Have I caught her before? The sea finally answers
Spotting a ship is a ritual with a cost. You bring the zoom up, hold the hull centred while the lock ring fills, and spend the shot. Until today the one thing the game never told you during that ritual was whether the shot was worth spending — whether this particular hull was already sitting in your collection.
Aircraft have not had that problem since the middle of August. A tail you have caught before carries a small green ✅ seen 3× line wherever the sky is drawn: the plate in the simulator, the hover card on the map, the radar card after a scan. Ships had the same collection, the same counter in the database, and none of the marker. The information existed and simply was not asked for.
What changed
The lock reticle now carries the line. As soon as the dossier reveals the vessel's name, it also tells you how many times you have caught her, and — this is the honest half — whether today's catch has already been counted.
That second clause matters more than it looks. A hull counts once per day. A second photograph of the same freighter the same evening is allowed, it still uploads its proof, it still pays the small repeat reward — but the number on the card does not move. Without a word about it, the sequence reads as a bug: cheerful toast, unchanged counter. Now the reticle says counted today and the sequence reads as a rule.
The same sentence, from the same component, is now on the floating plate above the hull in the world, on the ship card in the in-game map, and on the card in the standalone map embed. Four surfaces, one wording. When one surface says "3 catches" and another says "seen 3×", players stop trusting both.
The bearing ribbon that appears while you are zoomed learned it too. Aircraft already dimmed on it once they were in the day's bag; ships were drawn at full strength forever, because nothing on the client knew any better. A vessel whose catch has already counted today is now dimmed the same way — the ribbon's job is to point you at what is worth turning towards.
And on the cards themselves
The catch count was, technically, already printed on every collection card. It sat at the end of the subtitle, after the category, the length and the first-caught date — on a single line that does not wrap and ends in an ellipsis. On a 150-pixel wall card, cargo · 263 m · 📸 2026-08-04 ×3 is cut off long before it reaches the ×3. It was written, and it was never once readable.
So it became a badge: a small dark pill under the rarity ribbon, on the one component every card surface renders through, on ships and aircraft alike. That last part is deliberate — a distinction that shows up on the collection wall but not on the profile showcase reads as a bug rather than as a record.
What did not change
No counter was rewritten, no history was migrated, and no reward was recalculated. Ship counts from before the once-per-day rule stay as they are — which day each old catch fell on was never recorded, so there is nothing truthful to reconstruct. The map that the live surfaces read is fetched once per session and patched locally when your own catch succeeds, so the feed that every player shares stays shared and anonymous.
Private craft carry no marker at all. They have no identity to key one on, and they are not collectible in the first place.
The other half: the spotter now catches what you are looking at
Testing the marker turned up something worse, and it had been there all along. The vessel spotter did not actually know where you were looking.
It picked its target by bearing — a flat horizontal angle off your heading — and then, inside that ±14° cone, it took the nearest ship. Two consequences, both reported from the cockpit. With five vessels on screen only one of them was ever targetable, forever, no matter where you pointed the camera; moving your eyes to the neighbouring hull changed nothing. And because a horizontal bearing has no notion of up or down, a boat below you stayed "aimed at" while you were plainly looking up at an airliner — so the shutter caught the boat.
There was a guard against that second case, but it was half a guard: it only fired once the sky layer had already identified an aircraft, which happens inside nine kilometres. A jet one kilometre further out left no aim at all, and the boat won. It also never worked in the other direction — an aircraft anywhere within 14° of centre took the shot even from a ship you had dead centre.
Aircraft never had this problem, because the layer that draws them measures a true angle from the camera to each contact. Ships now do the same: the vessel layer publishes, every frame, how far each hull it draws sits from the middle of your view. Targeting picks the smallest of those angles — the hull closest to your crosshair — and uses distance only to break a tie. A small arbiter decides between the two spotters the same way: whichever contact is nearer to where you are looking owns the shutter, with one exception — a lock you are already holding is never stolen by something drifting a degree closer to centre.
The practical differences: point at any of five ships and you get that ship; raise your eyes off a hull and the reticle lets it go; look up at an aircraft at any range and no vessel is caught. Spotting from high altitude now genuinely requires tilting the camera down onto the water, which is what "aim at it" should have meant from the start.
The cone sizes themselves are untouched. Their meaning changed — they are real solid angles now rather than horizontal tolerances — and retuning them in the same pass would have made any regression impossible to attribute.