How The Deep works.

Dive → Plankton → Relics → Lab

Plankton rules

Plankton is points, not a token. The ledger is append-only on this server and can move on-chain later.

Coins and Deep Six

Deep Six is the daily puzzle at /daily. Every UTC day two schools are published and one whale in each is the answer. Guess a whale from the school and you are told which of its five traits the answer shares, and whether the answer is rarer. 6 guesses. You do not need a wallet to play, and the board is the same either way.

The shallows is one whale out of 100. The abyss is one out of 500, with the same 6 guesses, and it pays ten times as much for it. Both are playable every day and they keep separate streaks. The abyss opens once 500 whales have been mirrored; until then it says so. Being paid for it is what needs a whale: the daily rewards are for the pod, and a wallet holding fewer than 1 of them can play every day and earn nothing. That is what stops one person minting Coins from a hundred empty wallets.

Coins are not Plankton, and there is still no exchange rate between them. Plankton exists because a whale dived; Coins exist because somebody turned up. Keeping the two ledgers apart is what lets the daily puzzle pay out without inflating the Plankton that Whacky Bags are priced in. The wheel is the single place they touch, and it is a lottery rather than a rate: you cannot choose to convert, most spins pay no Plankton at all, and the wheel stops paying Plankton for the day once it has handed out 2000 of it across everybody.

The draw is checkable. Each day stores the seed it was drawn from and a fingerprint of the pool, and both are published once the day is over, so the answer provably could not have been chosen after seeing anybody's guesses.

The whacky wheel

The one thing Coins buy. 100 🪙 a spin, on /daily, no cooldown and no daily limit. The spin is burned whatever happens. Twelve slices, and most of them hand some of it back: Coins out at 25, 50, 100 (break even) and 250, Plankton out at 10, 50 and 150, and one rare slice that pays 500 Plankton or, rarer still, a real Whacky.

The wheel pays back less than it takes, and that is the design. Coins have two faucets and this is the only drain, so a wheel that broke even would leave the balance climbing forever. The face is drawn as twelve equal slices because the rarest outcome is 5 chances in 10,000 and a slice that size would be a fifth of a degree wide; the odds above are the real ones.

The Plankton it pays is capped per day. Once the wheel has paid 2000 🦐 across everybody in one UTC day, the Plankton slices pay Coins instead until midnight. The Whacky slice needs a bag in stock; when the shelf has none left it pays the 500 🦐 half.

Every spin is decided before you press it. Before you spin we publish the SHA-256 hash of the seed your next spin will use; spinning reveals the seed. A seed that hashes to the number you were already shown cannot have been picked after the fact. The roll follows from the seed, the prize follows from the roll, and each spin stores a hash of the prize table in force, so a later retune leaves old spins checkable. It is all on the panel.

Lab rules

The Lab is sealed, and applying a Relic is not open yet. Changing a whale's traits means redrawing it, and that needs the artist's five layer files. We do not have them, so an applied trait would show in the metadata and never in the picture. Diving, Plankton and salvaging Relics all work as written, and nothing you keep expires. The rules below are the ones the Lab will open with, published now so the economics are not a surprise later.

• Same slot only. Head → Head, Body → Body. Five slots: Backgrounds, Skin, Body, Face, Head.
• Owner of record only. You edit whales you hold right now.
• 150-600 🦐 per swap, set by how rare the trait you are applying is, and a 1h cooldown per whale after every apply.
• No duplicates. No two whales may end up with an identical 5-trait set.
• Relics are consumed. Applying one spends it, and the trait it replaced leaves the pod for good. Every dive makes the collection rarer, and so does every swap.
• 1/1s are frozen. #1, #1000, #2068 and #10000 never dive and are never edited.
• Listing warning. OpenSea can cache metadata for a while after a swap - check the whale page before listing.

Whacky Bags

• The price picks the bag: Shallow bag 1,000, 1 NFT · Deep bag 10,000, 3-7 NFTs · Abyssal bag 25,000, 5-15 NFTs.
• Real NFTs from the treasury - whales and friends of the pod, not points and not Relics.
• Sent by hand. There is no custody contract and no hot wallet here. Your claim reads "on its way" until the owner has sent it, then "Sent".
• Stock. Each tier sells as many bags as the owner has put up. When they are gone it reads sold out until it is restocked.
• No second whale needed. This is the sink that works if you only ever held one.

FAQ

Cookies

The strip at the bottom of the page asks about one thing: product analytics. Here is the whole of it.

• Always on, no choice involved. A session cookie when you sign in, and two small cookies that remember which address you are playing the dailies for and where your puzzle streak is. Without them the site cannot do what you asked it to, so they are not part of the question.
• Only if you allow it. PostHog counts page views and clicks so we can tell which parts of The Deep get used. If you are signed in, events are tied to your wallet address - the same address already public on-chain. Sign out and that link is dropped.
• If you say no, nothing loads. Not loaded and switched off: the analytics code is never fetched and no request to it is ever made. Your answer is kept in one cookie so you are not asked on every page.

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