LEARN IT IN THE WATER. The game now opens on a practice lagoon before it ever takes you out to a reef. Swim through three rings, spear two fish, and the boat runs you out. Nothing in there can hurt you, nothing else is on the screen, and it takes under a minute. Older players told us it was not clear the game is played with two thumbs, one on each side of the screen. It is a course you swim now rather than a page of text, and everybody gets it once, including people who have been playing for months. You can swim it again any time from HOW TO PLAY. Also fixed: the first thing a new diver saw was a prompt telling them to swim up to the boat and unload, on a dive that had not started and a bag with nothing in it.

THE TAP HOME WORKS. Tapping to skip the ride back to the dock did nothing on some devices. It was being offered to the interface first, and anything drawn over the travel screen quietly swallowed it. The tap is taken before anything else can have it now. THE DINOSAURS LOOK LIKE DINOSAURS. The giants wading past the Dinosaur Beds were drawn as a body, some legs and a neck that never joined up into an animal. They are one silhouette each now, and there are three of them: a long-necked sauropod, a theropod that runs on two legs, and a stegosaur with plates down its back and spikes on its tail. Multi-fish spears are still counted per reef on your postcard, from the last update.

YOU CAN SEE WHAT IS LEFT ON THE REEF. The number of lionfish still down there is on screen the whole dive, counting down — and when the last one comes off, it says REEF CLEARED and stays saying it. Before this the only sign was a message that flashed once and was gone thirty seconds before you started wondering. AND A CHART OF THE SITE, TOP RIGHT. Where the remaining fish are, where the boat is, and where you are. The reefs show up as clusters, so it answers the question you were actually asking by swimming end to end: which way. ALL-TIME HIGHS AT THE DOCK, under Badges. Most fish in one dive, heaviest dive, biggest fish, and the fewest dives it has taken you to strip a whole reef. A record you have not set yet says so rather than showing a zero. AND A TROPHY ON THE CARD WHEN YOU BREAK ONE — naming which one. If you have been diving a while, the first dive after this update quietly sets your records rather than claiming them, because a record nobody was keeping is not a record of zero. THE CHART IS READABLE NOW. The cleared count was drawn in a green meant for use underwater, on cream paper, which is about as legible as it sounds. Thirteen reef names on two rows also ran into each other; they are on three now. Every reef you have stripped wears a rosette.

MEASUREMENTS ARE A TAB NOW. Metric or feet, chosen once, and every screen follows it — depth, fish length, visibility, the lot. There is a third setting and it is the one that matters: follow the phone. A fresh save does that, so if your phone is in feet the game is in feet without you being asked. THE BOAT SCREEN IS TWO BUTTONS. Return to Dock is the main one, because you are in the boat and the dock is the only way on. Back in the Water is gone — climbing into the boat is how you decide to end a dive, and a button offering to undo it takes back a choice you made on purpose. Sharing your card is still there, just no longer shouting over the thing you actually came to do. THE DIVE STOPS WHEN THE DIVE STOPS. Three sounds used to keep running behind your postcard: the underwater bed, the boat radio at full volume, and the mermaid if she happened to be nearby when you surfaced. Your air was still draining while you looked at your catch, too. All of it stops now, on the card, the chart and the run out. THE MARKET IS A TABLE. Every buyer used to lay its numbers out in its own shape, so the prices you are there to compare started in a different place in every row. Prices, counts and totals line up in columns now, and the duplicate rate list above them — which did not line up either — is gone. AND THE BUTTONS ARE BACK ON THE SCREEN. For the third time these controls have been reported in the wrong place: they were stacked in the right-hand gutter with two of them off the edge entirely. Fixed, and the render that missed it three times now checks the part of the screen they live in.

THE WHALE FEEDS YOU. Get swallowed and the lionfish it swims over on the way go into your bag — whole, one at a time, with nothing speared. No spear means no damage, which makes them the best-condition fish you can land and the only restaurant-grade catch that costs you no marksmanship. Letting yourself be eaten finally pays, and a good pass through a cluster is most of a bagful. POSTCARDS. Sell a haul and you can send a picture of it: you holding up the biggest one with its length beside it, the rest of the catch in the water behind you, the boat and spear and fins you actually own, the badges you have earned, and how the reef you just worked is holding. On this release it saves the picture to the app; sharing it straight to other apps is coming. MARKET AND CLINIC ARE NOW TWO TABS. Selling a haul and paying to get patched up are different errands, and while they shared a screen the clinic moved around depending on how hurt you were. Each tab does one job. The market tells you in one line when you are too hurt to dive and where to fix it, and the clinic is always there — it says so plainly when there is nothing to treat. FIXED, AND THIS ONE IS AN APOLOGY. A WATCH button appeared on iPhone and iPad offering money for a video. There are no adverts in the iOS version and there never have been, so there was no video to play: the button was a development stand-in that should never have shipped, and tapping it simply handed you the money. Alongside it an "advert choices" setting offered to change a privacy preference that did not exist. Both are gone. Nothing about your data was ever collected by either of them — the privacy policy has always said this version carries no adverts, and now the app agrees with it.

THE WHALE FEEDS YOU. Get swallowed and the lionfish it swims over on the way go into your bag — whole, one at a time, with nothing speared. No spear means no damage, which makes them the best-condition fish you can land and the only restaurant-grade catch that costs you no marksmanship. Letting yourself be eaten finally pays, and a good pass through a cluster is most of a bagful. POSTCARDS. Sell a haul and you can send a picture of it: you holding up the biggest one with its length beside it, the rest of the catch in the water behind you, the boat and spear and fins you actually own, the badges you have earned, and how the reef you just worked is holding. On this release it saves the picture to the app; sharing it straight to other apps is coming. MARKET AND CLINIC ARE NOW TWO TABS. Selling a haul and paying to get patched up are different errands, and while they shared a screen the clinic moved around depending on how hurt you were. Each tab does one job. The market tells you in one line when you are too hurt to dive and where to fix it, and the clinic is always there — it says so plainly when there is nothing to treat. FIXED, AND THIS ONE IS AN APOLOGY. A WATCH button appeared on iPhone and iPad offering money for a video. There are no adverts in the iOS version and there never have been, so there was no video to play: the button was a development stand-in that should never have shipped, and tapping it simply handed you the money. Alongside it an "advert choices" setting offered to change a privacy preference that did not exist. Both are gone. Nothing about your data was ever collected by either of them — the privacy policy has always said this version carries no adverts, and now the app agrees with it.

THE PYRAMIDS. The second reef out is no longer a sandbox full of buckets and spades. Somebody built all this on dry land and the sea came and took it anyway: a great pyramid with its casing stone still clinging on, a sphinx, a toppled obelisk, and a colonnade with one column left standing. Green water over pale limestone, and a bronze cat somewhere down there that is entirely unbothered about any of it. A HOW TO PLAY tab, because the controls had never been written down anywhere. What each thumb does, and the three things that catch people out. The dock also shows which build you are playing, top right, on every tab. FIXED, FOR PHONES WITH A CAMERA CUTOUT. The dock, the chart and the run out to the reef were drawn edge to edge, so on some handsets the camera sat on top of the text. All three keep clear of it now, whichever way round you hold the phone, while the water and the sky still reach the edges of the screen. FIXED. With a full bag, a speared fish is put back on the reef alive — but it used to just reappear beside you with no explanation, which looked like fish materialising out of nowhere. Now it visibly bolts and the game says how many swam off.

Every reef now remembers your best haul and tells you what it is when you arrive. The catch bag weighs what you are carrying against that record all dive and turns green the moment you pass it. Weight counts how many fish, how big they were and how cleanly you shot them, all at once, so a careful dive beats a rushed one. Three things that used to leave you guessing now say what happened: Running out of air. With an empty tank you cannot swim back down, which is correct — but the game simply refused you and said nothing. It now tells you the tank is empty and offers the one thing left to do. Coming home. After emptying your bag at the boat, the run home reported nothing aboard however much you had landed. Every bag you emptied is counted now. A full bag. A fish there is no room for goes back on the reef alive. It used to reappear beside you with no explanation, which looked like fish materialising from nowhere. Now it visibly bolts and the game says how many swam off.

At the boat there are now two choices instead of one. EMPTY THE BAG puts the fish on the deck and leaves you in the water; GET IN THE BOAT ends the dive. A full bag no longer sends you home — your air is the only limit now, and the bag decides how far you can range before walking back. The chart counts how many times you have cleared each reef. And the sell screen explains itself. It shows what each buyer pays per kilo and what each will accept, and under the best offer it tells you what the same fish would have been worth if you had shot them cleanly. The three buyers were never really a choice — they are a measure of how well you shot, and now they say so.

The reefs are the headline. There are thirteen of them and ten have been rebuilt from scratch, because most were one shape repeated: a drowned town that was three brown roofs is now a church with a stopped clock, a water tower, a school with a flagpole and streets with stop signs on them. There is a galleon with a cannon, an open chest and an anchor. A navy wreck with a gun turret and a propeller. A snowed-in reef with a chairlift pylon and a snowman. A rocket splashdown with a scorched capsule and an engine bell. The last reef is now The Swarm — five hundred lionfish over the best coral in the game. Fish your wish. Bigger boats now earn you more, not just faster. The far reefs hold noticeably bigger lionfish, and since buyers pay by weight, the same twelve fish from the last reef are worth about two thirds more than twelve from the first. One spear can bring back up to four lionfish if you line the shot up. It used to be capped at two however well you aimed. New kit: four grades of fins, including a monofin that visibly changes how you swim, and two larger catch bags. Clear a whole reef and a conservation trust pays you $200 for it — the only money in the game that rewards finishing rather than accumulating. The sell screen now shows what each buyer will actually pay, including the bounty and minus your fines, and marks the best one. The old figure left the bounty out, so the number you compared was never the number you got. Also: the dive tells you which reef you are on, the map runs the boat to where you are actually going, and a bug that fined you for a protected species you never hit is gone.