The Reef

A living aquarium that runs as the background of the stream — and everything in it belongs to somebody watching. You claim a creature, feed it, and it grows. Feed it enough and it can hunt other people's creatures. Get eaten and it is gone for good.

It renders in Unity on the GPU and reaches the stream through Syphon, which is why the reef can be this busy without the laptop's fan ever coming on.

The reef with sunken ruins and a shipwreck
The reef floor: sunken ruins, a wreck, and sixty-odd creatures going about their business.

Getting a creature

Redeem one with Channel Points in chat, or type !fish to see what you already own. Every creature carries your name, a number, and a species that decides how big it starts. A brand-new creature is shielded from hunting for its first 5 minutes.

Feeding — growth arrives over time

You get 3 free feeds every day with !feed, and can buy more (50 points each). Food does not land instantly: it digests at about 8 seconds per pellet, so a ten-pellet feast arrives over roughly 80 seconds.

Why it works that way. Feeding used to be a burst — you could buy a lot of growth in seconds and eat somebody's creature before they had any chance to react. A rate makes that a commitment other people can see coming, and it needs no cap and no refusals: every point you spend still counts in full, it simply arrives at a pace.

Food is growth, not armour. This is the one that catches people out. Feeding while something is chasing you does not make you harder to eat right now.

A butterflyfish over the wreck
Creatures are individuals — species, size and colour all mean something mechanically.

Hunting

A creature can eat another when it out-bulks it by more than 10. Type !hunt, or buy Hunter Mode and it hunts on its own roughly every 50 seconds for the length of the window.

  • The cooldown grows with your size — from 3 minutes up to a hard 5. Power buys reach; you pay for it in frequency.
  • A hunting creature digests 50% slower — chasing burns what it eats.
  • A kill pays instantly. Growth from eating lands the moment you catch something. Hunting is the fastest way to grow here; it is also the hardest.

Eaten is permanent. There is no compensation — that is what makes the whole thing matter, and it is why the defences below exist.

An orca cruising past the wreck
Bigger animals cruise the open water. Everything you see is owned by someone in chat.

Defending

  • 💨 Escape (40 points) — nothing can eat your creature for about 3 minutes. This is the answer to being hunted, not food.
  • 🕊️ Peaceful — opt out entirely. Your creature cannot hunt and cannot be eaten. !peaceful on, !unpeace to rejoin.

How size actually works

Two numbers, doing two different jobs.

  • Species base — a whale is always a whale. This never changes and never decays.
  • Condition — the part you feed. It decays with a 12-hour half-life of stream time if you stop, so nobody sits at the top by having paid once, long ago.

But it never decays to nothing. Every creature keeps a floor of 10, and paid feeding raises that floor permanently: you keep 50% of what your feeding was worth, forever, even if you never feed again. Standing you paid for is yours; only the fresh weight on top burns off.

Small creature, big rival? You do not out-muscle it — you out-last it. Their condition is falling while yours climbs.

Patch notes

Patch 26.2 2026-08-29

The desk is funded. There is a clock on the stream that can be yours. And every card on screen got bigger, because one of you told us they were unreadable on a phone.

🌊 The reef clock is yours for 15 minutes

  • !mytime +3 Istanbul puts YOUR local time on the stream. Your name goes above the clock in the rail, your city below it, and both clocks up there switch to your time for 15 minutes.
  • Give us the number, not the city. +3, -5:30, +5.5 — whatever your phone shows as "GMT+X". Then your city, spelled however you like; nothing is looked up, so nothing can be wrong about it.
  • !localcity Istanbul renames it without losing your turn, and !mytime off hands it back early. If someone already has the clock you go in the queue and it tells you the wait.
  • It's a tide-keeper thing — subs, VIPs, and regulars Kinesin has marked trusted. If that isn't you yet, it's a matter of showing up, not of paying.
  • !help clock explains all of it in chat.

🖥️ The standing desk is FUNDED

  • It's real, and it's in the room right now. It was never one big cheque — it was a lot of people deciding it was worth it. All of you. Thank you, genuinely 💜
  • The card now teases what's next instead of showing a bar pinned at 100%. There's a robot patrolling one side of it and a couple of drones on the other, and a big question mark in the middle, because the next goal genuinely isn't decided yet.
  • You get to decide what it is. There's a box in the 💜 panel now — say what you'd want to see. A robot in the room you could drive and talk to Kinesin through? A drone over Kocaeli? Another camera? It costs nothing and he reads every one.

👓 Everything on screen is bigger

  • Every label on the HUD grew, and this one came from a viewer. HeyMykro said the smaller text was very hard to read at thumbnail size — and he was right, for a measurable reason: Twitch scales the whole picture down per quality setting, so a 12px label lands at about 4px on the 360p rung. Below roughly 10px nothing reads at all.
  • There's an analog clock in the day plan now, with AM/PM, so a glance tells you where in the day Kinesin is without reading anything.

🐟 `!decay` is now `!appetite`

  • Same switch, kinder word. People read "decay" as their creature ROTTING, when the mechanic is just that an over-fed fish burns off what it ate. !decay and !hunger still work — a command that silently stops existing is worse than an extra word in the list.

😴 New things you'll see on the webcam

  • When Kinesin steps away, the camera goes off and Kinesin the fish takes its place — asleep on a pillow for !sleep, or off on an errand with a tote bag for !brb. The camera is genuinely off during those, not covered up.
  • Pull-ups and push-ups have their own scenes now, with a camera pointed at the actual exercise. Expect to see them mid-stream.

Patch 26.2 2026-09-01

One-line summary. Shown above the sections.

🍤 Feeding

  • Lead sentence, bolded. The detail after it.
  • Bullets may wrap across lines — continuations are folded into the bullet.

🐟 Fixes

  • Plain bullets work too; the first sentence becomes the heading.

Where it shows up

  • Extension → 🐟 Fish circle → Patch notes tab (newest 3 patches).
  • The Strategies tab beside it is the standing companion: patch notes say what CHANGED, strategies say what to DO. Its prose is hand-written but every number is derived from the daemon's live constants via projection.strategy_payload() — tune a cooldown and the advice corrects itself. Never hardcode a number into that tab.

Rules

  • Lead with the player impact, not the mechanism. "Food now digests" before "we moved growth into a pending pool".
  • Always give the why for a nerf. ADR-0014's guardrail is *never silent*; the same applies to telling people why something they paid for changed.
  • Say what will catch people out. 26.1 leads its second bullet with "food is growth, not armour" precisely because that is the change most likely to cost someone a creature.
  • One patch file per number. Never edit a published patch to change history — cut a new one.

The reef changes often. The most recent notes are also in the Twitch extension, under ⋯ → Patch notes.