A store you can walk through

Buying fish used to be a list on your phone. Tap a name, get a fish. Functional, forgettable, and — for a game that’s supposed to be about looking at fish — a weird place to make you read text.

So I tore it out and built a showroom. Tapping Store now drops you into a full wall of display aquariums, one per species, with the fish actually swimming around inside. You don’t pick a name off a list — you watch the tank and click the specific fish you want, and that’s the one you take home, with its exact colors and personality intact.

There are tabs for Plants, Decor, and a Crew section with shrimp, snails, and algae-eaters paddling around their own tanks. Locked species sit behind a cheery “COMING SOON!” sign. You zoom and pan around the room like it’s a real shop floor.

The checkout got real too. Instead of buying on the spot, fish go into a cart — and when you’re ready, you review everything, see the total, and pick which tank to send it all to.

My favorite little touch: when you add a fish to your cart, it visibly lifts up out of the display tank — and if you change your mind and remove it, it swims right back down. It makes the shop feel like a place where the fish are real, not a menu of SKUs.

The tanks you’re shopping for now report their own vitals, so you know where a new fish is actually going.

And the fish don’t only come from the store. I’ve got vendors now — a local fish store, a specialty breeder, a rare importer — who message you when they’ve got something special, alongside field-guide discoveries and achievement unlocks. The inbox makes the world feel like it has other people in it.