Sonar & Chart

01 The scope

A round glass sits fixed in the bottom-right corner any time you’re piloting in open water. A sweep line circles it once every few seconds; contacts brighten as the sweep crosses them and fade behind it, and anything closer to you reads brighter than anything far away. It hides itself the moment the Hold, Ledger or Chart is open — one instrument at a time.

Click the scope, or press M, to open the full Chart — the same instrument, enlarged to fill the window. Two marks live only on this small glass and never earn a row of their own on the Chart’s Key: a soft amber dot for a station keeper once you’re inside the Berth, and a faint shimmering glint for a skill pickup still drifting in the water — both too local or too fleeting to belong on a chart of the whole expedition.

02 The vocabulary

Nothing on either glass is decoration — every mark is a live read of real game state, shaped so its kind is legible at a glance. These are the same nine rows the Chart’s own Key panel draws when you press its Key button.

03 The glass, enlarged

The Chart is the corner scope’s glass stretched to fill the window — the same domed glow, the same faint scanlines, the same drawn marks, nothing simulated twice. A scan bar sweeps down the column every few seconds, exactly like the scope’s own sweep unrolled from a circle into a line: marks glow brightest the instant the bar crosses them and hold an afterglow as it moves on, with a readable floor so the glass is never fully dark between sweeps. Drag or scroll to pan the camera up and down the column, use the arrow keys to step between marks, or hit the compass button in the corner to snap straight back to the drone.

Depth reads top to bottom as banded sectors, one per charted zone, tinted in that zone’s own water colour and bracketed in the left gutter with its name and a live tally — creatures recorded and crystal fields charted, both out of the zone’s total. Water you haven’t reached yet carries the same bracket but no tally, just a grainy “NO SURVEY” and a slow drift of static across the band.

Below your deepest mark the column keeps going but nothing has named it yet — a soft “UNSURVEYED” line, then a darker “NO SIGNAL BELOW” band that noise and the odd streak of interference cross without ever resolving into anything. Out past that fog, the Chart also plots a jammed, stuttering return or two — the Sealed glyph from the legend above, given a rough position rather than nothing at all. Those are the Ledger’s two sealed chapters (see The Ledger): the game telling you it has already written that content, and something is genuinely down there, without pretending you can reach it. Select one and the chip it opens only ever offers a line of naturalist teasing — never a way to go.

04 Maps — the Chart is a travel hub

Beside the glass sits a second list, headed Maps: every region you know about, not just the column you’re standing in — the Berth, the Open Column, the Kelp Forest and the Sealed Grotto, all at once, from wherever you actually are. On a phone the glass and the map list trade places behind a Water/Maps tab rather than sharing a 390-px column.

Every region is a row, whatever your relationship to it: a lit mouth for one you can travel to right now, a padlock for one you’ve found but can’t yet enter, a dashed ring for one you haven’t found at all, and a plain dot for wherever you already are. Each row also carries its own status word (“You are here”, “Travel”, “Locked”, “Unfound”), a one-line blurb, its depth range, and how many beacons you’ve planted there. A locked or unfound region is listed and selectable exactly like an open one — never hidden, never a dead end.

Select any region and the panel’s action bar shows what happens next: an open one gets a single 52 px Go — travel herebutton that runs a real trip there and then, no flying back to a passage mouth first. A locked or unfound one swaps that button for a plain list of exactly what stands in the way — each line naming the requirement and, if it isn’t met yet, what would satisfy it:

• Unfound. The Kelp Forest and the Sealed Grotto both sit behind a hidden mouth that has to be flown into once, in the water, before the Chart can offer it at all. The Chart hints at a direction rather than a position — “a slot in the rock somewhere along the Twilight shelf” for the Kelp Forest, “a fault in the trench wall, deep in the Lower Dark” for the Sealed Grotto — so the hunt stays a hunt.
• Pilot level. Finding the Sealed Grotto’s mouth isn’t enough on its own — its signal stays jammed until Pilot Level 15, the same real gate covered in Pilot & Classes. The requirement line reads your actual level back at you: “you are level 9 — dive, record and haul to climb,” for instance, never a bare refusal.
• Hull depth rating. Arriving somewhere your hull isn’t rated for isn’t forbidden in the water — the relief valve simply blows and shoves you back up — so the Chart gates it instead, reading your hull’s current rating against the region’s own ceiling and naming the fix: fit a deeper-rated hull in the Hold.

Nothing about a lock is a surprise sprung on you mid-swim: it’s printed on the Chart the moment the region itself is known, worded as a target to work toward rather than a wall.

05 The NOW rail

Beside the glass sits a short rail of up to five cards, titled Now — never a fixed checklist, but whatever is genuinely worth doing this moment, derived fresh from live state and reordered as it changes: a charted field still waiting for a drone, the trip back to the water or the Berth, the nearest unrecorded creature in the zone you’re actually in, a place you haven’t stood in front of yet, and — last, because it’s anticipation rather than an errand — the distant sealed contact, if the Chart can hear one. Every card carries the same drawn glyph as its mark on the glass, so the two always visibly match.

Click a card and the camera flies to its mark and pulses it amber, so you can see exactly what you just selected settle into view rather than jumping to it blind.

06 Selecting a mark

Click any mark on the glass — or arrow-key to it and press Enter — and a small chip opens right beside it: the mark’s name, one line of detail, and, only when the game can genuinely act on it, a single button. The chip never advertises a move it cannot actually make.

• Go runs a real trip through the passage — The Berth, the shallows, or your deepest mark, the same travel the vortex itself performs.
• Assign puts an auto-drone on a field you’ve already charted but haven’t put to work yet.
• Everything else is a note: a creature already in the Ledger, a rumour you haven’t stood in front of yet, or a sealed contact’s jammed reason — true state, offered with no button attached.

The Berth and the two return trips are the same destinations Cartographer Wren offers in person, on her own illustrated depth strip — see The Berth.