Everything Now Hatches

The same-day companion, in the proud tradition of issues nine-and-a-half and twelve-and-a-half: this morning we taught the fish to swim, and by afternoon we had stopped selling fish entirely. There is a nest now. There are eggs. There is a market stall underwater, which raises questions we have elected not to answer.

The half-issue is, by now, an institution: the dispatch's way of admitting that one day contained two subjects and the one-subject rule is sacred. Issue 9½ confessed the shop had no till; 12½ confessed the app had no store. Issue 16½ gets to be the first half-issue with nothing to confess and everything to announce, and we hardly know how to hold our hands. The news: fish are no longer bought. They are hatched.

The nest and the stall

South-east of the reef, in the open channel where Bubbles has always parked its little drone-body for the night, there is now a proper landmark: a rocky outcrop holding three things that belong together. Bubbles' perch, unchanged, because some things are sacred. A Fish Nest — a pebble-ring bowl where eggs sit visibly warming, color-coded by rarity, wobbling harder and harder as hatch time approaches, which is exactly as agonizing to watch as it sounds. And a Market stall, with a canopy and a crate and a barrel, run by nobody, questioned by nobody, selling one thing: eggs.

Six eggs, one per rarity. Common through Epic cost Bubble Essence — five essence for a Common egg up to 120 for an Epic — and each hatches, after a real incubation (45 seconds for a Common, half an hour for an Epic), into a random fish of its tier, odds printed on the stall the way this establishment prints everything. The Premium Egg is the exception that proves the house style: fifty pearls, an hour in the nest, and inside is the top of the roster — 70% Legendary, 30% Mythic, disclosed. The nest holds four eggs at once, and the clocks are real clocks: close the game, live your life, and the eggs keep warming without you. Every new reef begins with two starter eggs already nestled in the bowl, so your first fish don't arrive by transaction. They arrive by birthday.

We would like to state for the record that the eggs wobble before they hatch, and that we have watched the final fifteen seconds of an incubation doing absolutely nothing else, and that we do not regret the engineering hours.

Corals now have childhoods

The eggs turned out to be contagious. Coral levels — the old tap-to-upgrade numbers — have been reborn as growth stages: plant a coral now and what goes into the sand is a stage-0 hatchling, a hopeful little nub that produces exactly nothing. It grows on its own real clock through Sprout, Juvenile, Colony and Mature to stage-5 Full Grown, over about half an hour, geometry filling in denser at every stage so growth looks like growth rather than inflation. Your polyps, previously the currency of upgrades, are now the currency of impatience: a Grow Now button skips a stage instantly, for stewards who love their corals but not the waiting. Growth, like incubation, continues while the game is closed — the reef no longer pauses when you look away, which we find we keep saying out loud to ourselves in a small voice.

The Hidey-Hole, and other bedrooms

This morning's issue noted, poignantly, that a fish with no shelter beds down on open sand. That sentence had a shelf life of about six hours. Sleeping fish now check into accommodation in strict order of preference: a proper shelter first — the Anemone Haven, the Reef Grotto, or the new Hidey-Hole, a twenty-polyp decoration that is essentially a pile of rocks with a dark doorway and room for four, and which we defy you to place just one of. Failing that, they nestle into a grown coral, two sleepers each, which means a mature reef at midnight is now a neighborhood of occupied branches. Only a reef with nothing at all still sees fish on the sand, and frankly at that point the fish are making a statement.

Light, from the things that claimed to have it

And the bioluminescent species — the lantern corals, the glow eels, the anglerfish, everything the journal has long flattered with the word "glow" — now actually light the water around them. After dark, every biolum pours a soft pool of its own color onto the reef around it, and biolum corals cast true light that neighboring fish swim through and catch on their flanks. A twilight shelf at midnight is now lit like a street of porch lamps. The one-subject rule prevents us saying more, but the screenshots channel of our hearts is full.

Regarding the market stall

Who runs it? Who restocks the barrel? Why does an underwater canopy exist, and what is it keeping off? These are excellent questions, and in the grand tradition of this publication — a clam with no advertisements, a shop with no till, an app with no store — we answer: the stall is run on the honor system by the reef itself, and it is doing a better job than most economies we have shipped. See you Tuesday. We mean it this time; we've automated the editor.

— The Reef Bloom team