The shark remembers every patch. This is the one where the game learned to tell you the truth about itself.

2.1 is on the default branch, and the demo is updated alongside it. Steam updates you the next time you launch; the title screen should read v2.1.0 in the corner.

A first-time player recorded thirty-eight minutes of the 2.0 demo for us. They loved the atmosphere, and they could not tell what half of it did — with good reason. The game's own words were wrong about sonar, stances, jellyfish, the brood and prestige. A whole family of upgrades changed a number and nothing else. And the very first screen told them they had slept for seven minutes. 2.1 is the answer to that recording: every sentence the game says is now true, and every purchase does something you can see.

Your saves come with you

No reset this time. 2.0 saves load in 2.1 as they are — progress, collection, cosmetics, all of it.

One thing will look different if you are still in your first run: your shark will be smaller. In 2.1 the shark starts life as a pup and grows over the first run, so its size now follows how far that run has gone. Nothing is lost and nothing about the hunt changes — the bite reaches exactly as far as it did — and it is full grown by the time you can Molt.

Sonar finally does what its upgrades say

"Sonar power" was a readout with nothing behind it. Every Sonar upgrade, study, relic and reward — Echolocation, the first upgrade you see, included — raised a number on the Status panel and changed nothing in the water. A pulse grabbed a single fish at a crawl, and chasing with the mouse was strictly better. Our playtester worked that out, and they were right.

Now each doubling of Sonar power adds fish, reach and pull — steep at first, flatter later, so no Sonar purchase ever goes inert. Echolocation's first level takes a pulse from three fish to four. And the ring is the grab: fish are taken by the ring sweeping through them rather than pulled from anywhere on screen, so where you pulse matters. None of this changes what a fish is worth; the pacing is the same as 2.0.

Stances are a real choice

Stalk used to be worse at everything — its one advertised strength was a value the game never read. Now Frenzy is the chase: more prey, and a bite that blooms with your combo. Stalk is the lure: prey stop fleeing, and your sonar grabs more fish, reaches farther and pulls faster. Switching tells you which one you are in and what it is for.

You can see the progress

The notes on 2.0 were blunt. "Buying squids should put squids in the ocean." "I thought the brood would be shaped like me." "Could the shark start as a baby?" All fair.

• Every run is a dive. A new run starts in sunlight — bright shallows, long shafts of light — and the water deepens as the run climbs toward its next prestige. Marine snow thickens, the light goes, and past the twilight the water starts making its own. The Status panel reads your depth in metres, and each zone announces itself: Sunlight, Twilight, Midnight, the Abyss, the Hadal trenches.
• What you own lives in the water. Each generator tier puts its own animal behind the hunt — silver schools, moon jellies, giant squid crossing mantle-first, serpents, a void whale wearing a constellation, isopods walking the seabed, kraken arms reaching in from the edges, a drowned god's face, eyes opening in the dark. More arrive as you own more, and the first of each tier arrives where you can see it.
• The shark starts as a pup and grows up over your first run.
• The brood are your kind. Each is your body form at a quarter of your size: a hammerhead's brood carry little hammers, a squid's are squidlets, an angler's carry lit lures.
• Drift Between Waters. A new toggle under Ocean Depths in the Bazaar: every seven minutes the ocean drifts to the next water you own, the way a desktop background rotates.

The collection, redrawn

The jellyfish never stopped spawning. They arrived in silence, faint and small, and left ten seconds later — so almost nobody saw them, and we went a long while without seeing one ourselves. Now each arrives with a glass chime and a bloom of its own light, drawn larger, and stays from 24 seconds for a common to a full minute for a mythic.

The fifty species used to be six templates with cartoon eyes. Each is now its own animal, most drawn after a real one — the moon jelly's four-leaf clover, the sea nettle's stripes and ribbons, a comb jelly's shimmering rows — and the rarer the species, the more of it moves and glows. The Aquarium is a cabinet of specimens now: every species you have caught sits in its own small tank, the ones still out there show their silhouette, and each counts how many you have caught.

The game says what it does

• The Guide was rewritten against the code, with a new Glossary. Among the numbers it had wrong: the size of the brood, idle income, the offline cap, Submersion's multiplier, and how many studies there are and how long they take.
• "Devour" is now "Upgrades." The tab named a verb, a stat and a shop at once, and our playtester spent half an hour not realising it sold anything.
• Hints are cards, not pop-ups. A stray click can no longer throw one away unread, and each has a button that opens the tab it is talking about.
• New tabs say so, with a NEW badge and a line on what the tab is for. Locked tabs show how close you are.
• Readouts say what they measure — Per Fish instead of "Devour Strength", Sonar instead of "Sonar Boost" — and Pearls and Biomass show a fill line toward the next one.
• Hunts say what completes them. Five descriptions promised checks that never ran. Blitz Molt told you to complete a Molt — but Molting ends the active hunt, so doing what it said failed it. Each now states exactly what counts.
• Achievements say the count they check. Abyssal Conqueror said "all 13 hunts" when there are 16 and it counts any 13; Cosmic Scholar and the final achievement had the same problem.

And the quieter half

• A new game no longer opens with "You slept for 7 minutes." Pressing "Save & leave" on the title screen wrote an empty run into the slot, and opening it later counted your time on the title screen as sleep. Your run and your settings save automatically, and the menu now says so.
• Settings stick from the first screen. The title screen used to play at full volume whatever you had set.
• The ocean keeps going behind the menu. Reading the Guide used to cost progress. Now the economy keeps ticking while the hunt holds.
• Screen Shake off means off. The setting only ever stopped the bite shake; rare-prey bursts, arc chains, depth charges and the prestige ceremonies shook the screen regardless. Now none of them do.
• Everything clicks. Settings, brood upgrades, studies, hunts and about forty other controls were silent. Purchases chime when something was bought and buzz when nothing was.
• The music loop lost its seam every 64 seconds, and the Bazaar's tracks now play at the same loudness as the default.
• In the demo, a hint no longer tells you Hunts are open when they are not, relics no longer arrive and vanish every session, and moving your save to the full game no longer carries over an achievement earned on seven generators instead of sixteen.

A correction

Our 2.0 notes said the four hunt abilities are "earned by how you hunt, not by how deep you have already gone." That was not right. They unlock on the prestige ladder — Arc Devourer at your first Molt, Abyssal Vortex at your first Awakening, Depth Charges at your first Fracture, Spectral School at your third — which is what the ability picker says. The notes should have said it too.

What to send us

Anything the game tells you that turns out not to be true. That is what 2.1 is for, so it is the report we most want. After that: anything that breaks, and any machine where the ocean will not draw. Quote the build stamp from the title screen — version, channel and commit — and we will know exactly what you were running.

The ocean is not water. It never was. As of this build, it will at least tell you what it is.