Pilot & Classes
Every dive banks XP onto a single account-wide ladder, all the way to Level 100. Three levels on it are hard gates — Level 5’s class ceremony, Level 10’s W unseal, and Level 15’s E unseal and Sealed Grotto signal. Nothing else on the ladder blocks a system you can’t already reach another way.
01 Where XP comes from
Pilot XP is paid flat, per event, the moment something meaningful happens in the water — never for opening a menu, never purchasable at any price.
Every XP source
Open a level-up card and it says exactly which of these fired. There is no separate, hidden multiplier — the number on the card is the number in this table.
02 The climb to Level 100, honestly
The curve is a steepening exponential with a knee at the class choice: cheap at first, then harder and harder, on purpose. Level 100 is meant to be rare air — the single most expensive level-up in the game, by design, not an oversight.
Pacing for a daily player
These are targets the curve was tuned against, not a promise timed to the second — play more and you’ll beat them, play less and you won’t, and neither is a failure state. XP earned past Level 100 keeps banking rather than going to waste.
03 What Pilot Level actually locks
The Console’s Skills tab (press K) shows the whole ladder to Level 100, but your Pilot level itself only ever gates three things — everything else you fly toward opens through its own condition, in its own chapter of this manual, that has nothing to do with the number on your ring.
The three real gates
All three of a class’s abilities seat into Q/W/E together the moment Calibration is chosen, but they don’t all fire that same day — each locked slot stays visible under its own cover plate, showing exactly which level unseals it, rather than sitting blank — see Abilities.
Everything else you’ll reach for early keeps its own, separate unlock: field charting needs no level at all, just working the same field enough times, while Nets and Tools open on their own milestones — see Getting Started and Concealment. Hardpoints & Pearls are a real, playable Console tab today — press H — with no Pilot-level gate on it at all, only the Parts and crystals to fit into it. See Hardpoints & Pearls for the full chapter.
Titles keep going well past Level 15 — see §07, below — but nothing past the Sealed Grotto’s signal changes what you can actually do. It changes what a share card says about you.
04 The class ceremony, at Level 5
The moment you cross Level 5, the Console’s Skills tab stops offering an empty rack and starts offering a ceremony — its own Calibration view: your own drone, shown three times over, once per class, everything the choice changes laid out before you commit — no hovering required. Pick one and its three abilities seat into your Q/W/E slots at once, fitted and ready to drill — but only Q is actually ready to fire that same moment. W stays locked until Pilot Level 10 and E until Pilot Level 15; each tile shows exactly which level unseals it rather than sitting blank, so the bar is always honest about what’s coming and when — see Abilities.
The three classes are not three sets of buttons wearing different labels. The moment you choose one, it permanently shifts real stats on your drone — the same StatPipeline every part, Pearl and Calibration node already runs through, see The Bay. Every class carries a genuine trade: real strengths and a real weakness you will feel inside a single dive, never just flavour text. A weakness is never total — the core loop always still works — and Parts can soften one at most, never erase it: a Hauler geared exactly like a Scout is still slower than that Scout, by the same fixed proportion, no matter how much either of them carries.
Here’s why gear can’t just buy the weakness away: the StatPipeline computes every stat as (base + every flat bonus) × every multiplier, and a class’s penalty on speed or Fleet Haul is written as one of those multipliers, not a flat subtraction. A flat penalty would shrink as a proportion of the total the more you stacked on top of it — pile on enough part and Pearl bonuses and a flat −20 speed eventually reads as almost nothing. A multiplier can’t be diluted that way: 0.82× takes the same 18% off whatever total you’ve built, forever, because it applies to the WHOLE stack — base stat, Calibration nodes and every Pearl included — not just the base number underneath it. That is the literal mechanism behind “never erase it”: it isn’t a promise the numbers happen to keep, it’s what the multiplier shape guarantees by construction. The Salvager’s hull and Charge penalties below are the one exception worth naming — they’re flat, not multiplied, because Pearls don’t currently touch hull integrity or Charge recharge at all, so there’s nothing for a flat number to be diluted by yet.
The three classes also stopped being the same drone in three accent colours: each is now a genuinely different machine in the water. The Scout keeps the stock AV-1 “Lumen” shell exactly as it always flew. The Hauler re-hulls it as a pressure boat — free-flood casing, conning sail, stern planes and screw, a flat keel. The Salvager slings it inside an open box-truss rig — drum, glazed cab, derrick and a slewing cutting boom. The chassis is visual identity only: every hardpoint is shared across all three, so a hull, lamp, dome or claw you fit still bolts on exactly the same whichever machine it lands on.
“Big inventory, steady currents — you bring the whole field home.”
Chassis: Free-flood casing over a long straight body, a conning sail with periscope masts sunk into the bridge, a cruciform stern-plane cluster and screw, a flat keel run the manipulator hangs off. The AV-1 shell the Scout flies unaltered is bolted in here amidships, as the pressure module.
Plays like: Every trip is a payload run: slower off the mark and heard from further away, but nothing you find gets left in the water.
“Fast and far — first eyes on everything down here.”
Chassis: One shell, one fin, one lamp pair — the AV-1 “Lumen” hull every recruit already knows. The Hauler and Salvager both carry this exact shell inside their own frame; only the Scout flies it bare.
Plays like: You cover more water than anyone and creatures barely clock you coming — just don't expect your inventory to keep up with your pace.
“Nothing sealed stays sealed. You open what others swim past.”
Chassis: A box truss with lightening holes, a cable drum aft, a glazed operator cab forward, a derrick with a running hook over the bow and a cutting boom on its own slew ring. The AV-1 shell hangs slung inside the frame, every seam of it reachable.
Plays like: You crack open more of the map than anyone else — the hull runs thinner and the cell takes its time, so pick your fights.
The first choice is always free. Re-calibrating later — switching to a different class entirely — costs a flat 3,000 Nauts, and nothing about picking one closes off the others for good: a class you leave keeps every rank and Calibration node it already earned, its skills keep every bit of mastery you drilled into them, and your fitted Parts and Pearls stay exactly where they are — none of it is class-locked, so a respec never strands anything you own.
05 Promotion, at Level 15
At Level 15, your class earns Rank I — a promotion stamped only after both the level and a class-flavoured Promotion Trial attempted in the water are satisfied, never purchasable at any price. It pays a new title and stamps a fresh insignia over the one Calibration gave you at L5: Cargomaster for the Hauler, Pathfinder for the Scout, Wrecksmith for the Salvager.
Enter the Midnight Zone and it arms: gain at least 3,000 crystals of cargo from that moment, then reach the Berth with the relief valve never once blowing along the way. A blowout doesn't fail the attempt outright — it just disarms, and walking back into Midnight arms it again.
Five sightings of creatures you've never recorded before, inside one calendar day. The tally resets when the day turns over, and only genuinely new sightings count toward it.
Fail an attempt and nothing is lost — the water is still there to try again whenever the conditions line back up.
06 Calibration — the constellation
Every level-up banks one Calibration point, starting from your very first — not Level 16, the way the old flat 10-node tree once worked. That means points are already quietly banking before you have anywhere to spend them: by the time you cross Level 5 and the ceremony opens, you walk in already holding 4 points, ready to spend the instant your class’s chart lights up. Keep every level-up from here to Level 100 and the same cadence pays 99 points, lifetime — the exact size of a single class’s whole tree, see below.
Spending them happens in the same Calibration view that ran your ceremony, now grown into a full radial chart: your class emblem at the centre, rings climbing outward — Base, then Rank I through IV — each outer ring drawn dark and fogged until you actually reach that rank, so a first look never shows more than the Base ring lit. Three named paths radiate out from the centre, each one built on a stat family your class already leans on:
Three paths per class
Clicking a node never spends a point on the spot — it stages it, lit at half-brightness in your class’s own signature hue, and a live stats readout tracks exactly what your whole staged plan changes, stat by stat, current value to new value, plus a plain line of text for every keystone or pair you’ve staged. A running count sits over the chart the whole time (“7 of 20 pts planned”), and a node you can’t afford or haven’t unlocked yet says so honestly on its own card rather than just refusing silently. One press of INSTALL commits the entire plan at once — every staged node applies together, in a single save. Close the screen without installing and the plan simply evaporates: nothing spent, nothing lost, no prompt trying to talk you out of leaving.
What a Calibration point buys
Every class’s tree absorbs exactly 99 points — the same 99 a pilot who reaches Level 100 has ever banked. Reach the cap and your class’s whole tree completes, to the point: no dead levels at the top, and nothing earned that has nowhere to go. Points sitting unspent never sit silently either — the Skills tile carries a live badge (“4 pts ready”) for as long as you leave any banked.
The Holdpath (Hauler and Salvager) is the one place on the chart that doesn’t touch a percentage or a flat combat number — every point spent there buys real squares on your Inventory board instead: a small node adds +1 square per rank across its 3 ranks, a notable adds +2, and the Hauler’s own Hold-path exclusive pair can add +3 more (its sibling option widens pickup radius instead). These stack on top of whatever your hull already grants — see Inventory & Warehouse — and are counted completely separately from Fleet Haul, the offline Fleet Dispatch ceiling covered in The Economy: a maxed Hold path never raises how much crystal an away fleet can bank. Every node you own here — which rank, which side of an exclusive pair, how many times you’ve respec’d — survives a reload exactly as installed. And because this path can shrink your capacity on a respec, it carries one hard guarantee: if giving back those points would drop your Hold below what’s currently packed onto it, the overflow moves to whatever free squares the Warehouse has the moment you confirm, and a “Hold trimmed” card names exactly what moved and how many squares you gave up. If the Warehouse itself is full, the rest waits at the dock — never deleted, never lost — and is delivered automatically the moment you free space or buy another Warehouse row. Nothing already in your Hold is ever stranded by your own respec.
Each of the three paths crowns in one keystone — the last node at the far end of its own chain, and the one place a Calibration point changes a rule instead of a number:
Cargo overflow auto-ships to the Warehouse instead of blocking pickup — it arrives when you next dock.
Pickup radius doubles while you move under half speed.
A relief-valve blowout shoves you ALONG the seabed instead of up.
Three seconds at full throttle grants +30% speed — but the lamp dims while it holds.
Sonar pings echo twice; the second echo reveals through cover.
Creatures your lamp edge touches glint through the dark for two seconds.
The hook takes two adjacent salvage nodes in one cast, and reels 30% slower.
Uncollected salvage in your current map marks itself on the Chart.
Cracked rock pays one extra material roll; the rubble lingers half as long.
Re-tuning a tree you’ve already built costs a flat 300 Nauts, every time — a separate fee from the 3,000-Naut cost of leaving your class entirely (§04): one respecs a tree, the other respecs an identity. Nauts are always earnable without spending a cent — 1,000 crystals stamp into 1 Naut at the Berth. An exclusive pair swaps free the moment you own both of its options, no fee either way. And if a balance patch ever nerfs a node you already own, that patch hands you a free respec token outright — a build a patch broke is never left bricked, and a banked token always covers the fee entirely.
Not the same points as an ability’s own level — a Calibration point tunes a node in this tree; drilling and buying a skill’s level (see Abilities) spends crystals and a class material instead, from the Skill Bench sitting right next door in the same tab.
Every small, notable and exclusive-pair node runs its effect through the same StatPipeline every part and ledger bonus already uses — nothing here is a second, separate power source, just another honest input into the numbers already on your Rig’s Status tab. Keystones are the one exception worth naming: they carry no stat line at all, because their whole payoff is a rule wired straight into the game’s own code, not a number on the pipeline. See The Bay.
07 Title milestones
Five levels on the ladder pay a title instead of a feature — cosmetic, permanent, and printed on a share card the moment you cross them.
Before Level 5, your title simply reads “Recruit.” After it, your title is your class name, or the rank above it the moment you’ve earned one — both read out at the top of the Skills tab, next to the badge.