The Part Catalogue & Workbench
The seven slots from Your Drone now carry a real range of gear, not a handful of milestone rewards — forty-five parts in total, weapon included, every one of them a drawn layer on the hull rather than a line in a menu. This chapter is the catalogue itself, the five real ways one reaches your Inventory today, the Workbench itself and its Naut-priced buyout, and the one honest catch every one of those paths shares — owning a part is not the same as fitting it.
01 The catalogue, by the numbers
Forty-eight items exist across the AV-1’s seven slots today, spread fairly evenly by rarity tier — this is the whole current range, stock loadout included, read straight off the game’s own item table. Nine of them are weapons, the newest and youngest slot in the catalogue — see Weapon & Rockets for the full mount-by-mount table.
Forty-eight parts, by slot
…and by rarity tier:
02 Five ways a part reaches your Inventory today
Every item carries a source, and the Inventory shows it plainly (see The Bay). Twenty-eight of the forty-five parts are craft rows — built for crystals and materials rather than found or granted — and crafting now has a real door: the Workbench, its own screen on the rail, covered in §04 below.
Every live source, and how many parts carry it
| Source | Count | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Start | 6 | The stock loadout every drone ships with — see Your Drone |
| Craft | 28 | Built at the Workbench for crystals and materials, once its own unlock condition is met |
| Milestone | 4 | One-time grants for a real depth or wallet threshold — see The Bay |
| Siege | 7 | Forged from Breachstone guardian-wave materials — see The Breachstone |
| Salvage | 3 | Grappled out of the water with the arm — see The Salvage Arm |
All 48 parts are reachable today across these five sources — a craft row still needs its own unlock condition met (a depth, a lifetime total, a capture count) before the Workbench will build it, exactly the same gate a milestone part reads against.
03 The silhouette actually changes
Fitting a part is never just a stat changing behind a menu. Each slot on the AV-1’s drawn rig is its own layer, and a fitted part replaces that layer’s body outright — a different lamp housing, a different hull plate, a different claw — so the drone you fly is visibly the drone you built. The same drawing is reused for the item’s icon in the rack, so what you see sitting in the Inventory is exactly what lands on the hull.
The wrap slot is the one exception, by design: a wrap re-paints the hull’s existing plating rather than replacing its shape — see Your Drone for the two liveries that exist today.
04 The Workbench
Press U from anywhere in the water and the Workbench opens — its own screen on the rail beside the Console and the Chart, not a tab buried inside either one — the shop, split into four racks rather than one long list: Parts, grouped by mount exactly the way the Rig(your drone’s mounted loadout) is (lamps, dome, hull, engine, claw, weapon); Wraps, the hull’s appearance line, kept off the Parts rack on purpose; Tools, informational plates for the milestone-earned gear covered in Concealment; and Consumables, the same net tiers the Berth sells, spent through the identical wallet the HUD’s own net button uses.
Click any part and its card opens a Try It preview — your own drone, redrawn live with that part fitted, before you spend anything — beside the real build price and a one-press confirm that actually crafts it, spending crystals and this item’s own-tier materials together.
The Workbench’s own footer names a couple more seams the same way, honestly rather than hiding them: Socket Unlocks and Luck Potions still have no standalone shop line (both live inside Pearls, or nowhere, today — see Hardpoints & Pearls), and Repair Goods still has no shop line either — there’s nothing to spend crystals on to restore a worn part yet.
05 Buy outright — Nauts buy time, never power
Once a recipe is genuinely open — its unlock condition already met, exactly the same gate Build itself checks — a second button sits beside Build on that card, priced in Nauts rather than crystals. It isn’t a discount on the normal price with the materials trimmed off; it replaces both legs of it — crystals and this item’s own-tier materials — with a single flat Naut number, so a pilot who’s a few materials short of a part they’ve already earned the right to build can close it out on the spot instead of farming the rest.
What a buyout actually costs
The Naut price is a fixed band set by the part’s rarity tier alone — not a formula run against its own crystal or materials price, and not a conversion of the two. Every Coastal craft part buys out for the same figure, every Leviathan one for the same steeper figure, regardless of which specific item it is. The band climbs hard with rarity: a modest 250 Nauts at Coastal rises to 12,500 Nauts at Leviathan — the same shape every tiered cost in this game follows, steeper at a deeper tier because that tier’s materials are harder-won in the water.
Say the fair-play line plainly, because it’s the whole point of the control, and it’s the same one the Nauts Shop itself runs on (see The Economy): a buyout never opens a recipe one metre early — it runs the identical unlock check Build does, so a locked recipe never grows a Naut-priced side door, and there’s nothing to buy out on a part with no materials leg to skip in the first place. It only ever skips the crafting wait — farming out the last of a tier’s materials — for a part you’ve already unlocked. It never sells the unlock itself.
06 Owning a part is not fitting it
Every way a part reaches you — Build, Buy outright, a milestone, a siege forge, an arm retrieval (see The Salvage Arm) — does the exact same thing under the hood: it adds the item to your Inventory. That is all it does. A newly owned part changes nothing about your drone until you actually fit it. Owning and fitting are two separate steps, not one: acquiring a part never touches a single stat, and only equipping it into its slot registers the bonus that part actually carries. It’s an easy trap — a fresh Build or a lucky wreck haul looks finished the moment the toast pops, and it isn’t. Every acquisition toast ends with the same honest reminder, “press I to fit”, for exactly this reason — say it here too, in the open, rather than let you find out mid-dive that nothing changed.
Tools are the one exception, not the rule: the Shear Tool, the Chisel Arm and the Wash Thrusters have no slot of their own to fit into at all (see The Bay), so for them owning really is the whole story — there is no second step. Every one of the seven slotted parts — lamps, dome, hull, engine, claw, weapon, wrap — is the opposite: sitting in the Inventory unfitted, it is worth exactly as much as if you’d never picked it up.
Weapon carries one more honest difference from the other six: it is the single slot with no Hardpoints cut into it, at any rarity — a deliberate line, not a gap. See Weapon & Rockets for why.