Inventory & Warehouse

01 Cargo has a shape now

The Inventory is the drone’s own on-board grid — press L and it slides in from the RIGHT, over the live water, no dimming and no pause. You keep flying while it’s open. Salvage hauls, the five tiered materials, consumables, rockets, pearls, and any part you own but aren’t wearing all occupy a real footprint on it — not a line in a list, a shape on a board. Currencies never do: crystals and Parts ride in a Bag drawn below the grid instead (§04). Close it with L again, Esc, or its own ✕ control — which draws both keys as their own keycaps — and at a short window height the panel scrolls rather than clipping. At the Berth, talk to Stowmaster Quill — press T near his counter, or tap his ring on touch — and a second, bigger board slides in from the LEFT: the Warehouse, for everything you own but aren’t carrying out to sea (§07).

02 The board itself, always drawn

All 50 squares draw at all times — 5 columns × 10 rows. Base capacity is 20 squares (four full rows), enabled top to bottom; the other 30 sit disabled — dark, locked squares, never simply missing — until a bigger hull raises the ceiling. Hover a locked square on desktop, tap it on a phone — same line either way — and it names exactly what unlocks it and how far.

03 What earns you more squares

Extra squares come from your hull — the only slot that raises the ceiling on the way up. Only one hull is ever worn at a time, so these numbers don’t stack with each other; each is base 20 plus that one hull’s own bonus.

Every other slot can shrink the Inventory too, in exchange for its own upside — a leaner engine, a nimbler claw, a longer-ranged lamp or the heaviest weapons each ship a small negative holdSquares of their own (down to -5 on the top-tier weapon, -4 on the top engine and lamp). Fitting one for its real bonus costs you a little cargo room, live, the moment you equip it.

04 The Bag rides below the grid

Only two things never take a square: Crystals and Parts — the game’s two currencies, drawn as a pouch below the board, on both panels, with a running count next to each. The Inventory’s own Bag note says it plainly: “Crystals and parts ride in the Bag — never in a square.” Everything else — including the five tiered materials, which used to be a third kind of ledger balance — is a physical stack sitting on the grid (§05).

05 What actually takes a square

Every physical item in the game — every part, pearl, rocket and material — carries its own width × height footprint, one shared definition the Inventory, the Warehouse and the drone’s own cargo pack all read from. A stack costs its footprint once, no matter how many of the same thing are piled into it.

06Auto-stow while you’re piloting

Pickups auto-stow the instant you grab them mid-dive — there is no packing minigame while you’re dodging a territorial eel. If something genuinely won’t fit, you get a live-number refusal and the item behaves honestly depending on what it is:

• A pickup that still exists in the world — salvage, a floating find — is simply refused. It stays exactly where it is until you make room.
• A payout with no world object left — rock rubble, paid the instant the rock broke — has nowhere to sit uncollected, so it ships straight to the Warehouse instead, with an honest notice: “Sent home — [quantity] × [material]. The Inventory had no room, so it shipped to the Warehouse — [N] squares free on board.” Nothing is ever silently lost.

The actual tetris — deciding what to take, what to leave behind, rearranging before a deep run — happens dockside at the Berth, where the game is paused on nothing but your own patience.

07 The Warehouse at the Berth

The Warehouse has a keeper: Stowmaster Quill, standing at his own counter at the far LEFT end of the Berth deck, same as Quartermaster Bell and the Beastkeeper. Press T near him — or tap his ring on touch — and the Warehouse slides in from the LEFT. The Berth is the only place it opens; unlike the Inventory, the Warehouse carries no key of its own.

The Warehouse has no fixed ceiling the way the Inventory does — it is 6 columns wide and grows a real row (6 squares) every time you buy one, rather than ever showing a square you have no way to unlock. It starts at 60 squares (10 rows), free, day one.

On desktop, both panels can stand open together — Warehouse on the left, Inventory on the right — so you can compare the two boards and move cargo directly between them. Below a certain window width, and on any touch device regardless of width, only one panel opens at a time; on the smallest screens, whichever one is open takes the whole screen.

Quill’s counter carries three actions of its own: a one-press Unload that auto-stows everything from the Inventory into the Warehouse, an OPTIONAL Tidy both bays that auto-sorts what you already own on either board — optional, never mandatory, so the manual packing that actually feels good is never taken away from you — and Bolt in another row, the crystal-priced expansion covered in Fig. 3 below.

08 Stacks to 999, and building beside the pile

Pearls, materials and rockets stack up to 999 per stack, and a stack still costs its footprint once regardless of how many are piled in it. Only an exact match merges: same kind, same tier — for a pearl specifically that means the same content row on every axis at once, so a Leviathan Bounty Pearl never merges with a Normal one even at the same level.

Click a stack of crafting pieces and, once a recipe’s count is met, a Combine action enables. The built part lands NEXT TO the pile rather than replacing it in place — which means the build itself needs its own free squares and can be refused with live numbers (“needs 2×2 free”-style) if there’s nowhere for the finished part to land. The consumed pieces decrement the stack; whatever’s left stays stacked.

Inspecting anything in either board opens the same detail card the shop, Workbench, Forge Book, Fitting Panel and Breachstone already share — never a second modal. Its action row is contextual: Equip for parts, Combine when a recipe’s met, Open/Use for consumables, Move between the Inventory and the Warehouse (Stow one way, Take aboard the other — both directions, always), and Drop — always behind a confirm naming exactly what and how many, since a chosen drop is the one loss this whole system allows.

09 Equipped is zero squares, and the shrink guard

A part on the drone lives on the drone, not in a box — it costs zero squares while worn, exactly like the locked squares cost nothing while disabled. Unequip it and it needs somewhere to actually land: the Inventory if there’s room, the Warehouse otherwise.

For a cargo-raising hull this compounds with one hard rule: no equipment change is ever allowed to strand cargo you’ve already packed. Removing a bigger hull, swapping down a tier, or fitting a part that trades squares away for its own bonus (§03) is refused outright the instant it would drop your capacity below what’s currently in use — coached with live numbers, e.g. “The inventory would drop to 20 squares — 26 are packed. Stow 6 in the Warehouse first.” Equipment changes happen at the Berth, so the Warehouse is always one press away — the refusal is never a dead end.

10 The pack riding on the drone

The cargo you’re carrying is drawn ON the drone, not just tallied in a menu — the pack visibly swells through four load states keyed on how full the Inventory’s squares are: empty, light (up to a third full), laden (up to two-thirds), and full. At full, the drone rides a little heavier — a slightly deeper idle bob and a quiet amber glint on the pack straps — and that’s the whole cue. No balance physics, no topple, no fail-state for carrying a lot: the silhouette itself is the read.