The Bay

01 The expedition rail

Four 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. Console, Chart and Shop are each their own full screen; the fourth, Inventory, sits directly under Console and opens a side panel instead — everything else you can open lives behind one of these four.

Tap or press I and the Console opens: one full screen, one exit chip, and a tab rail down the left holding seven sections — Drone (three groups — Rig, Pearls and Materials, covered below), Pearls (Hardpoints, Fusion & Refinement — see Hardpoints & Pearls), Skills (level, class & the skill bench — see Pilot & Classes and Abilities), Ledger, Fleet, Account and Setup. Each tab still keeps its own keyboard shortcut (F, K, 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. Your cargo board lives outside the Console entirely — press L for the Inventory, its own panel over the live water rather than a Console tab (see Inventory & Warehouse). Fleet Dispatch is the one Console tab that earns crystals on its own while you’re gone — full mechanics, the payout formula and a worked example are in The Economy.

Seven overlays used to be seven separate screens, each with its own tile, key and exit. If you remember a right-hand column of icons from an older build, that build is out of date — this is the current shape. The Workbench moved out of the Console onto its own tile first; the Inventory has since followed it out, trading a Console tab for its own side panel so it can stay open over the live water instead of blocking it.

02The Rig is your drone’s mounted loadout

Press I to open the Drone tab, and it lands on Rig — the group that isn’t a screen about the drone, it’s the drone itself, standing lit under glass with every part physically present. Two more groups sit beside it in the same header: Pearls and Materials, both read-only summaries of state that already lives elsewhere in the engine — see §03 for what Materials actually opens. Your cargo itself — what you’re carrying, as opposed to what’s fitted — lives on its own Inventory panel now, opened with L (§01, and Inventory & Warehouse).

• Parts live in illuminated sockets on a rack either side of the AV-1, one row of switches per slot. 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.
• The wrap chip sits with the rest of the Wrap slot’s rack — cosmetic hull liveries, browsed and worn the same way any other part is fitted.
• The instrument panel 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.

Fleet Haul is named for exactly what it does: it’s the ceiling on one Fleet Dispatch claim (stock 100 × 100 = 10,000 crystals — see The Economy), and nothing else. It never limits what you can physically carry on a dive — that’s the Hold’s own squares, covered in Inventory & Warehouse.

Luck is real, not flavour text. Every roll with a shot at going your way — a part dropping off broken rock, a Pearl shell’s own find — reads the same curve: +2 percentage points of success chance per luck point, capped at +10pp no matter how much you stack, so even a heavily-built pilot never turns a roll into a certainty, just tilts it. Rocket fire runs the identical curve on its own base: a flat 2% crit chance plus that same luck bonus on top, so a pilot at the luck cap crits up to 12% of the time — against Abyssal Arena bosses and World Leviathan hunts only, never against ore. A landed crit triples the rocket’s damage; the free ranged bolt crits too, honestly, at 1.5× — its own half-strength shot, tripled, never borrowing a real rocket’s full premium. See The Abyssal Arena and World Leviathan Hunts.

03 The forge book

Switch the Drone tab to Materials and every material you own sits in one place for the first time — the five tier currencies (a tier’s own reward for diving it) alongside the five siege materials the Breachstone’s guardian waves drop, which used to be visible only inside the grotto itself. Before this existed, a pilot standing in open water couldn’t see a single Warden Plate they were actually carrying.

Every row is a door, not just a count. Click any material and its own book opens: every recipe that spends it, at either bench, with each leg printed as owned over needed — 5/8 Warden Plate sitting beside a fully-ticked leg and an overall percentage, never hidden behind a hover. A refusal states its reason with live numbers rather than going dark — “Dive past 2,500 m”, “Still needed: 3,000 more Crystals”, “Dive to the Sealed Grotto” — so a locked recipe never reads as a dead row.

Nothing here is a hand-written list: the book is derived from items.json’s 28 craft rows and breachstone.json’s 3 grotto recipes, across all 10 materials, at the moment you open it. Add a new craft part or a new grotto recipe to the game and it appears in the book with no separate page to update — the same discipline that keeps every other number on this site checked against the content it’s read from.

04 Where gear comes from

Every item in the Inventory carries a source, and the Inventory 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 & Workbench for the full 45-part range. A fifth source, craft — built at the Workbench console tab for crystals and materials, no milestone or drop required — is live today too, its own unlock condition met the same way a milestone part’s is.

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.

05 Milestones

Six one-time milestones sit here too, granting a part the moment a real, permanent threshold is crossed — a depth, a lifetime crystal total, a fully charted field. 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. Wreck salvage — grappling a part physically out of the water with your fitted arm — is a real, separate system now, covered in full in The Salvage Arm; two of the six parts below can be reached either way, milestone or wreck, whichever comes first.

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