Dressing the bird
Tridents have been the prestige currency since the summer, and until today the shop that spent them held thirteen items: four avatar frames, five titles, three name colours and a season trophy. Two problems with that. The first is arithmetic. Four accounts on the server hold Tridents at all, and after the richest one the balances are 13, 10 and 3, against a catalogue whose cheapest useful row cost 15 and whose top row cost 150. The second is worse: of the thirteen, exactly zero rendered in the world. You bought a name colour and it appeared on one web page. You bought a title and it appeared nowhere at all.
Both are fixed.
What is on sale now
Plumage and livery. Five tints for the gull and five for the drone, 25 🔱 each. These are colour, not paint schemes. The realistic gull's two wings share one texture island byte for byte, so a painted stripe down one wing lands on both and the whole thing needs an artist rather than a shader. A tint works on every craft, ships with the code and costs nothing to load. Gull and drone have separate slots, so owning both never makes you choose.
Trails. A fading ribbon behind the craft, 30 🔱, or 40 for the rainbow, which rotates its colour along the ribbon as well as over time. The trail is trimmed by age rather than only by length, so a parked drone does not leave a frozen scribble hanging over the harbour.
The name plate. The plate that floats above every pilot picked up three things: your equipped name colour on the handle, your equipped title under it, and an optional frame, 20 to 40 🔱. Frames can carry one moving element, a shimmer or a slow hue cycle, and exactly one. A plate is legible from four kilometres away, and a field of blinking rectangles is worse than no frames at all.
Titles, and a lot of them. Eighteen at 10 🔱 that say something about how you fly: Low and Slow, Altitude Optional, No Flight Plan, Does Not Land, Chronically Airborne, Bread Enjoyer, Battery Anxiety, Still Arming. Fourteen at 20 🔱 that declare an interest rather than a deed: Harbour Regular, Night Flyer, Contrail Watcher, Tail Number Nerd, Ask Me About Ships, Reads The METAR.
The rule about titles
A phrase hanging over your bird and readable across a city is read as a claim. So a bought title may not assert a feat, and an earned one asserts nothing else. Everything in the paragraph above is flavour, stance or a hobby, and nothing a leaderboard could contradict.
The claims are earned. Leviathan Hunter, Track Master, Legend in the Flesh, Both Worlds and Dawn Patrol arrive with the achievements of the same names. World First lands the first time you are first in the world at anything. Record Breaker lands the moment a run takes a track record. Three titles that were on sale for 15 🔱 until this morning (Legend Hunter, Record Breaker and Tall-Ship Master) are now in that earned group, because they were achievement names being sold to anyone with pocket change. Exactly one account owned any of them, so this was the last cheap moment to fix it.
Seeing what you bought
Other pilots see your colours over the network, including when you change them mid-flight. You did not, because the flock never sends your own aircraft back to you, so the one person who could not see a purchase was the person who made it. There is now a free setting, on by default, that draws your own name plate above your craft in third-person views. It never appears in first person, where it would sit in front of the camera.
Prices across the whole catalogue came down to match what people actually hold. The entry rung is 10 🔱 and the most expensive item is 80.
What is not here yet
Hats, sunglasses and scarves for the gull. Decals and motor effects for drones. Cockpit frames and OSD themes for the FPV view. A portrait of your craft on your profile. Mirrors and a decorated beak in first person, which the operator asked for today and which need a rendering change before they can exist at all. The flight camera clips anything closer than two metres, and a beak is closer than that. Those are separate pieces of work and they are written down, not forgotten.