The Bay

01 The expedition rail

Two tiles sit in the upper right of the screen at all times, plus the sonar scope, which never leaves and never gets a tile of its own — everything else you can open lives behind one of these two.

Tap or press I and the Console opens: one full screen, one exit chip, and a tab rail down the left holding six sections — Drone (the Hold, covered below), Skills(level, class & the skill bench — see Pilot & Classes and Abilities), Ledger, Fleet, Account and Setup. Each tab still keeps its own keyboard shortcut (K, L, P, R, ?) as a deep link straight into that tab — pressing it again, or Esc, closes the whole Console from wherever you are inside it. Fleet Dispatch is the one tab that earns crystals on its own while you’re gone — full mechanics, the payout formula and a worked example are in The Economy.

Six overlays used to be six separate screens, each with its own tile, key and exit. If you remember a right-hand column of seven icons from an older build, that build is out of date — this is the current shape.

02 Your Hold is a cockpit

Press I to open the Hold — and it isn’t a screen about the drone, it’s the drone itself, standing lit under glass with every part physically present. Three tabs sit on the left: Status, Parts and Wardrobe.

• Parts live in illuminated sockets on a rack either side of the AV-1. Hover one and a lit leader line runs straight to the exact spot on the hull it bolts to, pulsing that mount while the others dim — you see where a part goes before you ever fit it.
• Fitting is an animation, not a swap. Pick an item and it visibly lifts out of its socket, flies across the bay and clunks home on its mount — no confirm dialog, and the model updates the instant it lands.
• Wardrobe holds the wrap chip — cosmetic hull liveries, browsed and worn the same way a part is fitted.
• Status reads every computed stat live off the same pipeline that actually drives the drone, drawn as the console’s own instruments — bar-light rows, a needle gauge, a lamp dial, tank and cell gauges — rather than a plain list. If a part changes a number, the instrument and the water agree instantly.

03 Where gear comes from

Every item in the Hold carries a source, and the Hold shows it plainly: a stock part your drone shipped with, salvage picked straight out of the water, a one-time milestone grant, or siege— a mount or livery forged from materials the Breachstone’s guardian waves drop, and craftable nowhere else (see The Breachstone for the full recipe list). See The Part Catalogue for the full 31-part range these four sources cover today. A fifth source, craft— built at a Workbench for crystals and Parts, no milestone or drop required — is real content already sitting in the same item table, but there’s no cockpit screen yet to spend at; see What’s Coming.

Tools — the Shear Tool, the Chisel Arm, the Wash Thrusters — are a fifth kind of gear again: milestone-earned like a part, but with no slot of their own to fit into. They never appear in a shop and never will. What each one opens, and exactly how it’s earned, is covered in full in Concealment.

04 Milestones

Wreck salvage isn’t a real object in the water yet — wrecks to search haven’t been built. Until they are, six one-time milestones stand in for that reward loop. Cross one and a part is granted once, with a toast to mark it; nothing about spending your crystals afterward can ever take it back, because milestones read your lifetime totals, not your current balance.

Full effects for each of these six parts — exact stat numbers, rarity and slot — are in Your Drone.