Cleaning up, in every sense

Last few updates were about how the tank looks. This one’s about how it runs. I spent the whole session on the un-glamorous middle of the game — the upkeep, the gear, the sponsor jobs — with one rule taped to my monitor: maintenance should be something you want to do, not something the game nags you into. A pull, not a push.

A squeegee you can actually drag

Tending the algae on the glass used to be a vague soft brush. Now it’s a real squeegee — rubber blade, metal channel, orange grip, all drawn right in the engine — and you drag it across the glass yourself. It turns to stay square to your stroke, the mouse cursor vanishes so the tool is your cursor, and each pass strips a crisp, blade-width band of film with a little white “squeak” sheen fading behind it. I quadrupled the resolution of the grime so the wiped edges come out sharp. It’s a tiny PowerWash moment, and I’ll admit I cleaned the same pane about forty times just testing it.

Making “clean” mean something

Here’s the boring-but-important one. Testing a fresh save, I watched a new player’s tank turn into a swamp within minutes — and, at the other end, a fully kitted tank sit pinned at a perfect 100 forever. The culprit was the math: cleaning power used to multiply (filter × crew × plants), so a bare tank was helplessly filthy and a maxed one was invincible.

So I tore that out and made it additive. Now every snail, every plant, every filter tier is a similar-sized, readable step up, and I clamped both ends so nothing runs away. A fresh empty tank sits at a comfortable “Good.” Your first few fish with no gear yet land at “Fair” — present, but not a health hazard. Add a sponge filter, a couple of cleanup critters, and some plants and you’re way up. But here’s the part I like best: even a maxed-out build tops out at 96. That last sliver to truly sparkling takes an actual scrub with the squeegee. Your gear gets you to good; your own hand gets you to perfect. And a single snail now roughly cancels out the everyday film, so the cleanup crew visibly earns its keep instead of being decoration.

Sponsors that remember what you’ve done

Two embarrassing progression bugs turned into a proper rule. Reed’s third job was asking me to “do a livestream” — the exact thing you’d just done to meet him. And a new sponsor’s first three jobs were all marked complete the instant he called, because I’d never told them to check what you’d already accomplished.

The fix is a rule I’ve now written both into the code and into my own notes so I never break it again: every quest has to extend what you’ve already proven. Thresholds ratchet upward, and the game never asks you to re-do an activity you’ve done. Reed’s third job is now “get the water sparkling” — which, neatly, points you straight at all the cleaning systems I’d just rebuilt. The whole session ties its own bow.

I also chained the sponsors themselves. They used to all show up at once in a big dump; now they arrive one after another, each waiting on the last, so meeting a new one feels like an event. There’s a new face too — Sy, a fish supplier who runs alongside the others — and each collection sponsor’s fish request only lands once you can actually buy that fish. On top of that, anything new in the shop now wears a little coral “NEW!” sticker until you’ve seen it, and locked items save that sticker for the moment they unlock, so a sponsor’s reward announces itself.

A better-looking, better-behaved school

A pile of fish work landed alongside all that.

Four new species joined the roster this week — a Chili Rasbora, a Congo Tetra, an Endler’s Livebearer (which shoals with the guppies, just like it does in real life), and a Gold Dust Molly — and the Cardinal Tetra picked up a second look, split evenly across a school so they’re not all identical. Half a dozen of the older species got art refreshers while I was in there. I also chased down a shimmer that had been bugging me for ages — turning fish were importing without the right texture settings and looked faintly blurry in motion. Reimporting all 43 fish and switching them to proper filtering fixed it; they’re crisp now, even at the new higher zoom. A couple of dwarf cichlids that were accidentally rendering smaller than a guppy got their size put right. And you can now tap any fish to have the camera gently drift over and follow it for a few seconds while you read its card — it lets go the instant you pan away, so it never fights you for control.

And the plants finally caught up

The plant catalog jumped too — ten new species this week, bringing it to twenty-two.

There’s an Amazon Sword, a whole run of Cryptocorynes (Wendtii in green and bronze, plus Lutea and Parva), a Green Lotus, and a Rotala. My favourites are the three surface floaters — Red Root Floater, Amazon Frogbit, and Water Lettuce — which sit as little rosettes right on the waterline with their roots trailing down into the tank. A few of the older plants got touched up too, and the Moneywort got noticeably bushier (three stalks became six).

What’s next

Now that cleaning is fun and the gear steps are legible, I want to make the gear visibly pay off: water clarity that lifts as your cleanliness and filter tier climb, so a good filter is something you can actually see working. After that, flow and bubbles from your equipment, and eventually CO₂ as the thing that unlocks the fussier, showier plants.

Thanks for following along. 🐟