What's Coming
Everything on this page is real: tested code, real content rows, numbers read straight off the same files the rest of the manual is checked against. What none of it has yet is a screen in the cockpit to touch it from. Read this as a look at what’s being built, not as something you can go do in the water tonight — every chapter of the manual proper only ever describes what you can actually reach today.
Two systems, both finished underneath, neither one playable yet01 The Workbench
Sixteen of the part catalogue’s thirty-one items are craft rows — see The Part Catalogue for the full 31, and the four sources (stock, salvage, milestone, siege) that already reach your Hold today. A craft row carries its own unlock condition, the same way a milestone part does — a depth, a lifetime total — plus a crystal-and-Parts price on top, paid outright with no roll involved. Every rarity tier has at least one craftable part, and the price climbs hard as the tier does:
One craftable part per tier
| Tier | Part | Crystals | Parts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coastal | Pin-Spot Lantern (Lamps) | 240 | 1 |
| Twilight | Heavy Grabber (Claw) | 700 | 3 |
| Midnight | Survey Lamp Array (Lamps) | 2,400 | 6 |
| Abyssal | Quad-Blade Turbine (Engine) | 6,800 | 15 |
| Leviathan | Warden Plate (Hull) | 24,000 | 40 |
Once unlocked, no roll and no refusal beyond affording it — pay both prices at once and the part is yours, permanently, the same one-and-done shape as unlocking a Hardpoint below.
What’s missing is the console tab itself: the pricing, the affordability checks and the grant-on-purchase logic are all real, tested code, but there’s no Workbench screen in the cockpit today to browse these sixteen parts or pay for one. None of the sixteen craft parts above are reachable by any means yet — not a single one has ever landed in a pilot’s Hold.
02 Hardpoints — sockets cut into your gear
Any part you own is designed to carry Hardpoints — the number fixed by that part’s own rarity tier, from a single socket on Coastal gear up to three on a Leviathan-grade part. A Hardpoint starts locked; unlocking one is built to cost a flat batch of Parts, paid once, never rolled for:
03 Five Pearl families, five tiers each
A Pearl is built to fit into an unlocked Hardpoint and grant one stat bonus, graded across the same five rarity bands as everything else in the water. Twenty-five Pearls exist in the content already — five families, one row per rarity tier apiece — and every number below is what a freshly socketed Pearl is designed to grant before any Refinement:
Twenty-five Pearls, five families by five tiers
| Pearl | Coastal | Twilight | Midnight | Abyssal | Leviathan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bounty PearlYield | +3% | +6% | +10% | +16% | +25% |
| Current PearlSpeed | +8 | +16 | +28 | +44 | +65 |
| Lumen PearlLight radius | +15 | +30 | +50 | +75 | +110 |
| Hold PearlOffline cargo cap | +10 | +20 | +35 | +55 | +80 |
| Fortune PearlLuck | +0.02 | +0.04 | +0.07 | +0.11 | +0.16 |
Pearls are designed to be earned, never sold — a creature, a hostile kill, a Breachstone wave, never a price tag. That rule is already true of everything else earnable in the water; nothing about this system is meant to be the exception.
04 Fusion — three become one, always
Three loose Pearls of the same family at the same tier are built to trade, deterministically, for one Pearl of that family at the next tier up — no roll, no partial result, the same outcome every time. A Coastal Current Pearl fuses only with other Coastal Current Pearls; a family’s Fusion ladder never crosses into another family’s.
Leviathan is the ceiling — there is no tier above it, so a Leviathan Pearl has nowhere left to fuse into.
05 Refinement — the fair-line ladder, +1 through +10
A socketed Pearl is designed to start at +0 and refine up to +10, each level scaling its magnitude by another 15% — a fully refined +10 Pearl would grant 2.5× what it did fresh out of the water. Every attempt, win or lose, spends crystals up front; the published odds and price both steepen with the climb:
The published Refinement odds, +1 through +10
| Refine to | Odds | Attempt cost | Miss refund | Buy-out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| +1 | 100% | 20 crystals | never fails | — |
| +2 | 100% | 61 crystals | never fails | — |
| +3 | 100% | 116 crystals | never fails | — |
| +4 | 100% | 184 crystals | never fails | — |
| +5 | 100% | 263 crystals | never fails | — |
| +6 | 70% | 352 crystals | 36 dust | — |
| +7 | 60% | 450 crystals | 42 dust | — |
| +8 | 50% | 557 crystals | 48 dust | — |
| +9 | 25% | 673 crystals | 54 dust | 260 dust |
| +10 | 15% | 796 crystals | 60 dust | 520 dust |
+1 through +5 are coded to never actually roll the dice — they succeed outright, every time. The real odds only start at +6.
06The promise, stated now so it’s on record
A failed refine will never destroy or downgrade your Pearl. Not once, not at any level.
07 Where this stands
The socket inventory, the material cost to unlock a Hardpoint, deterministic Fusion and the full Refinement ladder with its exact odds all exist, are fully tested, and save safely across sessions — same for the Workbench’s pricing and grant logic above. There is no screen in the game today for either one: no way to unlock a Hardpoint, socket a Pearl, fuse three into one, spin the Refinement wheel, browse the Workbench’s craftable parts, or pay for one. The Pilot ladder already names Level 8 for Hardpoints & Pearls (see Pilot & Classes), and that chapter is honest about it: nothing changes in play when a pilot crosses that level today. Both systems are finished underneath; the rooms to stand in front of them aren’t built yet. The moment either one gets a real cockpit screen, it moves off this page and becomes its own chapter of the manual, written the same way every other chapter is — against what a pilot can actually do.