One, two, spot: the catching ritual now teaches itself
Catching a ship or an aircraft in the sim is a three-beat ritual: bring the zoom up, hold the target centred until the lock goes green, take the shot. The mechanic itself has been stable for months. What was never explained was the ritual — and a mechanic nobody can see is, for a new player, just a button that does nothing.
A pilot put it plainly: "in zoom mode it isn't clear what there is to spot." That single sentence turned out to be two separate failures.
The buttons were two features, not one sequence
On a phone the zoom lived by the joystick and the shutter lived in the action cluster on the far side of the screen. That split was deliberate once: it saves your thumbs a trip, and it does — if you already know the sequence. If you don't, all you can see is two unrelated round buttons in opposite corners, and absolutely nothing on screen says that the camera is inert until the binoculars are lit. Tap the camera first and you get a small toast; tap it again and you get the same toast; conclude the feature is broken and stop.
So the two are one thing again. They sit together at the bottom centre in a single frame, numbered ① and ②, with a chevron pointing from the first to the second. Step ② is dark until step ① is on — still tappable, because a button that both looks dead and silently refuses teaches nothing, and a tap that lands early still gets you the coaching line explaining why.
Above them runs a single line that narrates the beat you are actually on: Tap 1 — zoom in → Aim at a ship or plane → Hold it centred… → Locked — tap 2! That line is not guesswork on the button's part; it comes from the spotters themselves, the same code that draws the reticle, so the frame and the crosshair can never tell you different stories. When the lock goes green, the frame turns green and the shutter breathes.
Where the pair sits was measured, not chosen by eye. On a 390-pixel phone the bottom-left corner belongs to the flight stick and the bottom-right to the action cluster; the only gap wide enough for a framed pair is the middle, below the stick's own bottom edge. That is why the hint is one line and the buttons are the size they are.
And now you can see what there is to catch
The second half of the complaint was the more interesting one. Zoomed in, the HUD would happily describe whatever was already in your crosshair — and if nothing was, it said "Aim at a vessel." True, and useless: the first step of the loop is finding something worth aiming at, and that step had no instrument at all. You were told to search, with no radar, by a HUD that could plainly see everything around you.
While the zoom is up there is now a bearing ribbon across the top of the screen. Every catchable contact in range gets a tick on it — ships from the AIS scan, aircraft from our own feeder network's sky — placed left or right of the nose mark by its actual bearing. Turn, and the ticks slide towards the centre. The one you are lined up on lights up and shows its distance. Anything outside the ribbon's window collapses into a "◀ 3" counter at the edge, which is still the answer to the only question that matters: which way do I turn?
A few details are deliberate. Rare vessels glow gold, so a detour is a decision rather than a surprise. Aircraft already caught today are dimmed rather than hidden — they are really out there, and hiding them would read as a bug. Both halves of the ribbon are measured the same way, so the ship ticks and the aircraft ticks cannot disagree about which is further left. And the ribbon only appears while you are zoomed: unzoomed, it would be a second permanent radar competing with the minimap, and you have not told anyone you are hunting yet.
None of this changes what counts as a catch, what it is worth, or how long a lock takes. It only makes the loop legible — which, for the people who kept tapping a camera that seemed to do nothing, is the whole difference.