The Ledger

01 Sighted, then captured

Collection is two stages, and only the second one inks the plate. Pilot the drone close enough to a creature — a little over a hundred metres — and it is sighted: identified, no click, no menu, its book entry turning from “???” to a grey silhouette with a name attached. A sighting pays out a single Part on the spot. It does not pay the entry’s permanent bonus, and it does not remove the animal from the water.

That bonus, and the finished plate, wait for a capture— a Specimen Pod, actually thrown and actually held. Only a capture inks the entry for real, pays the stat bonus printed on it, and counts toward its chapter’s completion.

• Both stages are piloted only. Your automation can farm a charted crystal field all day without you, but it can never sight or catch anything — only a hand on the stick fills the book.
• A capture is a sighting too — pod something you never flew close enough to properly identify first, and the book still names it correctly.
• A quieter, second layer of the book records places rather than creatures — see The World for how landmarks are found and recorded.

02 Specimen Pods, and the aim that beats the odds

Press C near a sighted creature to aim, and again to throw. A pod flies, closes on the animal, and either holds — or doesn’t. Three tiers exist, bought at the Quartermaster’s counter (see The Berth), and a stronger pod both holds a wider range of rarities and rolls a better base chance.

The listed chance is a floor, not the whole story. An aiming arc sweeps as you line the throw up, and where you catch it genuinely moves the number: a dead-centre hit gets a second roll against the same chance, while a wide graze — or a creature startled by a hot approach — weakens it. Skill at the arc beats the number on the pod every time it matters.

No pod, no throw and no combination of the two is ever a guaranteed hold. The ceiling sits just under certain, on purpose.

03 Six chapters, thirty-seven entries

The book is organised the same way the water is: one chapter per zone, shallow to deep — plus one for the Kelp Forest, reached through its own hidden passage rather than a straight descent — each with its own completion bonus on top of every entry’s own. Thirty-seven species are filed across the six today — thirty-six of them in water you can already dive.

04 The index spread

Open the book and the very first pages, before any creature’s own plate, are an index — every entry as a small mini-plate, inked once you’ve found it and a dark silhouette with a cryptic hint drawn from its own field note until then. They’re grouped chapter by chapter, each with a live progress bar, and clicking any plate turns the book straight to that creature’s own two-page spread — no hunting through thirty pages by hand.

A chapter with no diveable water yet — the one sealed chapter above — doesn’t get a grid of plates nobody can click their way into. It renders as one locked card instead: the chapter’s name, “uncharted waters,” and how many species are noted for it, with none of them surveyed. That count is real — it’s the same number in the table above — the book simply doesn’t pretend the chapter is emptier than it is.

05Silhouettes & hints

Turn to a creature you haven’t found yet — from the index or by paging through — and its plate shows what an unrecorded entry always shows: no name, no latin, no personal sighting, and its recorded length redacted. What it doesn’t hide is its rarity tier, its habitat, and the exact bonus it’ll pay once you find it — the book teases what’s worth chasing without spoiling the chase itself.

06 Why some entries are hard to find

Most of the bestiary is simply there — pilot into the right zone, get close enough, and it’s recorded. A real minority follow a stricter rule, and every one of those rules is something you can learn by watching the water, not by reading a wiki:

• Slow approach. A handful of species only tolerate a drone moving well under its own top speed. Ease off the throttle as you close and they hold their ground; come in hot and they’re gone before you arrive.
• Deep and dark. A few live only below a certain depth, and only in a zone with no sunlight at all — both conditions have to be true on the same dive.
• Near a smoker. Some cluster within a fixed distance of a hydrothermal vent, wherever the game has placed one — swim past without lingering and you’ll miss them entirely.
• Seeded day. A small number aren’t in the water on any given day at all. They’re tied to a rotating local calendar the game computes on its own, present roughly one day in a handful and gone again the next — back on some later day that isn’t predictable from here.

None of this flickers once you’re actually near it, either. A rule like slow approach decides whether an animal is in the water at all the moment you arrive — not something that blinks it in and out while you sit beside it. Get close while its condition holds and the animal stays put; gunning the thruster afterward doesn’t make it vanish. It just makes it a bad moment to throw — see §02, above, on why a hot approach weakens the pod’s chance rather than the animal’s presence.

Which species carries which rule, and the exact numbers behind each one, aren’t printed in this manual. Figuring out why a creature you can see won’t let you close is most of what makes finding it worth the plate it fills.

07 A capture leaves the world

The instant a pod holds, the animal is gone from the water — not hiding, not respawned nearby, actually removed. What happens next depends entirely on its rarity:

• Coastal and Twilight species repopulate. A new individual returns to the water 48 hours after the capture — a slow gift, never a farm.
• Everything Midnight or deeper never comes back. One specimen, page complete, and the world remembers it that way for good.

A sighting alone never removes anything — only a held pod does. You can identify a rare creature, decide the throw isn’t worth it yet, and it’s still there the next time you come back for it.

08 Pacing, honestly

Thirty-six species live in charted water today, filed across five open chapters — big enough that a single good dive won’t clear one, let alone all five. The seeded-day rule above is the pacing made literal: some entries are only a chapter you can finish if you keep coming back.

The Sealed Grotto is real content, not a promise — the last of six chapters, already written, waiting on a door nobody has found how to move yet. This manual will say so honestly until it does.

Want to know what a chapter is worth chasing? Every entry and set bonus already granted shows up live on the Status tab of your Hold.