Pilot & Classes
Every dive banks XP onto a single account-wide ladder. It ends, honestly, in Level 5’s class ceremony and Level 15’s Sealed Grotto signal — everything else on it is a sign of where the game is going, not a second lock bolted onto systems you already earn another way.
01 Where XP comes from
Pilot XP is paid flat, per event, the moment something meaningful happens in the water — never for opening a menu, never purchasable at any price.
Every XP source
Open a level-up card and it says exactly which of these fired. There is no separate, hidden multiplier — the number on the card is the number in this table.
02 The climb to Level 100, honestly
The curve is a steepening exponential with a knee at the class choice: cheap at first, then harder and harder, on purpose. Level 100 is meant to be rare air — the single most expensive level-up in the game, by design, not an oversight.
Pacing for a daily player
These are targets the curve was tuned against, not a promise timed to the second — play more and you’ll beat them, play less and you won’t, and neither is a failure state. XP earned past Level 100 keeps banking rather than going to waste, toward a prestige system that doesn’t exist yet.
03 What the ladder actually unlocks
The Console’s Skills tab (press K) shows the full ladder up to Level 15, and every row on it is real, printed content. But only two of those rows are an actual gate in the code today — the rest describe when a system is designed to arrive, and every one of those systems already has its own real unlock condition, covered in its own chapter of this manual, that has nothing to do with your Pilot level.
The ladder to Level 15
Auto-drones, Specimen Pods and Tools are all in the game today, unlocked by their own milestones — see Getting Started and Concealment. Ability slots read as two separate ladder rows (L3, L6) but that isn’t how they actually open: all three of a class’s abilities are sealed together and drop in at once at L5’s Calibration — see Abilities. Hardpoints & Pearls are real code underneath — the full socket inventory, deterministic Fusion and the whole Refinement ladder, save-safe and fully tested — but there’s no console in the cockpit yet to touch any of it, so nothing actually changes in play at Level 8 today. See What’s Comingfor the preview. The contracts board and a second chassis aren’t built at all yet — the ladder is honest about carrying their names early.
Titles keep going well past Level 15 — see §07, below — but nothing past the Sealed Grotto’s signal changes what you can actually do. It changes what a share card says about you.
04 The class ceremony, at Level 5
The moment you cross Level 5, the Console’s Skills tab stops offering an empty rack and starts offering a ceremony — its own Calibration view: three drone silhouettes standing ready, each with its own aura and a single line of identity. Pick one and its three abilities drop into your Q/W/E slots at once, fitted and ready to drill — see Abilities. It is a branch, never a cage — later respecs exist, at a modest crystal cost, and a class you leave keeps every rank it already earned if you come back to it.
“Big holds, steady currents — you bring the whole field home.”
Leans toward: Cargo, hull rating, collector reach“Fast and far — first eyes on everything down here.”
Leans toward: Speed, beam, luck, Charge fill“Nothing sealed stays sealed. You open what others swim past.”
Leans toward: Yield, luck, cargoThe first choice is always free. Nothing about picking one closes off the others for good — only the trials and Calibration points you’ve already spent are what a respec asks you to earn again.
05 Promotion ranks, and their trials
Inside your class sit four promotion ranks, each needing both a level gate and a class-flavoured Promotion Trial attempted in the water — never purchasable at any rank.
The four ranks
Every rank pays a title, an evolving class insignia painted on the hull, and — from Rank II on — is flagged for a class-exclusive ability variant. Say plainly: that variant isn’t wired into the ability system in this build yet, and Ranks II through IV aren’t reachable at all today, because only one trial per class has actually been built.
Return to the Berth from the Midnight Zone with a full cargo hold, without the relief valve blowing on the way.
Five unrecorded sightings inside one seeded day.
Open three covers and salvage a wreck in one dive — described in the ladder, not yet wired to a pass condition.
Fail a live trial and nothing is lost — attempt it again the next time the conditions are right. Rank II–IV trials for every class read as real content already, waiting on the same kind of build the Salvager’s own Rank I trial is waiting on.
06 Calibration
From Level 16 on, every level-up banks one Calibration point, spent in the same Calibration view of the Skills tab that ran your Level 5 ceremony. Spend it in your class’s own tree — a handful of small, named nodes (Ballast Trim, Wide Beam, Practiced Hands and the like), each a flat or percentage bump to one stat, gated by your promotion rank and sometimes by an earlier node in its own branch. A full respec of the tree is available at a modest crystal cost, any time.
Not the same points as an ability’s own level — a Calibration point tunes a stat node in this tree; drilling and buying a skill’s level (see Abilities) spends crystals and a class material instead, from the Skill Bench sitting right next door in the same tab.
Every node’s effect runs through the same StatPipeline every part and ledger bonus already uses — nothing here is a second, separate power source, just another honest input into the numbers already on your Hold’s Status tab. See The Bay.
07 Title milestones
Five levels on the ladder pay a title instead of a feature — cosmetic, permanent, and printed on a share card the moment you cross them.
Before Level 5, your title simply reads “Recruit.” After it, your title is your class name, or the rank above it the moment you’ve earned one — both read out at the top of the Skills tab, next to the badge.