How Ticker Fish works

01The wallet you fish with

A connected wallet is required to play. The first thing the island asks for is one signed message. It costs no gas, moves nothing, and approves no spending: it only proves the address is yours, and that address becomes your permanent reward address.

• What signing does: links the address to your explorer, so catches, shells and stock rewards have somewhere to land.
• What it never does: take tokens, approve transfers, or ask for a seed phrase. Nobody at Ticker Fish can move anything from your wallet.
• Permanent by design: an address can belong to one explorer and an explorer keeps one address, so rewards can never be pointed somewhere else later.
• Then it is free: playing, fishing, boats, chat, the journal and every shell purchase cost nothing. Only the upgrade ladders ask you to hold $TICKER, and holding is never spending.

You still pick a name of your own on the way in, and you can add a username and password later to sign in from another device. Passwords are stored properly hashed, recovery uses one-time codes shown exactly once, and no email is ever involved.

02The world

Ticker Fish is one shared, low-poly ocean planet. Everyone plays in the same world with real people walking around it: up to 256 explorers at once, one world connection each. You see full detail for the two dozen people nearest you, plus live counts for everyone else.

There are eight islands across both hemispheres: Daydream, where everyone starts, then Sunleaf, Crescent, Moonshoal, Emberfall, Frostveil, Pearl Haven and Tanglewild.

• Getting around: walk anywhere on land, or take a boat. Steer freely across the ocean or pick a guided voyage between piers. Every island discovery pays shells the first time.
• Day and night: a shared 24 minute cycle, one real minute to one game hour, the same for everybody. Nights stay readable on purpose, and a personal brighter-nights setting lifts the dark on your screen alone.
• World radio: one global channel, deliberately quiet until you open it. The server keeps at most 60 messages for 30 minutes, then lets them go. Mute is local.
• Ocean life: sharks, manta rays and octopuses pass through. They are there to be seen, never caught.

03Controls

On phones: a touch stick on whichever side you prefer, tap to walk, one finger to look, pinch to zoom. During a bite the whole cast console is the tap target. A short tour covers all of this on your first visit and can be replayed from the help panel.

04Fishing: the bite and the hook

Fishing is a moment, not a countdown. Cast, wait, react.

• Cast anywhere land meets water, from any shoreline or pier, with F or the cast button. Different coasts hold different fish, and the line always goes out to open water rather than back over the sand.
• The bite comes at a random moment between 4 and 8.5 seconds, never the same twice. It is decided and locked the instant you cast, and nobody, your own game client included, can see it coming.
• The hook: when the “!” appears you have 1.6 seconds to press Space or tap. Land it and the faster you were, the more bonus shells, up to 6. Pressing early is simply ignored.
• The escape: miss the window and the fish slips away. One shell for trying, no catch, and no reward eligibility from that cast.
• Changing your mind: walking away reels the line in. A cancelled cast pays nothing.

05Progression and shells

There are 12 catchable fish species and 16 rod tiers. Rods are the fishing progression: each tier can add regional species to your pool, and a better rod raises the chance that a cast hooks a stock catch instead of a fish, from 3% at tier 1 up to 22.5% at the top.

Every upgrade needs lifetime fish plus shells that are spent, and every tier past the first also asks you to hold $TICKER in your linked wallet: checked once at the moment you upgrade, never taken.

In the current phase rods are obtainable up to tier 3. The higher tiers are listed with their full requirements so the road ahead is visible, and they open in a later phase. Anyone already above tier 3 from the earlier economy keeps every tier they own, and a tier you own is never re-checked against these prices.

Shells

Shells are the in-game currency, earned from catches, reaction bonuses, discoveries, journal activities and the daily community goal.

• Payouts are rolled, not fixed: 15 to 30 shells for a common fish, 23 to 45 uncommon, 38 to 75 rare, 75 to 150 legendary, plus the quick-hook bonus of up to 6.
• Same seed as the bite: the roll comes from the committed seed, so any settled cast can be recomputed from the revealed one.
• Fish copies: some cosmetics trade spare copies of fish you have caught. Your collection, journal and aquarium are never touched, only surplus copies.
• Explorer level grows with lifetime fish and unlocks some cosmetics for free.

06The stock license and $TICKER

The stock license is a second, separate ladder of ten levels. Your rod decides how often the market bites. Your license decides which symbols can be on the line and how valuable a single catch can be. Every cap is a ceiling, not a price tag: a level 6 license can still catch a $1 reward, it just can also catch up to a $6 one. Level 1 is free.

How upgrading works: shells are spent and gone, while $TICKER is only held. The game reads your linked wallet's balance at the moment you upgrade and never takes the tokens. What you do with them afterwards is your business. Levels are bought in order.

What $TICKER is: the world's own token on ARC. In the game it does exactly three things: it unlocks rod tiers past the first, it unlocks license levels 2 to 10, and it can be spent on Tide Catalog looks. Nothing else is gated by it, and it is never spent to land a catch.

07Journal, sightings, community

• Field journal: eight island notebooks worth 25 shells each, completed by exploring.
• Sightings: spotting an ambient species up close, a shark, a manta, an octopus, pays 35 shells once per species.
• Daily community goal: the whole world works toward 75 fish per UTC day. Contribute at least 3 yourself and collect 75 shells when the world gets there, once a day.

08Shops: upgrades vs. cosmetics

One distinction matters everywhere, and it is labelled everywhere.

Cosmetics arrive four ways: free level and discovery unlocks, fish-copy trades, shell purchases, and the small crypto corner below. Buying with shells or fish means actually standing at Mara's market on Daydream.

09The reward layer

Plain words first: stock catches pay real tokenized stocks on ARC, in small capped amounts, from cents up to a few dollars per catch depending on your license. They are yours to hold or sell. Ticker Fish is a cozy game with a real cherry on top, not an investment platform, and nothing here is financial advice.

• Link your wallet on the way in, with one signed message and no gas. That address is your reward address from then on.
• Earn: eligible casts can land stock catches. Eligibility and the reward budget are locked the moment you cast, and only a successful hook turns that into an earned reward. Escapes and cancels return the budget to the pool.
• Rod badge: an optional non-transferable NFT that records your earned progression tier. Bragging rights only.

The earlier prototype phase paid valueless practice tokens. Anyone who earned those can still claim them from the legacy section of the reward chest.

10Claiming, step by step

Say you hook an NVDA catch. Here is the whole path, from splash to wallet.

• The catch card. Instead of a fish, the result shows a stock catch with its mark and value. It lands in your history like any catch and is recorded in the game ledger immediately. Nothing to do yet, and nothing can be lost: keep fishing and rewards pile up.
• The reward chest gathers everything earned, grouped by symbol, with the caps and your remaining daily room shown plainly.
• One prepared transaction. Claiming builds a single voucher signed by a separate authorization service. The public game server never holds a signing key.
• Confirmed, then final. Slow blocks, dropped connections and chain reorganizations are reconciled automatically, and a claim is followed until it is final. Pressing the button twice returns the same transaction instead of paying twice. Close the tab mid-claim and the chest picks it up when you come back.

11Boutique and the Tide Catalog

• Boutique classics: Aurora crown, Starlight rod, Nebula boat, payable in claimed tokens. Payment is a plain transfer to a burn address, verified on-chain, granted exactly once, and it survives restarts without ever being replayable.
• The Tide Catalog: nine exclusive looks that rotate with the tide. Every 14 days a new tide brings three of them in and the rest return later. Anything you buy is yours forever, even after its tide goes out.
• The royal collection: ten premium pieces with a dual price, $TICKER plus shells together. Two crowns, two jackets, a gilded rod finish, and five boats with genuinely different silhouettes. Shells are set aside when a purchase starts and come back automatically if it lapses.

Like everything cosmetic: style only, clearly labelled, never required.

12Fairness and limits

• Provable draws: before a cast resolves, the server publishes the fingerprint of a secret seed. The catch, the reward size and even the bite moment all come from that seed, and the seed is revealed afterwards. Anyone can recompute any cast from the proof view in the reward chest.
• Caps, layered: roughly $3 per claim, $5 per wallet per day, and $50 for the whole world per day per symbol, enforced independently by both the game and the on-chain contract, so no single point of failure can overpay.
• Server authority: your position, your catches and your rewards are all decided server-side. The client sends movement intent only, so teleporting or fabricating a catch is not possible.
• Active play required: the hidden bite moment and the 1.6 second window mean unattended farming earns nothing.

13What is coming, what is not

Live now: real tokenized-stock rewards at stock license level 1.

Arriving with the $TICKER launch: license levels 2 to 10, with more symbols and bigger catch caps, $TICKER payments in the boutique, and a $TICKER section on the homepage. When the token launches, the only official contract address will be published on this website.

• No hidden boosts. Cosmetics never change your odds, and $TICKER is never spent to land a catch. The bite, the hook window and the fairness proof are identical for everyone.
• No trading between players, and no marketplace.
• Nothing here is financial advice. Playing never requires buying anything; climbing the two ladders past their first step does require holding $TICKER.

Seen something you would change? That is what this page is for. Bring it to the crew.