← The Pilot’s ManualChapter 16

Hardpoints & Pearls

Every part you own carries sockets cut into its plating. Unlock one, fit a graded Pearl into it, and it grants a real stat bonus on the spot — no roll involved, same as it’s always worked. Fusion is the one door in this chapter that rolls real dice: a disclosed 50/50 that can end with three Pearls and a fee gone and nothing to show for them. Press F to open the Pearls tab and see all of it.

01 The Pearls tab

The Console’s Pearls tab — Ffrom anywhere in the water — is one screen for the whole system: every hardpoint on every part you own, your loose Pearl tray, your pearl-dust balance, and however many Luck Potions you’re holding. Sockets are drawn on any part that has them, locked or not, so you always know a plate or a claw has room cut into it even before you’ve paid to open the socket up.

From there the loop is the same regardless of which hardpoint you’re working: unlock it, fit a loose Pearl into it, and — once three matching Pearls are banked — walk one to the fusion apparatus. A socketed Pearl can also be refined, climbing its own +0-to-+10 ladder independent of whether you ever fuse anything at all.

02 Hardpoints — sockets cut into your gear

Any part you own carries Hardpoints — the count fixed by that part’s own rarity tier, from a single socket on Coastal gear up to three on a Leviathan-grade part. A Hardpoint starts locked; unlocking one costs a flat sum of crystals, paid once, never rolled for, and steeper the deeper the part’s own tier reaches:

Coastal

1hardpoint

40 ⬡

Twilight

1hardpoint

80 ⬡

Midnight

2hardpoints

160 · 360 ⬡

Abyssal

2hardpoints

320 · 720 ⬡

Leviathan

3hardpoints

640 · 1,440 · 2,560 ⬡

Unlocking is one-and-done and never a gamble — the only thing standing between you and an open socket is whether you can afford the crystals.

03 Five Pearl families, five tiers each

A Pearl fits into an unlocked Hardpoint and grants one stat bonus, graded across the same five rarity bands as everything else in the water. Twenty-five Pearls exist in the catalog — five families, one row per rarity tier apiece — and every number below is what a freshly socketed Pearl grants before any Refinement:

Fig. 1

Twenty-five Pearls, five families by five tiers

Pearl	Coastal	Twilight	Midnight	Abyssal	Leviathan
Bounty PearlYield	+3%	+6%	+10%	+16%	+25%
Current PearlSpeed	+8	+16	+28	+44	+65
Lumen PearlLight radius	+15	+30	+50	+75	+110
Hold PearlFleet Haul (offline dispatch ceiling)	+10	+20	+35	+55	+80
Fortune PearlLuck	+0.02	+0.04	+0.07	+0.11	+0.16

Pearls are earned, never sold — a creature, a hostile kill, a Breachstone wave, never a price tag. That rule is already true of everything else earnable in the water; Pearls aren’t the exception.

04 Fusion — a real, disclosed gamble

Fusion trades three loose Pearls of the same family at the same tier for a shot at one Pearl of that family at the next tier up. Say the odds plainly, because this is the whole point of the system: it is a coin flip, exactly 50/50, the same number for every pilot and every recipe. Nothing anyone can buy moves that base number — only another attempt, or a Luck Potion loaded into this one attempt, ever changes it.

50%

3× Coastal of one family + the fee → either 1× Twilight of the same family, or nothing at all

Fig. 2

What one attempt actually stakes

Three Pearls, one recipe.A Coastal Current Pearl fuses only with other Coastal Current Pearls — a family’s ladder never crosses into another family’s, and Leviathan is the ceiling: there’s no tier above it to fuse into.
A steep crystal fee, charged either way. Win or lose, the fee below is spent the moment you press the apparatus — never refunded, never waived.
The stake is gone on a miss.All three Pearls and the fee are consumed whether the roll wins or loses. A losing attempt does not return your Pearls for another try — they’re gone, on purpose, so the water keeps being worth diving back into.

Tier fused	Fee to attempt
Coastal	400 crystals
Twilight	1,200 crystals
Midnight	3,600 crystals
Abyssal	11,000 crystals
Leviathan	— (nothing to fuse into)

These are the real, re-based fees — no longer a placeholder. Fusion is now the single steepest recurring crystal sink in the game: a miss burns the fee and the three staked Pearls both, so a long push up any one family’s ladder means paying this fee again, and again.

Stated plainly, because the whole system depends on it

A missed Fusion is a real loss. Your three Pearls do not come back.

Two misses guarantee the thirda visible pity counter tracks consecutive misses per recipe — two in a row on the same family and tier, and the next attempt on that exact recipe is a guaranteed win, no roll involved.

Luck Potions raise this attempt onlyload one into the apparatus for +10% on that roll, stacking up to three (50% → 80%, never guaranteed) — a flat, fully shown bonus, the same for anyone who loads the same number of potions.

Potions aren’t reachable yetthe apparatus already has slots for them, but no shop sells one and nothing in the water drops one today — that source is still ahead. Said honestly, not implied.

Nobody rolls better dicethe base 50% is identical for every pilot on every recipe — money and drops only ever buy another attempt, or a potion worth the same +10% it’s worth to anyone else. Never a secretly better number.

05 Refinement — the fair-line ladder, +1 through +10

A socketed Pearl starts at +0 and refines up to +10, each level scaling its magnitude by another 15% — a fully refined +10 Pearl grants 2.5× what it did fresh out of the water. Refinement is a separate ladder from Fusion’s gamble above, and it plays by a different set of rules entirely. Every attempt, win or lose, spends crystals up front; the published odds and price both steepen with the climb:

Fig. 3

The published Refinement odds, +1 through +10

Refine to	Odds	Attempt cost	Miss refund	Buy-out
+1	100%	20 crystals	never fails	—
+2	100%	61 crystals	never fails	—
+3	100%	116 crystals	never fails	—
+4	100%	184 crystals	never fails	—
+5	100%	263 crystals	never fails	—
+6	70%	352 crystals	36 dust	—
+7	60%	450 crystals	42 dust	—
+8	50%	557 crystals	48 dust	—
+9	25%	673 crystals	54 dust	260 dust
+10	15%	796 crystals	60 dust	520 dust

+1 through +5 never actually roll the dice — they succeed outright, every time. The real odds only start at +6.

Unlike Fusion above, this ladder never eats what you already have

A failed refine will never destroy or downgrade your Pearl. Not once, not at any level.

Miss, and you keep the Pearlexactly as it was before the attempt — same tier, same level, same Hardpoint. Only the crystal ante already paid is spent.

+6 and up, a miss pays you backa partial refund in pearl dust — the ladder’s own material, earned back even on a loss, never sold for real money.

+9 and +10 always have a second doora fixed, deterministic dust buy-out sits beside the dice at both of the ladder’s hardest rungs — no roll required if you’d rather bank the material and walk through.