted onto every card alike. And a refusal is never a bare greyed-out button: short on crystals states plainly how many more you need, and short on a tier’s own materials names the exact currency and the exact shortfall still owed — the same “the shop states its refusals” rule the Workbench already follows.

Fig. 3

Two real parts, all three prices

Part	Ordinary, half-worn	Failed restore, at 0%	Buyout, at 0%
Riveted ShellCoastal	4 ⬢50% missing, prorated	64 ⬢+ 6 Coastal Scrap	244 ⬢crystals only
Keeled Pressure HullMidnight	280 ⬢50% missing, prorated	4,480 ⬢+ 22 Midnight Plate	7,560 ⬢crystals only

Scale up the ordinary column and a full repair from a genuine scratch is still cheap — a handful of crystals at Coastal tier, a few hundred at Midnight. The failed-restore and buyout columns are steeper on purpose: they’re the price of a part that ran all the way to 0%, not a routine top-up.

Repair never travels with you the way condition itself does through the save — it’s spent the moment you pay, same as any other purchase. And repairing a part changes nothing about the part itself: same effects, same slot, same tier, just back at full strength.

Wear shows, too, not just on the numbers: the drone standing on its own stand on your Rigcarries real damage art on whichever slot is actually worn — a scored hull plate, a fouled engine hub, a scorched lamp, a cracked and arcing dome, a chipped claw — layered straight onto the same rig, so the card you’re reading and the drone in front of it always agree.