Weapon & Rockets
The gun used to live bolted onto the claw, an arm with teeth. It has its own slot now — nine mounts, four firing styles, and a rock-solid rule underneath all of it: no weapon in the water carries a Pearl socket, on purpose, ever.
01 Why the gun needed its own slot
Every claw in The Salvage Arm still does exactly what it always did — reach, reel speed, lift capacity, the numbers that decide how well you haul a wreck or prise a shell. Firepower used to live on that same part, which meant the one claw fitted in your claw slot was quietly tuning salvage lift and siege damage at once — upgrade one and the other moved whether you wanted it to or not. The weapon slot exists to end that: a claw is a claw again, and a weapon is its own object, drawn as its own layer on the hull, fit independently of whatever’s on your arm.
What a fitted weapon actually decides today: it’s the weapon’s own rarity tier — not the claw’s — that sets a Breachstone strike’s rank, and rank is the number the siege’s own damage table reads. See The Breachstone for the real strike math.
02 Nine mounts, one ladder
One weapon ships stock — the Single-Tube Flare Launcher, bolted on at the yard, enough to matter against a wall and nothing close to enough to finish a siege alone. The other eight climb the same five-tier ladder as everything else in the water: eight are built at the Workbench once their own depth gate is crossed, and one — the Breach Cannon — is pulled from a wreck with the salvage arm instead (see The Salvage Arm).
Every weapon in the catalogue
| Weapon | Tier | Style | Blast | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-Tube Flare Launcher | Coastal | Launcher | 4 | Start |
| Arc Cannon | Twilight | Cannon | 9 | Craft, 1,000 m |
| Twin-Tube Launcher | Twilight | Salvo | 5 | Craft, 850 m |
| Breach Cannon | Midnight | Torpedo | 15 | Salvage |
| Cluster Launcher | Midnight | Salvo | 8 | Craft, 1,700 m |
| Maw Cannon | Abyssal | Cannon | 26 | Craft, 2,600 m |
| Siege Launcher | Abyssal | Salvo | 17 | Craft, 2,450 m |
| Leviathan Lance | Leviathan | Torpedo | 40 | Craft, 3,900 m |
| Warden's Battery | Leviathan | Salvo | 24 | Craft, 3,700 m |
Every row on this table trades something for something — a bigger blast number never arrives free. The drum is the one number that never ladders: every mount carries up to 999 rockets, full stop. Cannons and torpedoes both cut into Fleet Haul, Hold space and acceleration; every salvo mount costs speed. Read a weapon’s full effect list on its own card in the Workbench before you build toward it.
03 Four firing styles
Every weapon declares one of four styles, and the catalogue enforces it — a weapon row with no style, or an unrecognised one, fails to load at all. Whatever the mount, the volley is yours: two small hexes on the fire tile offer ×1 or a five-rocket volley, each showing how many of that pull you have left. A Salvo-style mount staggers its burst rather than firing it simultaneous:
The four styles, as authored
Fast and flat — 0.45× the baseline flight time, almost no arc at all. Arrives before you've finished the thought.
The baseline arc every strike already throws — the stock mount's own arm, unmultiplied.
Fires the volley staggered, each rocket landing about 140ms after the last — a burst, not one shot.
Slow on purpose — 1.8× the flight time — but lands with a 35% wider blast on arrival. The heaviest hit in the family.
Half of this table is live, half is still on paper — said honestly rather than folded into one claim. The blast multiplier and the salvo stagger are real: they shape every shot you fire at a breakable rock in open water (a torpedo hits 35% harder per rocket, a Salvo-style mount lands its ×5 volley roughly 140ms apart) — see Hazards, Wear & Repair for a rock breaking under exactly this arithmetic. What’s still just profile: the flight itself. A cannon’s flatter, faster arc and a torpedo’s slow heavy one are authored numbers waiting on a follow-up pass to reach the projectile’s actual motion — every rocket flies the same shared arc today no matter which style fired it.
04 Rockets — one round, no compatibility matrix
A rocket is an item now, not an ammo stat baked into the gun. There is no magazine to model and no per-weapon round to match up: whatever’s in your locker fires from whatever’s fitted in your weapon slot, full stop. One row exists, and only one:
The rocket locker
| Rocket | Tint | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Signal RocketThe only round there is — warm-gold nose, dark charcoal body. Every launcher in the family fires the same one, and how hard it lands is the mount's business, never the round's. | Twilight | 45 ⬡ |
One round, and one only. A second, dearer rocket used to sit on this rack and fired exactly like the first — a price tag pretending to be a choice — so it was taken out rather than dressed up. The ladder you actually climb is the launcher’s: fit a heavier mount and every rocket you already own hits harder.
Rockets are bought, and only bought. They are not scattered on the seabed for you to stumble over — the ordnance locker is a counter, the same as the one that restocks your nets. That keeps them a decision about crystals rather than about luck. Crystals buy you rounds and nothing else — never a better round.
They spend now, too — the ordnance locker is wired to a running game, not a catalogue you can only browse. Fly up to a breakable rock in open water and press X — the same key that swings at the Breachstone, answering to whatever’s actually in front of the drone — and the fitted mount fires for real: blast decides what one rocket does, and the two hexes on the tile decide how many leave the tubes — ×1 or a five-rocket volley, your choice on every mount, and every rocket spent actually leaves the inventory. The choice is never a foregone conclusion — a single round or the whole volley, so you never have to empty five bought rockets into a rock that only needed one. Full mechanics — rock HP, respawn, what breaking one pays — in Hazards, Wear & Repair.
Said plainly, because the manual only ever describes what you can reach today: rockets only ever spend against breakable rock. A Breachstone strike still costs one of your daily strikes and nothing from this locker, exactly as before (see The Breachstone) — the siege stays the one place in the water gear buys no speed, on purpose. That’s a different honesty gap than a missing wire, the same distinction this manual draws for Luck Potions (see Hardpoints & Pearls).
05 No Pearl sockets on any weapon
Look for a Hardpoint on a weapon’s card and you won’t find one — of every slot on the AV-1, weapon is the single one the game refuses to cut a socket into, on every tier, without exception.
A socketed, refined weapon would put raw firepower on the deep upgrade ladder. That ladder is where Pearls and Refinement already live for every other stat — keeping the gun off it is a deliberate line, not a gap waiting to be filled.