Pearl Shells
A shell sits shut in the water, resisting the same claw-slot arm that hauls a wreck free (see The Salvage Arm) — no cast, no tether, just the arm holding steady against real resistance until it gives. Every shell in the water looks exactly alike; nothing about its shell tells you what’s inside. What it yields is rolled the instant it opens, off nothing but how deep you found it.
01 One kind of shell, no colour-coding
There is no rare shell and no common shell to learn to tell apart — every shell in the water is the same physical object, by design, so the choice you’re making by swimming to one was never “which shell.” It’s “how deep do I dare go,” because depth is the only lever this system gives quality. A shell is fixed and one-time, exactly like a salvage haul or a landmark: sail up to it and it’s there, prise it open once, and it’s gone for good — never re-locks, never respawns.
A shell always gives something. There is no roll anywhere in this system that can come back empty — every rarity-and-family combination the drop table can land on carries a real, positive chance at every depth in the water, the Sunlit Reef included. Someone who swims a dark trench for a shell and gets nothing for it never tries a second trench; this game doesn’t do that to you.
02 Prising it open
A shell doesn’t need casting — you’re already sitting next to it, the same proximity a cover opens from, not a wreck’s own reach. Press Tin range and the arm starts working the shell. One number worth knowing precisely: the range that counts as “in range” here is your cover-opening reach— the same 150 world-px every drone starts with, and the same stat a Salvager’s class shift widens by 40 more px — never the wreck-hauling arm’s own cast-and-reel reach. A claw upgrade that only extends the wreck arm’s reach does nothing to how far off a shell you can start prising it.
Prising itself runs on the identical rate the wreck arm reels at: your fitted arm’s reel speed divided by the shell’s own resistance, ticking up toward done. A better arm works faster; a more stubborn shell takes longer — the same fact you already learned hauling a wreck, not a new number to learn twice.
Progress fills for as long as you stay in range and don’t cut it — no cast beat, no line to feed, just the arm bearing down on the shell every frame you’re close enough.
Swim more than about 1.15× your cover-opening reach from the shell mid-prise, or press T again on purpose, and the attempt releases — tighter slack than a wreck haul allows, because standing next to a shell is a much smaller cone than staying on the end of a cast line. Either way the shell drops back exactly as closed as it was; nothing about it changes, and it waits for a later attempt.
Progress fills to full and a Pearl is rolled and credited on the spot, loose in your Pearl tray — not fitted, not chosen, just yours the way anything landed in the Hold is yours (see Hardpoints & Pearlsfor what to do with it next). The same “salvage” award a cracked cover or a hauled wreck already pays lands too: +25 Pilot XP.
03 Resistance is checked against the arm, not the reach
A shell has a resistance weight, same units as a wreck’s own weight, checked against your fitted arm’s lift capacity before an attempt is even allowed to start — a shell heavier than your arm can pry is visible and in range, but the prise simply refuses to begin, exactly the same “in reach but not liftable” state a too-heavy wreck already shows you. Come back with a better claw and the same shell opens.
Shell weight climbs with depth, roughly the way you’d expect — the shallowest shells resist almost nothing, and the deepest, packed into the Sealed Grotto, resist as hard as anything in the water. The very heaviest of them sit exactly at the limit of the strongest arm in the game: the Piston Crusher Claw, an Abyssal-tier claw with a lift capacity of 8. Nothing weaker will move them, and nothing in the ocean is beyond an arm you can actually build — the hardest shell down there is a real ask, never an impossible one.
04 What decides the rarity: depth, on two axes
The instant a shell finishes prising, two independent rolls decide what comes out — which rarity tier and which of the five Pearl families— both read off nothing but the shell’s own depth, never which zone it happens to sit in by name. That means a shell at the deep edge of one zone and a shell at the shallow edge of the next read almost identically: the curve is a gradient, not a cliff you’d feel as arbitrary crossing a zone line.
The tier roll, by depth
| Tier | 0 mSunlit Reef | 600 mTwilight edge | 1,300 mMidnight edge | 2,100 mLower Dark starts | 2,800 mLower Dark's far edge | 4,000 mSealed Grotto's far edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coastal | 70% | 45% | 22% | 10% | 5% | 3% |
| Twilight | 22% | 40% | 38% | 22% | 12% | 6% |
| Midnight | 6% | 12% | 30% | 38% | 28% | 14% |
| Abyssal | 2% | 3% | 9% | 26% | 40% | 32% |
| Leviathan | 0% | 0% | 1% | 4% | 15% | 45% |
Read a column top to bottom for the real odds at that depth. Every low tier stays genuinely obtainable everywhere — Coastal never goes to zero, even at the deepest breakpoint — and Leviathan starts at exactly 0% on the surface: the top rarity only begins appearing once you’re truly deep, meant literally.
05 Five families, three common and two that only bloom in the deep
The other axis picks which of the five Pearl stats the shell rolls — the same five families Hardpoints & Pearlsalready covers. Bounty, Current and Hold sit flat: exactly as likely on a surface shell as on a Sealed Grotto one. Lumen and Fortune are the two the drop table deliberately holds back — rare everywhere shallow, and only really opening up once you’re in the deepest water the game has.
flat — same weight at every depth
flat — same weight at every depth
flat — same weight at every depth
0.15× a common family's weight at the surface, up to a full 1.0× (parity) at 4,000 m
0.05× a common family's weight at the surface, up to 1.25× — the single likeliest family in the game — at 4,000 m
By the deepest water in the game, Fortune — the family that directly moves Hardpoints & Pearls’ own Fusion coin flip and its pity counter — is actually slightly MORE likely per roll than any single common family. That’s deliberate: the Sealed Grotto is already gated behind the Breachstone, so a shell that hard-won being unusually generous toward the family that most helps you push your own luck further reads as earned, not undertuned.
Depth is the only lever. There is no shell that’s secretly better than another shell at the same depth — the physical object never tells you anything; the water you’re in already told you everything the game is willing to tell you before you open it.