The ladder learns to fly — three ranks renamed
The career ladder was designed back when the only thing you could catch in Skydex was a ship. It shows. Of the fifteen ranks, seven were explicitly nautical — Beachcomber, Harbor Watch, First Mate, Captain's Eye, Sea Legend, Kraken, Poseidon — and, worse, both endgame tiers were sea myth. Which meant that if you came to Skydex through the aircraft side, spent your evenings catching airframes over your city and building a plane dex, the thing you were told to spend the next several months growing into was… a giant squid.
That's a small detail with an outsized effect. A rank name is the one piece of the economy you carry around: it sits under your name on your profile, it goes out to the community channel when you cross a top tier, it's the word other players use for you. If it belongs to somebody else's hobby, the whole career quietly reads as somebody else's game.
So three names have moved.
What changed
🧭 First Mate → Navigator (rank 6, 3,000 XP). "First mate" is a ship's officer and nothing else. A navigator is a real crew role on a ship's bridge and on a flight deck — same job, same compass, both cohorts.
🌊 Sea Legend → 🌬 Jetstream (rank 9, 16,000 XP). This was the only rank with the word "sea" literally in it, and it's also the threshold where a rank-up gets announced to the whole community channel — in other words, the most visible rank name we have, the one non-players see first.
🐙 Kraken → 🦅 Thunderbird (rank 14, 160,000 XP). Still a myth, still enormous, still something you'd rather not meet in bad weather. Just an aviation myth this time — and, not by accident, an aircraft name too.
What deliberately did not change
Harbor Watch (4) and Skywatcher (5) stay exactly where they are. They're not an imbalance, they're a pair: one tier for ships, the next for planes, sitting back to back in the middle of the ladder. That's the whole idea of Skydex — one world, two ways in — expressed in the career itself. Same story for the ranks that already read both ways: an albatross is a seabird and the longest- range flier alive, Pathfinder was an RAF force, and the Comet was the first jetliner.
🔱 Poseidon stays at the top. Not from stubbornness: Poseidon anchors the Tridents, the trophy currency you earn only from firsts and records, and the promise attached to it — cosmetics only, zero power, now or later. One sea crown over a ladder that's otherwise balanced is fine. Two of them in a row was not.
Nothing happened to your career
Thresholds are untouched, the curve is untouched, and ranks were never stored anywhere to begin with — yours is computed from your XP every time it's shown. Under the hood the internal ids are frozen, so your old notifications didn't break either: an inbox row from three months ago that said "New rank: Sea Legend" now reads "New rank: Jetstream", because the bell looks the name up fresh every time rather than storing a copy.
If you were a Sea Legend yesterday, you're a Jetstream today, at exactly the same XP, with exactly the same history behind it. You can see the full ladder, every threshold and how XP is earned on the ranks page.