DEEPER

Deeper biomes

Past the caves the descent had nothing but more of the same, faster. Three additions give the deep its own character:

Because the refill scales with your tank and the drain scales with depth, that one constant interval keeps the pressure roughly even across the whole game. Coasting, you stay ahead. Boosting burns air 2.2× faster, so sustained kicking runs you dry — which is what makes air a real constraint instead of a countdown.

Boost recovery was also shortened: regen went from 16+5/level to 21+7/level and the post-kick delay from 0.45s to 0.32s. A full refill drops from ~6.6s to ~4.9s, but the number that actually matters is the small top-up — a single second of boost now comes back in 2.5s at level 0 and 1.1s maxed, down from 3.3s and 1.6s. Short tactical kicks are the thing that got cheaper, not long ones.

Vents and currents are deliberately not lethal. They cost you control and air rather than the run, which means the deep gets harder without getting more arbitrary — and steering against a current while the Maw closes is a different kind of pressure than dodging one more shark.

The submarine ignores both, which quietly makes it better the deeper you take it.

The light switch

From 2,500m, something starts following you. The Maw closes from above while your flashlight is on, tracking your position and eating the gap at roughly 26–42 px/s. Kill the light and it loses you in about three seconds and leaves.

Going dark kills the beam, but it can't leave you helpless — being one-shot by a bomb you had no way to see isn't tension, it's a coin flip. So your eyes adapt over 1.4 seconds into a dim field, wider below than around you, that never gets as clear as the beam.

That first blind beat is the cost — flip the switch late and you're gambling. Hold it long enough to adapt and you can navigate, just without seeing coins or air clearly. A lit fuse still reads as a red pinprick in the dark, because a depth charge overtaking you unseen was the single most unfair death in the game.

Launching the submarine scares it off outright. A bubble shield doesn't kill it, but it knocks it back 70px and buys you a few more seconds.

Why 2,500m: a new player will never meet it. Depth-gating means the mechanic costs onboarding nothing — the first 45 seconds of the game are still one input.

Light in the deep

The flashlight tree was only ever lengthening the beam — the side halo was hardcoded at 26px regardless of level, so upgrading did nothing for peripheral vision. It now scales 26 → 82px, the cone widens faster (24 → 68 half-width), and each level shaves 5% off the overall murk. A second dimmer wash at 1.9× the halo softens the falloff so it isn't a hard circle.

Bioluminescent creatures light themselves. Lanternfish schools from 1,200m and siphonophore curtains from 1,800m punch their own holes in the darkness, so you see them coming whether or not the beam is on them. The anglerfish's lure and the leviathan's eye glow now too.

Hazard tiers

Hazard spacing tightens from 168px to 106px across the first kilometre. Past that, speed alone carries the difficulty.

Descent speed was reshaped to match — two stacked log ramps instead of one, with an easy shelf to 750m and a second ramp past it. Slower than before where players are learning, faster than before where they should be earning the Sovereign.

Hazard spacing also keeps tightening past 2,500m now — the old floor was 106px, it now reaches 80px by 5,500m — and the Maw returns up to 430px sooner the deeper you are.

The submarine

A 1,500-coin unlock plus three MK upgrades at 2,200 / 3,400 / 5,000 — 12,100 coins of new sink on top of the 14,560 for everything else. That's the long-horizon goal the shop was missing.

While it's running you are invulnerable, boost is unlimited, air doesn't drain at all, and anything you touch is destroyed rather than merely survived. The floodlight widens to 165px. Its speed multiplier went from 2.0× to 2.4× to keep pace with the reshaped descent curve. It is deliberately the most powerful thing in the game.

Nerfed in v3.7: durations were 15 / 25 / 35 / 45s, which meant a maxed MK4 launched at the surface put you at 1,290m — past the caves, most of the way to the dark zone, on a button press. It now runs 12 / 18 / 24 / 30s, topping out around 705m. Still the biggest single jump in the game, but it hands you a head start rather than a third of a good run.

It ejects with a 3-second red warning ring and hands back 2.4s of invulnerability, so you're never dumped out of it at full speed into a hazard wall.

Dark that keeps getting darker

Running with the lamp off used to look the same at 2,000m as it did at 700m: your eyes adapt over 1.4s into a dim field and that field never changed. Which made the deep feel oddly safe with the light off — the exact opposite of the intent.

The unlit field now shrinks and dims from 1,200m to 3,600m, down to about 45% of its old strength, and the water's own murk ceiling rises from 0.90 to 0.96 over the same stretch. Going dark past the Maw is now a real cost rather than a free way to shake it.

It stays survivable, and deliberately so: bioluminescence lights itself, coins and air tanks still catch a glint, and bomb fuses still show as a pinprick. You can read shapes. You just can't read them at leisure.

The kraken, 3,200m

The Maw is a chase — it comes for you and you shake it. The kraken is the opposite: a fixed boss between 3,200m and 4,300m — about 33 seconds — that holds the bottom of the frame and makes you dance in front of it.

When it wakes, the biome empties. No sharks, no bombs, no vents, no leviathans, no Maw — a sunken ship drifts up past you and the only things in the water are the tentacles, some coins and your air. Nothing to blame a death on but the fight.

Each attack telegraphs: a violet flare at the seabed and a faint column of water, 0.78s of warning at 3,200m tightening to 0.42s by 4,300m, where it also starts throwing two at once. The tentacle whips up past your row, holds, and retracts. Get out of the column.

Past the fight's midpoint it starts inking the water, and that is what makes the second half hard. The cloud drifts up from its siphon toward wherever you're standing, and it is opaque — your lamp does nothing against it, because ink isn't darkness, it's water you can't see through. It never touches you. It just erases the telegraph, so for a few seconds you're dodging a column you have to remember rather than one you can read. Clouds come every 4-6s at the midpoint, tightening to about every 3s at the end.

At 4,300m it sinks back down and lets you pass. The Sovereign suit sits at 5,000m, so there are still 700m of open abyss after the fight — long enough that surviving the kraken isn't the same thing as earning the suit, short enough that you can taste it.

Caves, widened

The channel was 48–76px of a 180px screen — under five diver-widths at its tightest, which with the diver's momentum meant threading it was closer to luck than skill.

Now 72–104px, and the centre wanders less (amplitudes cut from 24/9 to 20/7), so the caves demand fewer violent lateral corrections. Still visibly narrowing, still the tensest part of a run, but navigable.

They're also a bounded biome now: 420m to 1,100m, not a forever-repeating cycle. Caves are the thing that defines the mid-depths, and they hand off to open water before the dark zone starts — so the deep reads as somewhere else rather than more of the same.

The economy problem

Before this pass, a single 3,000m run paid about 2,100 coins and every upgrade in the game cost 5,350 total. Two and a half good runs emptied the shop. Any chest tuned against that was a rounding error.

Coin value now grows on 1 + depth/400 (capped at 12, was depth/150 capped at 30) and upgrade costs are roughly tripled to 14,560 total. Early runs pay 10–40, mid runs a few hundred, deep runs about 1,200 — so the curve is ~40 runs to max instead of 3.

Chest cadence

One chest every 8 hours, banking up to 3. Ten hours drifts — open at 8am and the next lands at 6pm, then 4am while you're asleep, and it's silently lost. Eight fits three natural play windows a day, and banking means missing one costs nothing.

New players start with one chest already waiting. Making someone wait 8 hours to see what a chest even is throws away the first session.

Ad placements

Three placements, wired as simulated ads — real timers, real gating, no network. The SIM tab in the locker shows why each one fired or didn't, and has a fast-ads toggle so you can test flow without waiting.

The interstitial fires on DIVE AGAIN, not on death — so it never competes with the revive offer sitting on the same screen. Death → revive → decline → then ads.

Remove Ads is simulated in the SIM tab. It kills interstitials but keeps rewarded offers, because players who paid still want the revive.