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 anchored like a landmark, but it is not one-time. Prise it open and it closes for 15 minutes — and most shells do not reopen on the exact spot you left them. Each keeps a handful of resting spots in its own stretch of water and settles onto one of them the moment it comes back, so what you learn is the area, not a pixel. A shell you have never prised never moves, nothing moves while a countdown is still running, and reloading the game reshuffles nothing. A small, endlessly replenishing faucet rather than forty rocks you eventually run dry. That matters because Fusion (see Hardpoints & Pearls) consumes Pearls whether it wins or loses: a finite well feeding a system that eats what it’s fed would eventually strand an unlucky pilot with nothing left to fuse. This way the water never runs out.
The other honest half of the same picture: a shell can come up empty. Finishing a prise is not a guaranteed Pearl — it’s a coin flip weighted by depth, checked first and separately from which Pearl you’d get. An empty prise costs you nothing but the time already spent working the shell; no net, no material, no progress is ever lost to it.
Chance a finished prise comes up empty, by depth
| 0 mSunlit Reef | 600 mTwilight edge | 1,300 mMidnight edge | 2,100 mLower Dark starts | 2,800 mLower Dark's far edge | 3,000 mKelp Forest floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 35% | 28% | 20% | 14% | 9% | 5% |
Emptier shallow, more reliable deep — the same direction as the tier table below, so depth pays off on both axes at once. A shell at the Sealed Grotto’s far edge is both more likely to hold something good AND more likely to hold something at all.
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. But the shell doesn’t just crack open on a straight line — it’s a hinged scallop that fights you first, in four honest beats read straight off the same progress number driving the reel bar:
Nothing moves. The arm sets into the seam for a beat of true stillness — the pause that makes everything after it read as force.
The seam parts a little and springs back, three separate times, each attempt landing a bit further than the last — the shell straining against the arm and losing ground slowly, never all at once.
The seam jumps, a puff of grit leaves it, and the valve visibly loses its grip — the one moment in the whole prise that isn’t a gradual push.
The shell swings the rest of the way open, faster than it fought and with a small overshoot before it settles — and the instant it does, the empty check from §01 resolves: either a shell of amber motes and a Pearl credited on the spot, loose in your Pearl tray (see Hardpoints & Pearls for what to do with it next), or nothing at all. A finished prise pays the same +25 Pilot XP either way — the same “salvage” award a cracked cover or a hauled wreck already pays, empty roll or not.
Drift more than about 1.15× your cover-opening reach from the shell mid-prise, or press T again on purpose, and the attempt releases — the crack eases back shut over a few frames from wherever it had actually reached, and the shell waits exactly as closed as it was, ready for a later attempt.
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, from 1 at the shallowest up to 7 for the heaviest shells packed into the Sealed Grotto. The strongest arm in the game — the Piston Crusher Claw, an Abyssal-tier claw with a lift capacity of 8 — clears every one of them with a full point to spare. 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 | 3,000 mKelp Forest floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 shallow edge, rising with depth
0.05× a common family's weight at the shallow edge, rising with depth
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.