The biggest version so far! The short version: unlocks are behind a new upgrade tree, the desktop has weather and boats that talk, there is a taskbar mode, fusion is rebuilt, TunaPlayer has real music, and Solitaire has the card explosion. We finally have sounds too.
Read this first if you played the last build
Your save carries over. The progression rules changed.
Your prestige level, multiplier and banked Black Pearls carry over.
Zones, dives, FishFusion and boat equipment are no longer unlocked by prestige. They are
sold in eBait. Anything you had unlocked by prestige needs to be bought with pearls.Fusion no longer has free daily fuses. It costs pearls per fuse.
The music placeholders are gone from your playlist. Real tracks unlock as you discover
species, so an existing collection starts you with several already open.
Prestige no longer locks content. eBait sells it.
Every "unlocks at Prestige N" gate is gone. Zones, dives, FishFusion, boat equipment and the
program tiers are now eBait items bought with Black Pearls, and pearls bank across resets.
Prestige keeps its multiplier, pearl payout and slot growth.
eBait is its own window, with its own mark in the titlebar. Icon items on a grid and a
detail panel showing what an item does, what it costs, what you have and what you will have
after. Pressed in means owned, green ring means affordable, "!" means it needs a prerequisite.Component lines feed your buffs, Bays add slots, the Incubator shortens geode timers,
Deeper Veins tilts geode rarity upward, Better Conversion raises the Recycle Center payout.
There are also items for modifiers, dive speed, a Knowledge branch, a "missing by zone"
readout in the Fishpedia, and TunaPlayer visualizer skins. Items that charged for features
you already had were removed.The prestige ladder was retuned. The first few prestiges are quick, tutorial-scale runs.
Past prestige 10 the bar grows steeply. The Black Pearl payout now grows with your prestige
level instead of staying flat, starting at 5 pearls at prestige 1.Geode timers are wider, geode tiers no longer downgrade at high prestige, and the early
achievement pearl grants were trimmed to match the new payout curve.
The desktop is alive
Weather. Clear, cloudy, rain, fog and thunderstorms roll across the desktop on a
fixed schedule, with cloud shadows on the water, rain falling behind your icons, fog, and
lightning during storms. Every state has its own sound.Weather changes what bites. Three species only appear in their weather: the Thunder
Eel in thunderstorms, the Typhoon Tarpon in rain, the Ghostfish in fog. The Fishpedia marks
them.FishCast. A new desktop app reading the same weather engine the sky does, so the forecast is never wrong. Current conditions on a pixel matrix display, animated weather glyphs, and the upcoming slots. Fairly buggy currently.
Boats leave wakes. Every boat draws a wake, bow foam and a contact shadow, throws a
splash when it turns, and rides the swell. Craft sprites use the water pack's own palette.
The wake is driven by real travel, so a boat that stops looks like it stopped.Boats talk. Boats meet on the water and exchange lines from a pool of 42, with
pixel symbol pops for the physical beats. A boat's haul rhythm follows its real income share,
so a freighter hauls constantly and a rowboat rarely. Speech bubbles dodge the desktop icons.Boats aim at clear water, so the fleet stops piling up in one corner.
Fixed: the fleet would line up along the bottom edge of the water, seeking destinations it could never reach.
The old boat auras are gone, along with the player boat they rendered on.
Fishing
The suspense beat. Land something Rare or better and the water tells you before the
card does. The surface shakes, the water darkens under the bobber, and the longer it builds
the better the fish. Legendary and Mythic add rising bubbles, a white flash and a splash, and
the reveal card slams in. Common and Uncommon catches never wait.No more coin chests. Every difficulty used to roll a treasure chest that sold for
coins, a quarter of the time at Easy. Chests are gone from every tier. A roll that would have
been a chest is now a fish of that tier's usual rarity, with a buff, from your current zone.Rod & Gear rebuilt. A pick-list of rods on the left with level pips and a color per rod, and on the right the two numbers a purchase needs: the gain and the cost. Max out previews how many levels you get for the money before you click.
Rod Mastery matches: same row shape, same per-rod color, an XP bar per rod, and each mastery node showing its bonus in big type over its cost.
Taskbar mode
Dock FISH.OS to the bottom of your screen as a 240 pixel always-on-top strip and keep fishing
while you do something else. The water, the fleet, the weather and your buffs all keep running.
Enter from the tray button or the Start menu. Right-click the strip to leave.
A fixed readout bar shows coins, fish and your income multiplier, with your buff chips
beside it.Sell All and Buy Next appear on the strip only when they can do something.
Always-on-top can be toggled live from Settings > System.
Audio keeps playing even if you have "mute when unfocused" on.
FishFusion is up to speed
The daily cap and the three free fuses are gone. Fusion costs a flat Black Pearl price set
by the rarer parent: 40 for Epic, 120 for Legendary, 350 for Mythic.New window: two specimen tubes, a porthole chamber, and a console with the price and your
balance. Fuse when you can afford it, no confirmation interstitial.The fuse runs a sequence: specimens drawn in, a shake, a burst in the chamber, then the
result goes through the full catch reveal with its own headline.Fixed: a fusion's effective rarity could read lower than its base rarity. It no longer
downgrades.
TunaPlayer is a music collection now
The thirteen placeholder tones are gone. In their place, a 12 track album and a 4 track EP,
licensed and credited in the Credits screen.Tracks unlock as you discover species.
ALBUMS and ALL views for browsing, plus playlists, saved with your game.
Four visualizer skins, sold in eBait.
Solitaire
The deck scales with your desktop: bigger cards on bigger screens.
Three card draw is back and is the default. A Draw 3 / Draw 1 toggle on the toolbar deals a
fresh game and remembers your choice.Auto-complete plays out in front of you instead of teleporting the cards.
Winning launches the cards. They bounce off the bottom of the screen and pile up on your
taskbar, in the classic style. Click anywhere to clear them.Dragging a run no longer leaves a ghost copy in the source pile, and the waste slot is wide
enough for its three card splay.
Booting up, Saves and more
FISH.OS boots to a game menu every launch: Continue, Settings, Credits, with a live shader
behind it.The BIOS phase has a real startup sequence, and the boot voice is back (minus the one line
that ruined it).Save profiles on the boot menu. Up to six Angler cards, each its own save.
A Shut Down entry in the Start menu. Previously the only way out was the window X.
Flippy greets you when you come back. After a long absence you get his line about watching
your boat alone. After a short one he tells you the fleet kept fishing and points you at the
Fish Market. The Welcome Back banner wears his face instead of the logo.
Shopping, fleet, aquarium
The shop is eBait: category tabs, Buy Max, and every line showing what the money buys you,
before and after.The Fleet catalog says what a boat does to your income. Each row reads the resulting total
per second and the multiplier.The Aquarium sorts your whole collection before capping the view, and shows modifier stats.
Bobber rate now shows in the fleet and aquarium stat panels.Achievements are a grid, pay a collection bonus, and update in place, so the list stops
jumping back to the top every tick.The Greed offer window is measured in sweeps, not seconds, so it is fair at any speed.
Sounds are here
The fishing loop has real sounds. The bite, the landing and the steps between each have
their own cue.A "BANKED" cue when the fish is secured. The needle parks when nothing is being asked of
you, and the water goes quiet when you stop fishing.Weather you can hear: rain, wind, thunder.
Ambience was rebalanced by measurement rather than by ear, so no single layer buries the
rest.Windows Volume Mixer shows "FISH.OS" instead of "Microsoft Edge WebView2".
Look and feel
Display Properties is its own control panel with its own wallpapers, including two live
shader wallpapers. Titlebars follow the theme.Custom themes derive their text ink from the surface it sits on, so nothing goes unreadable.
Taskbar tray numerals clear accessibility contrast on every theme, and got a heavier face.
A Language section under Settings > System, groundwork for localization.
Browser chrome that gave away the WebView shell (right-click menus, find bars, zoom) is
suppressed.F9 takes a screenshot. It saves a PNG of the game window to Documents/FISH.OS/screenshots
and tells you where it went. Steam's own F12 still works when you launch through Steam.
Fixes and under the hood
Fixed a crash on boot caused by two profile writes racing for the same temp file. This
matched four crash reports from the playtest.Playdata reporting ships in this build. It is on by default, the boot dialog tells you when
you start, and Settings lets you turn it off at any time.Steam stats are pushed at boot and every two minutes.
Buy Max on rods was invisible to pacing telemetry. It is counted now.
Windows no longer come back tiny after leaving taskbar mode.
Banners that need your attention queue while in taskbar mode and are built when you come
back, so their numbers are current.Hundreds of smaller test, layout and copy fixes.
Known issues
Entering taskbar mode from fullscreen and leaving it lands you windowed. Press F11 to get fullscreen back. A fix is in progress.
Radar in the Fishcast app is currently broken.
Thanks for playing the playtest. Most of this list exists because of your reports.