The Abyssal Arena
The Beastkeeper’s fight used to be a text list and a handful of CSS gradients standing in for your abilities. It isn’t any more: a drawn pit with its own flora and stone shelves, your real drone flown with the same water-feel glide the ocean uses, the real ability bar fired from the real drone, and eight beasts that each answer back with a named signature attack you can read and dodge.
01 Reaching the Keeper
The Beastkeeper stands on the Berth dock alongside Quartermaster Bell, Cartographer Wren and Stowmaster Quill — walk up and press T to talk. The arena itself opens as its own full-screen scene, off the dock rather than out in open water, so nothing about the fight competes with the Chart, the Console or anything else running in the background. General Berth mechanics — Bell’s counter, Wren’s passage, Quill’s Warehouse — are covered in The Berth.
02 The summon card — anatomy of a fight
Talking to the Keeper opens the roster as a horizontal card rail — a grid on a wide window, a swipeable row on touch — one card per beast, badge first, gauge before prose. Every card carries the same seven pieces, in the same order:
- The badge— a circular stone-well portrait, edged in the beast’s own rarity colour. Undiscovered beasts don’t exist on this roster; every row you can see, you can fight.
- The tier chip— Coastal, Twilight, Midnight, Abyssal or Leviathan, coloured to match the badge’s edge and every rarity chip elsewhere in the game.
- Name and one line of nature— the beast’s name in serif, then a single sentence on how it fights before you’ve even summoned it.
- The signature line— the boss’s named attack plus what to watch for, drawn on the card, so the telegraph you’ll actually see in the pit is a promise made up front rather than a surprise. Every signature on the roster is listed in full in §04 below.
- Rewards— the exact materials, XP, pearls and (for the top of the roster) a wardrobe drop the kill actually pays, read straight from the beast’s own drop table.
- The strength gauge— your drone’s live power rating against the fight’s recommended power, drawn as a bar with a mark at the “recommended” point. Green reads ready, amber reads close, coral reads outmatched — coral marking danger is the one deliberate use of that colour anywhere in Bathysia. The gauge is a warning, never a lock: the Keeper opens the pit on an outmatched fight exactly as readily as a crushing one.
- The contract picker and Summon button — ×1, ×3 or ×5 (see §07), then Summon with its own Enter keycap.
03 Piloting with the real thing
Nothing about how you fly or fight in the pit is a separate system from the rest of the water. Movement reads the exact same input axis — WASD, arrows, or the touch stick — driving a water-feel glide: push toward a heading and the drone eases up to speed, release and it coasts out rather than stopping dead, the identical accel/drag curve the open ocean already flies on. The ability bar stays mounted over the pit, same keys, same Charge cell, same cooldown rings, firing through the real Game.activateAbility call every other screen uses.
Glide, don’t steer a tank. A held direction pushes the drone up to a top speed and coasts on release — read the water the same way you already do in the open ocean.
Q is the movement burst on every chassis now — the old separate “turbo” input is retired. Real thrust, a real camera kick, and the dash that clears the drone from an otherwise-landed hit.
Both land as a real, aimed stun on the boss — reach the tether or the snare’s own range and it locks the target’s attack clock in place. A cast that reaches nothing still throws honestly and says so.
The exact same shield dome the ocean already knows, glued to the arena drone — damage reduction flows through the same gate a landed hit already resolves through.
Your fitted claw or weapon, ×1 or a ×5 volley — your call on every tile, same as open water — thrown from the drone’s real position toward the nearest live target.
These still fire for real — Charge spent, cooldown started — but the pit has no hold to widen, nothing hidden to reveal, and no loose salvage to sweep. The first press explains why in one line; after that it’s just a toast, never a modal on repeat.
04 The roster
Eight beasts stand ready today, climbing the same five-tier ladder as everything else in the water. hp below is the base row — a ×3 or ×5 wave contract scales every round after the first up roughly 18% on top of it (see §07).
The roster, tier by tier
| Beast | Tier | HP | Rec. power | Reward |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Silt Crab | Coastal | 582 | 35 | +2 Crab Plate · 20 XP |
| Reef Hound | Coastal | 491 | 55 | +2 Hound Fang · 28 XP |
| Bloom Anemone | Twilight | 1,349 | 110 | +2 Anemone Frond · 55 XP |
| Twilight Ray | Twilight | 1,462 | 150 | +3 Ray Barb · 70 XP |
| Midnight Eel | Midnight | 2,334 | 260 | +3 Eel Scale · 130 XP |
| Murk Lurker | Midnight | 2,452 | 300 | +3 Lurker Ink · 150 XP |
| Abyssal Warden | Abyssal | 4,042 | 460 | +4 Warden Core, +2 pearls · 260 XP |
| Leviathan Spawn | Leviathan | 5,302 | 700 | +5 Leviathan Marrow, +6 pearls, a wardrobe drop · 450 XP |
One signature attack per beast, content-driven and repeatable — the telegraph is the promise: every wind-up is drawn, timed, and dodgeable by reading the water, never an invisible hit.
Eight signatures, eight tells
| Beast | Signature | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Silt Crab | Silt WaveBurrows, resurfaces near you, and vents a floor-hugging wave of silt — climb over it or put a stone shelf between you. Untargetable while burrowed. | ~7s cooldown · 1.1s telegraph |
| Reef Hound | Ripcurrent DashCircles wide, then lunges three times in a row, each lunge leaving a current ribbon that drags the drone sideways for about 2s. | ~8s cooldown · 1.0s telegraph |
| Bloom Anemone | Spore BloomPlants three pulsing spore mines around the arena; each detonates into an expanding ring after 3s unless a rocket or strike pops it safely first. | ~10s cooldown · 0.9s telegraph |
| Twilight Ray | Shadow GlideFades to a barely-visible shimmer, glides a slow arc, then reappears mid-charge — the tell is the shimmer crossing your lamp cone. | ~9s cooldown · 1.2s telegraph |
| Midnight Eel | Arc CoilCoils in place and discharges two expanding electric rings; the safe line is threading between the first ring and the second. | ~8s cooldown · 0.9s telegraph |
| Murk Lurker | Ink VeilSpits a slow ink cloud that blacks out a third of the arena — inside it your lamp radius halves and the Lurker hunts you. | ~11s cooldown · 1.3s telegraph |
| Abyssal Warden | Pressure SlamRises and slams the floor: a radial shockwave ring plus two debris columns falling from the ruin above, each landing spot shadow-telegraphed first. | ~9s cooldown · 1.0s telegraph |
| Leviathan Spawn | Deep EchoSplits into two mirror echoes — only the real one takes damage — and every 8s they cross and reshuffle. Watch which one disturbs the flora as it passes: that's the real tell. | ~14s cooldown · 0.9s telegraph |
Telegraph length shortens tier by tier — Coastal warns longest, Leviathan Spawn shortest — but never drops below half a second on the shipped roster. Every projectile, zone and mine a signature throws is drawn on screen; nothing in the pit hits from somewhere you can’t see.
05 Second Wind — the interruptible heal
At roughly 40% of its hull, a boss disengages on its own and channels a visible heal — flavoured to the body: the crab burrows and regens under a glowing sand mound, the anemone folds shut and blooms, the ray dissolves into shadow, the eel coils around itself, the lurker hides in its own ink, the warden kneels with its seams blazing, and a Leviathan Spawn’s echoes merge back into it. The tell is unmissable: an amber glow pulses around the boss and a bar reading SECOND WIND — BREAK IT fills in above it. Left alone for the full ~4 seconds, it claws back up to 30% of its max hull.
Land a burst of damage — roughly 5% of the boss’s max hull inflicted while the bar is up — or land a stun with Electric Lasso or Algae Snare, and the channel cancels outright. A stun works instantly, no burst required. Either way the boss is left staggered for a beat afterward — the reward for reading the interrupt.
Coastal and Twilight beasts only ever channel once, near that 40% midpoint. Midnight tier and above get a second chance, later in the fight around 15% hull — and never more than that, so no fight can loop forever. On a ×3 or ×5 contract, only the lead beast in the pack ever channels.
06 Honest defeat
Hull empties and the fight ends the same way every hazard in the water already does: pulled back to the Berth, the contract void, nothing lost. No repair bill, no confiscated drops — whatever a beast had already dropped earlier in a wave stays credited. The defeat card names exactly what finished you — the signature that landed, or the beast “in close” on a plain body hit — so the loss actually teaches something before you summon again.
Walking away mid-fight costs the same nothing: press Esc to pull back to the Keeper any time, and the card reads plainly — “Nothing lost, nothing earned. The Keeper will still be here.”
07 Contracts and the tier ladder
Every card offers ×1, ×3 or ×5 — a wave contract puts the full pack in the water at once as an echo formation, each round escalated roughly 18% harder in hp and damage over the base row. Clear every round without your hull ever emptying and the payout carries a no-recovery bonus on top — extra XP and pearls, materials unscaled. Only the lead beast in a pack ever throws its signature or channels Second Wind; the rest fight with contact hits alone.
Boss stats are fixed per tier — nothing in the pit scales up or down to match your own fit. At matched-tier gear and real skill use, a beast is beatable; a tier below your own gear it’s hard; two tiers below, effectively out of reach. Recommended power only ever gates the summon card’s strength gauge, never the summon itself — a fully-evolved, well-levelled drone beats everything on the roster, and nothing here is unwinnable at the top of the ladder.
Fights run longer the deeper the tier, on purpose — a solo Coastal beast is a sharp scrap at matched gear, a Leviathan Spawn a real endurance fight built around multiple Second Wind cycles: roughly 45 seconds at Coastal, 75 at Twilight, two minutes at Midnight, two and a half at Abyssal, and two and a half to three minutes for a Leviathan Spawn. The curve is measured, not eyeballed — a simulated fight against matched-tier gear is recorded in the engine’s own test suite, so a content edit that pushes a beast’s numbers off its tier’s band fails a test before it ever ships.
Each contract tier is also a weekly resource, not an unlimited grind. It is the killing blow that finishes the whole contract — the last round on a ×3 or ×5, the only round on a ×1 — that actually clears it; a defeat or a walked-away fight spends nothing, so a rough attempt never costs you a shot at the same tier later the same week. The instant a tier clears, its button on the summon card locks and reads “Unlocks Monday”; clear all three on one beast and the whole card carries its own “Cleared this week — unlocks Monday” stamp in place of the three separate locks. Everything on every card reopens together at Monday 00:00 in your own local time — not a rolling week from your last clear, the same Monday the whole roster shares.
The reward line on a card is the full contract’s payout, not a single kill’s — on a ×3 or ×5, every round’s drops escalate the same ~18% its hp and damage do, and the card sums materials, XP and pearls across every round into the one total shown before you summon. The no-recovery bonus stays honestly separate, printed as its own line under that total: it only ever appears on a ×3 or ×5, and only pays out if your hull never once empties across the whole contract.