Reading the tide…
Cocklefighting
A Great Tide is a season: a fresh start that runs for 3 months and then ends. It has its own ladder, its own register of names, its own cockles and its own trait, which bends how every fight in it resolves. Everybody in a Great Tide starts it from nothing. It is the only time the whole Shore is level.
Beside it stands the Standing Shore: the permanent world, the one the game has always been. It is never reset, its ladder never clears, and it is where every cockle ends up eventually.
The word “tide” already means a day on this Shore. Trumpet cries a fresh board every tide, and the Quenching Tide is a blessing at the Forge. A season is always a Great Tide.
Four Great Tides a year, one per season, each opening at UTC midnight on the first of the month. Nothing schedules them: which Tide is open is worked out from the clock, so the Shore agrees with itself without a timetable to go wrong.
| Tide | Name | Mark | Trait |
|---|---|---|---|
| Great Tide I | Emberfall | EMB | The Hard Water |
| Great Tide II | Blackwater | BLK | The Silt Bloom |
| Great Tide III | Saltrise | SLT | The Spring Flood |
| Great Tide IV | Hollowmoon | HLM | The Deep Cold |
| Great Tide V | Kelpfire | KLP | The Scouring |
| Great Tide VI | Stormglass | STG | The Lean Season |
Every Great Tide carries exactly one trait for its whole run, and no Tide ever carries the trait of the one before it. A trait always trades something away: it is meant to make a season a different game, not an easier one. The Standing Shore has no trait and never will.
Both sides of every fight are bent by the same trait. A Great Tide only matches you against cockles standing in it, and the rivals the Pit deals you fight by its rules too.
| Trait | Terms |
|---|---|
| The Scouring The water came off the reef with the reef still in it. Everything bites; nothing holds. | Elemental bite +35% · Every ward -25% · Magic find +20% |
| The Deep Cold A slow black winter under the shelf. Shells thicken, blood slows, and a fight is settled by who lasts. | Health +25% · Speed -15% · Experience +15% |
| The Running Tide Water that never stands still and never lets you. Fast, thin, and over before you have set your feet. | Speed +20% · Health -10% · Turns refill 30% faster |
| The Glut Every wreck on the Shore gave up its purse at once. Gold underfoot, and nobody any wiser for it. | Gold +60% · Experience -15% · Salvage +25% |
| The Lean Season Nothing washes up but hard lessons. The purse stays light and the cockle does not. | Experience +35% · Gold -25% · Magic find +25% |
| The Silt Bloom The floor of the Pit turned over in the night and came up carrying. Mother Murk has not slept since. | Magic find +60% · Salvage +50% · Gold -15% |
| The Hard Water Water with a grain to it. It turns a blow the way stone turns a chisel, and rewards the cockle who waits. | Every ward +40% · Elemental bite -20% · Experience +10% |
| The Spring Flood More water than the Shore has room for. Everything happens at once and twice over. | Turns refill 50% faster · Rested surge banks 50% faster · Experience -10% |
| The Quickening Trumpet has not stopped shouting since the Tide turned, and for once the pay matches the volume. | Commissions pay double · Turns refill 20% faster · Gold -10% |
| The Riptide The pull runs both ways and it does not care which way you were facing. Take hard, get taken harder. | Attack channel +25% · Health -15% · Gold +25% |
Every trait has a keepsake: a mythic magic item found only inside a Great Tide carrying that trait, and nowhere else, ever. A trait comes round once every ten seasons and so does its keepsake. Miss the Scouring this time and it is years before another is findable.
A keepsake is kept when the Tide closes and your cockle retires, so a cockle carrying one is carrying proof of the season it was in. They drop from a rewarded win and from Mother Murk’s daily dredge, both inside the Tide. The Pit’s bot rivals never carry one, so the only way to take a keepsake off somebody is to beat a real player who found it.
They are mythic, deliberately. A season is not where the best items in the game live, or the Standing Shore would become the consolation prize. A keepsake is instead more specialised than anything in the permanent catalogue, leaning hard into its own trait, and several charge a real cost for it.
Not to be confused with the three primordial relics, which are permanent, findable at any time, and a different chase entirely. See Magic items.
| Relic | Found in | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| The Scouring Shard | The Scouring | +30 Elemental, +20% Elemental, pierces 22% of wards |
| The Black Shelf Weight | The Deep Cold | +18 Defence, +40 Health, -5% Speed, +14% Health, +14 ward (your armour's element) |
| The Running Knot | The Running Tide | +34 Speed, +18% Speed, -6% Health |
| The Glutton's Ballast | The Glut | +16 Attack, +16 Defence, +16 Speed, +16 Health, +16 Elemental, +6% Attack, +6% Defence, +6% Speed, +6% Health |
| The Lean Year Charm | The Lean Season | +26 Attack, +20 Elemental, +12% Attack, -8% Health, +12% Elemental |
| The Bloom Sifter | The Silt Bloom | +14 Defence, +26 Elemental, +18 bite (your weapon's element), +15% ward, every element |
| The Hard Water Grain | The Hard Water | +34 Defence, +16% Defence, +22 ward (your armour's element), +20% ward, every element |
| The Flood Sigil | The Spring Flood | +24 Speed, +24 Health, +10% Speed, +10% Health |
| Trumpet's Standing Order | The Quickening | +18 Attack, +18 Defence, +18 Speed, +7% Attack, +7% Defence, +7% Speed, +7% Elemental |
| The Riptide Hook | The Riptide | +36 Attack, +18% Attack, -10% Defence, pierces 12% of wards |
Trumpet cries differently inside a season. Two commissions are dealt only to a cockle standing in a Great Tide: make your name in this Great Tide and fight the season’s own weather. The board you work in a Tide is not the board you work on the Standing Shore, and with a trait bending what a fight is worth they pay best where it helps most. Everything else is ordinary: same rarity ladder, same pay, same one-at-a-time rule. See Quests.
Nothing is lost, and nothing is reset. When a Great Tide ends, every cockle in it is retired to the Standing Shore, carrying everything it earned: its levels, its gold, its gear and forge levels, its magic items and their upgrades, its town, its trophies and its whole battle history. It is a move, not a wipe. Your retired cockles are yours to keep playing on the Standing Shore for ever.
The final standings freeze the moment the Tide closes. The top 100 are kept for good, and that frozen board is what pays the marks below.
If the Standing Shore already has a cockle by your Tide cockle’s name, the retired one takes the Tide’s three-letter mark on the front. A cockle called Nautilus retiring out of Emberfall becomes EMB-Nautilus. The cockle already standing on the Shore always keeps its name.
A cockle’s own trophies and trophy titles stay with that cockle, for ever, and travel nowhere. A brand new cockle has none of them and can never borrow them.
A Great Tide’s marks are different: they are earned by the player, so they hang on the account, and any cockle on it can wear one, including one you raise three seasons later, an hour old. That is what makes starting again next season not the same as starting from nothing.
| Mark | Earned by |
|---|---|
| Tidefarer of the Emberfall | Reach level 10 with any cockle in the Tide |
| Tidewrought of the Emberfall | Reach level 50 with any cockle in the Tide |
| Emberfall Deepborn | Reach level 150 with any cockle in the Tide |
| Emberfall Hundred | Finish the Tide in the top 100 |
| Champion of the Emberfall | Finish the Tide in the top 10 |
| Sovereign of the Emberfall | Finish the Tide at the very top |
The names above are shown for Emberfall; each Great Tide pays its own.
Your account is who you are: your sign-in, your passkeys, and every mark the Great Tides have paid you. A cockle is one character in one world, and an account owns several. Signing in establishes the account; the Tidewatch is where you then choose a world and a cockle in it. The way in has four steps and only ever these:
You may keep 5 cockles in each world, counted separately, so a new Great Tide never costs you the roster you already had. Swapping between them does not sign you out.
Retiring a cockle removes that one cockle and everything on it, and frees its name in that world. It does not touch your account, your other cockles or your Tide marks, and it is how you make room in a world that is full. Closing your account is a different control, on the account page, and takes every cockle in every world with it.
Names are unique within a world, so the same name can be held by one cockle on the Standing Shore and a different one in the open Great Tide. Fights, plunder, the ladder and the fight board are all scoped to your own world: nobody on the Standing Shore can reach into a Great Tide, and nobody in one can reach out.
The Bottle Post is scoped the same way, so a bottle reaches the name as it is answered to in the world you are standing in. Jabber Rock is not: the Rock is the whole Shore talking, whichever water you are in.
See also: Progression for the curves a trait multiplies, and Trophies for the titles that stay with a cockle.