Four named bosses live in open water now, not just the Beastkeeper’s pit — each keeping to its own real wall-clock schedule, surfacing for a short window, then sinking back to dormant whether you showed up or not. This chapter reads straight off the shipped content rows and combat code: no invented lore, no rounded-off numbers.
Each of the four bosses is bound to its own slot on the clock, and the game means it literally — these are checked against your device’s real local time, not a simulated in-game clock:
When its slot hits, the body genuinely surfaces into the water and stays reachable for six minutes before sinking back to dormant. Miss that window and there is nothing to fight — no lingering body, no early spawn for showing up ready. The upside of a real schedule is a real countdown: the Chart (see §08) always knows exactly how long until the next one, because it is reading the same clock math the hunt itself runs on.
Three of the four keep to The Lower Dark; the Pearl Devourer holds its own ground out in the Kelp Forest. Full depth and zone context for both is in The World.
A plated charge and a shell shockwave punish a pilot who stays still.
A fast hunter that keeps changing its line until you create a firing window.
A vast zone-controller whose ink bolts demand movement and light.
A shell-bodied hunter that spits a living pearl bolt through the thicket.
Threat and visibility lines above are quoted straight from each boss’s own content row — the same copy the Chart shows when a hunt is contacted.
A surfaced boss doesn’t sit still waiting to be shot. It patrols its own ground until you close enough to draw its attention, and then it comes to you — there is no longer a safe stand-off range to plink from at the edge of its reach. Hover just past where it can hit you and it simply closes the gap itself.
Once it’s close enough and off cooldown, a boss winds up an attack: a shaded target zone is drawn on the water, labelled INCOMING, sized and timed to that boss’s own warning. Malefic Shark’s wind-up is the shortest on the roster at 0.95 seconds; the other three all warn for 1.35 seconds.
Partway through that wind-up — at its exact midpoint, once — the zone gets a single re-aim toward wherever you’re actually heading. Standing still and reading the initial circle isn’t enough on its own, but that one correction is also the only one: the back half of every telegraph is a real, honest dodge window with a fixed zone, not a mark that tracks you all the way in.
Still inside the ring when it resolves and it costs real hull — 18–20% of your stock max depending on the boss (Fig. 1) — plus a 1.2-second stun that stills your thrusters. Every world boss ships at the top of both bands on purpose: this is meant to be felt, not shrugged off.
Clear the ring before the strike lands and nothing happens — no damage, no stun. The boss recovers on a short cooldown before it can wind up again: about 2.2 seconds for Malefic Shark, roughly 3.3 seconds for the other three.
| Boss | Telegraph | Landed strike | Stun |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demon Turtle | 1.35s | 19% hull | 1.2s |
| Malefic Shark | 0.95s | 18% hull | 1.2s |
| Abyssal Octopus | 1.35s | 20% hull | 1.2s |
| Pearl Devourer | 1.35s | 19% hull | 1.2s |
Fire the fitted weapon — X, same key that fires anywhere else in open water — and it launches a real rocket at that boss for full listed damage, spending the same drum and Charge cost the rest of the ocean already does. Run the drum dry and the key still does something: a free ranged bolt, no ammo or Charge spent, at exactly half a rocket’s damage against these bodies. A rocket is worth roughly double a free bolt here — showing up unarmed never means standing there doing nothing, but carrying rockets still matters.
| Boss | HP | Rocket dmg / hit | Free bolt dmg / hit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demon Turtle | 1,100 | 145 | 72.5 |
| Malefic Shark | 1,250 | 120 | 60 |
| Abyssal Octopus | 1,500 | 100 | 50 |
| Pearl Devourer | 1,350 | 110 | 55 |
Full mechanics for the weapon slot, firing styles and the rocket drum itself live in Weapon & Rockets.
Demon Turtle, Malefic Shark and the Abyssal Octopus each pay the same three things on a confirmed kill: 700 crystals, one Leviathan Scrap — physical cargo, landing in your Inventory or the Berth Warehouse if the Hold is full (see Inventory & Warehouse) — and one fragment toward that boss’s own record (§07). All three are credited the instant the body drops, no return trip required to see the reward.
The Pearl Devourer pays differently: 700 crystals plus one guaranteed Pearl, rolled 60% Abyssal tier and 40% Leviathan tier from a random Pearl family. It doesn’t run on the fragment ledger at all — every clean win is its own complete reward, not progress toward a longer record.
Each of the three Scrap-paying bosses keeps its own record, capped at 50 fragments — one fragment per confirmed kill, nothing more per encounter no matter how it goes. There is no shortcut past that count: since each of those three only surfaces on its own hourly or two-hourly slot, finishing a record takes exactly as many separate, winning hunts as fragments it’s missing. The Chart shows live progress as fragments / 50for whichever boss you’ve contacted, and once a record hits 50 its state flips to complete.
Every hunt ground shows up as its own contact on the enlarged Chart (full Chart mechanics in Sonar & Chart). Open a contacted hunt’s readout and it shows, in order: whether it’s currently awaiting spawn, patrolling or already defeated this window; a filling ring counting down to the next scheduled surface; the ground’s named location; fragment progress; the reward line; and the same visibility copy quoted in §02 above.
This chapter names every ground by the same location name the Chart uses — The Shatter Shelf, The Riven Current, The Black Choir, The Pearl Thicket — and stops there. The Chart is where the exact spot resolves once you’ve actually found it; no set of coordinates is printed here to skip that discovery.