"Looks like a fish washed up.. We may want to throw it back."
1.0.12 is out now. It is the largest update Pixel Reel has had: a first quest, a town you walk around in, three new minigames, eight new waters, two new currencies and seven new ranks. Everything below has arrived since 1.0.10.
THE CURSED TIDE
Pixel Reel's first quest. It opens at the lagoon with a fish on the grass and ends on a beach with five carries and a boat that should not be there. There is a carry minigame, animated cutscenes, a chain of favours around a town full of keepers who all want something, and a finale that pays as you go.
- Completing it pays 1 Look Token, 2 Dupe Coins, your choice of two looks - Fish Love or Fish Hate, trailing hearts or skulls - and the Saltwick Vine line: +15% catch speed, permanently, auto-reeled catches included.
- Each of the five finale carries pays a free gift in coins and half a Megalodon's XP at your furthest water. Tam's toy boat pays the same when it surfaces.
- Old Salt points the fish out the first time she is flapping on the grass, so you will not walk past her.
Dev note: we wanted the first quest to be a favour rather than a fetch. Almost every beat is you doing something for somebody, and the town opens up behind you as you go. The fish never explains herself. That is on purpose.
SALTWICK
A walk-in harbour town, open the moment you accept the quest. Two and a half screens of waterfront: walk it, cast from it, chat in it. Up to 40 anglers a town across ten towns, and a friend's invite routes you to theirs.
- The harbour line pays coins and XP at 90% of active fishing pace at your best unlocked water, not the one you last fished. It rolls a gem every couple of seconds and throws coin bursts on the lagoon's Arc-bit cadence.
- Dock hot spots. A golden patch opens off the dock for 5 minutes, every 12 to 22 minutes, paying 3x coins and XP while your line is inside it. It runs on the world timetable like frenzies and Lagoo Ness, so every angler everywhere gets the same windows.
- Five walk-in shops: the Pet Shop, Marrow's Boosts, the Hunter's Lodge, Wick's Minigame House and the Boatwright's. Each is a one-screen interior where you walk up to the goods and talk to the keeper rather than scrolling a menu.
- Casting lands where you tapped along the edge, so you can put a line inside a hot spot on purpose.
The Pet Shop. Six tide pools, six new pals - Harbour Otter, Dock Gull, Saltwick Crab, Seal Pup, Puffin and Blue Eel - and the pools swap which pal they hold every 6 to 8 minutes. Stand at a pool to fish it: that pal's own Pet Bits every 4 to 16 seconds, plus 90% of the harbour's coins and XP. 500 of a pal's own bits buys it. A random pool swirls for 30 seconds every 90 to 150 seconds and pays 8 to 18 bits to whoever walks up first.
Marrow's Boosts. Marrow roams his own floor and stops to trade when you tap him: Alpha Bait (125 gems, your next 5 alpha kills roll their pal at double odds), the Gem Attractor (half a free gift in coins, 30 minutes, gems on 2 of every 5 catches), Boat Trip 2x (75 gems, 10 minutes), 2x Pet Bits (150 gems, 30 minutes) and Pip's Power (100 gems, 30 minutes). Every bottle confirms before it charges you.
The Hunter's Lodge. A contract board pins an alpha whose pal you are still missing. Sign for it and that beast spawns at 5% a cast, 10% with a scent, rolls its pal at double odds, and pays 1.1x a free gift for 3 to 7 kills.
Wick's Minigame House. Wick sells for dock points: five looks - Scientist, Royal, Knight, Painter and Vampire - at 60 points each with a trail and eight tricks apiece, the Lanternfish pal at 150, and a pond totem at 90 that adds +5% catch speed while it is placed.
THE SORT
Pip is a monocled magpie who lives in Wick's mountain of harbour junk. Before the quest is done he answers taps from inside the pile. Afterwards he bursts out, perches on top of it for good, and teaches you his game.
A cabinet of shelves, three slots each, twelve kinds of thing. Lift a shelf's rightmost thing and set it down elsewhere; three alike clears the shelf for a Shiny. Ninety seconds a round, unlimited plays, all day.
- Tap or drag. Drag lifts the thing and drops it where your finger lands. A press that misses everything picks up the nearest thing rather than nothing.
- Last in, first out. A shelf only ever gives up its rightmost thing, wherever on it you touch.
- The ramp. Round 1 is 12 shelves and 8 kinds. Round 2 is 16 shelves, 10 kinds and 2 boarded shelves that open when a neighbour clears. Round 3 and up is 20 shelves, 12 kinds and 3 boarded.
- Scoring. Every cleared shelf pays 2 Shinies times your combo - a second clear within 8 seconds chains to x2, then x3 - plus 1 Shiny per 5 seconds left, +5 for beating par, and +15 for a Perfect, which is under par with 30 seconds or more to spare. Three stars on the results card. Each cleared shelf also pays XP worth half a common catch at your furthest water.
Pip's case takes Shinies and nothing else: Magpie, Pack Rat and Tinker at 7,350 each, Collector at 22,600, Little Dragon at 25,400, all with a trail and seven tricks. The pals Shiny at 28,300 and Tinny at 45,200. Magpie's Eye at 50,900 for +8% catch speed permanently, and the Shiny Doubler at 67,800, which doubles every Shiny the game pays you, for good.
Dev note: the prices are set from how fast a competent player actually earns Shinies, so every tag is really a number of hours. The Doubler is last on purpose. It is the thing you look at for a while.
SIR INKWELL
One octopus lives under the Saltwick dock, and four of his tentacles surface off the front of it, each wearing a hat. He comes up every 30 to 60 minutes and stays 180 seconds.
- Forty taps a head, shared with everyone standing on the dock. Whoever lands the fortieth has their name on that head for the rest of the show.
- A tap pays coins, 100 pass XP and a 15% gem roll. Every tenth tap of yours pays 10 to 35 gems, up to four gem payouts an event.
- The pal, Inkwell, rolls at 1 in 1,250 for a head you finish and 1 in 2,500 for one you only tapped. Old Salt's Ring halves both.
- Each head's hit box is fixed and identical, so the last five taps land as easily as the first five.
THE DREDGE
Wick's crane game over the harbour. The claw swings on its chain, you tap to drop it, three drops a game. Points are the values of whatever you land, and a clean sweep doubles them. Three games a day.
BLIND ICE FISHING
From Blood Cathedral onward, the water freezes. Every 8 to 12 minutes, for 5 minutes at a time, on a timetable every phone agrees on: an opaque sheet across the whole water with a single hole cut in it.
Tap the hole to lay a blind line, then find the fish by feel alone. Nothing on screen tells you where it is. Hold on the green for 3.5 seconds to bring it up; off it, the meter bleeds back at 0.5 a second, or 0.35 with your hand off the ice.
- Ice catches pay 1.6x the rod rate and count as real catches everywhere: Fishdex, records, quests, tournaments, mastery, achievements.
- They are eligible for the Golden Hook and can claim the day's first-catch 2x. The Double Hook and Dee's rod roll a second fish on the ice.
- A frenzy suspends the ice and the hole comes back afterwards. The ice never opens over a boss, a boat trip or an open sheet, and never thaws mid-fish.
BLOOD MONEY AND THE DEEP WATERS
Unlocking Uncharted Waters turns your wallet over. From that moment every coin payout in the game - streak chest, nets, Boss Bash, boat trips, the lagoon, ads, purchased packs, all of it - lands as Blood Money instead. Spending drains the coins you still hold first, then Blood Money. Coins are never earned again.
Eight waters now sit past Uncharted, taken in order, bought with Blood Money and nothing else:
- Blood Cathedral (12B), crimson water under a black sky, altars of stone and chalice and candle
- Stormcrown (27B)
- Frostveil Shelf (61B), ice walls veined and dripping red
- The Long Drift (137B)
- Glimmerdark (308B)
- Ashfall Reach (600B), the only grey water in the game, ash falling through it under an ember horizon
- The Gilt Deep (950B), molten gold, coins turning over in the water, crowned idols on the floor
- The Hush (1.5T), a dead-calm pale mirror with two plum eyes that blink
Twenty-five species each, every one with its own three areas of music. The hand-made legendaries out there are The Last Ember, The Drowned Crown and The Unspoken. That is 32 waters and 800 species in all.
The fights are heavier out there: the common fight factor is 0.46, up from 0.42, and each blood water multiplies the fight scale on top, from 1.3x at Blood Cathedral to 2.4x at Glimmerdark. The bite window is untouched.
- The lagoon pays 35% of its passive rate in blood mode. Blood Siphon, 150 gems, doubles that to 70% for an hour.
- The offline Auto-Net keeps 40% of its rate in blood mode.
- Roaming alphas: after 25 catches at any blood water, any of the 23 old alphas can surface at the standard 1%, paying that beast's usual purse and its usual 1 in 250 pal roll.
ALPHA-O-MEGA
Once a day, at a set minute between 09:00 and 18:00, a notification names one of your alpha waters. Get there within 15 minutes and your next hook is the Alpha-O-Mega, whose pal rolls at 1 in 50 and is not halved by Alpha Bait.
- The day aims at an alpha whose pal you do not own yet. Once every pal is home it goes back to picking freely.
- Win or lose, it leaves Hot Waters behind for 10 minutes: alphas bite at a flat 20%, at the standard 1 in 250 pal roll, and Hot Waters now pays from your furthest water whichever water you are standing in.
RANKS, LOOKS AND THE PASS
Seven new ranks. Umbral at 150M XP, Riftborn 450M, Everdeep 1.35B, Godspoken 4B, Namebearer 10B, and then Deathless at 18B and Worldsend at 30B. The career runs to 24 ranks.
The Rare Looks Shop and Look Tokens. Twenty-five new outfits, each with its own walk trail - Shade, Bog Thing, Whaley, Axolotl, Bloodfin Megalodon, The Agent, Anglerfish, Bonesy, Space Angler, Hazmat, Ronin, Frog Prince, Jellyfish, Crab King, Sea Witch, Lifeguard, Nigiri, Penguin, Sea Turtle, Octopus, Tin Angler, Viking, Plague Doctor, Koi Spirit and Rubber Duck. Twenty sit on the shelf at one Look Token each; tokens come in packs of 1, 5 and 20. The Bloodfin Megalodon runs its own clock, flooding red for three minutes before ebbing back to blue.
Every fish you land anywhere also rolls 1 in 30,000 for a shelf look you do not own. No duplicates, and the roll stops once the shelf is yours.
The Deep Five - Snorkeler, Lobster, Merfolk, Giant Fish and Cthulhu - are tournament podium prizes and are not sold. Podiums pay the week's scheduled outfit instead of coins through week 47, and no look is ever given twice.
Dupe Coins. Every duplicate pal pays 1 Dupe Coin on top of the usual 250K. Spend them in the Pet Shop: 3 for a location pal, 6 for a boss pal. Salty, Bun, Meg and Chester are never sold.
Badges take the fourth slot on your license: SILVER B for every location pal, GOLD B for every boss pal, DEVIL B for both, ACHIEVER for the crest, CROWN for the last rank. It travels with you onto your lagoon name card and your inspection card.
The Angler Pass has no daily cap. Fill a bar and the tier is yours; the next bar starts at zero. A tier costs 200 XP times its number up to a 12,000 ceiling from tier 60. Every tier past 30 is a prestige tier that pays again: a free gift's worth of coins on the free track, 200 gems on premium. Existing progress carried across at the same tier and the same fraction into the next.
Boss Bash is always a ladder now, the chest opens on a clear, a bank, a loss and a dock-out alike, and your first visit back-paid a roll for every rung you have ever won. Salty goes to the first angler in the world to clear a complete ladder - the Megalodon rung plus every boss in the game - in one unbroken run with no ad retry. Nobody holds it yet.
BALANCE
- Mob fishing, every boat-trip route, the offline Auto-Net haul and sunken crates now pay from your furthest unlocked water rather than the one you are standing in. Treasure caskets scale from the furthest water plus the trail premium.
- Pip's Power replaces Marrow's Dock Luck at the same price and the same 30 minutes. It doubles The Sort's Shinies and stacks with the Shiny Doubler for x4. It no longer doubles dock items.
- Golden and Massive Lures stack. Buying one while it runs adds 10 minutes, up to 60 minutes from now. Blood Siphon does not stack.
- Frenzy coins pay x1.3.
- A Weathered Casket totals 110 to 170 gems all in, averaging about 130, and never pays less than the rolls gave. A casket cosmetic you already own pays dupe gems instead, and the row says so.
- Achievement gem payouts were rebuilt across every ladder, with first rungs at 25 to 50 and the long hauls worth far more: 1,000,000 fish 2,500, a 500-day streak 5,000, 1,000 jams 5,000, every pal 2,500. Anything you had already claimed was back-paid the difference once, on first launch.
- The pond honours your XP boost, and its aquarium feed purse anchors to your furthest water.
- The Saltwick harbour line no longer drips dock items. Dock points come from The Dredge alone.
- Backgrounding the app in the lagoon credits up to 2 minutes 30 seconds of passive coins and XP when you come back.
- Saltwick's pals sit outside the Pets Found hiscore. Dupe-coin pets still count.
Dev note: the furthest-water change is the one we would most like you to feel. Standing in the shallows for a treasure trail used to quietly tax your boat trip and your overnight net. It does not any more.
QUALITY OF LIFE
- Three named tackle loadouts under the steel shelf: save, rename, equip. Equipping respects your rank's slot limit and skips relics you do not own.
- The Golden Hook's 20% roll is visible at last. The catch card tags it GOLDEN HOOK: 2X COINS, BOTH FISH x2 or THIS FISH x2.
- The catch card sits on a raised panel with a rarity ribbon in the catch's colour. Over pale skies like The Long Drift's, the bare text was unreadable.
- A MISSING PALS grid on the PETS tab shows what you are still short.
- The friends sheet tells you who added you, with an ADD BACK button and a blue dot on the badge.
- Ponds can be locked to friends only.
- The lagoon picker shows when Lagoo Ness was last up under each lagoon, or NESS IS UP with her timer running.
- Boss Bash reward cards and chest tiles are tappable for a detail card showing the outfit on your own angler, its band and its odds.
- Gear upgrades confirm first, naming the gear, the price and the level step.
- Boost countdowns where the boost applies: Blood Siphon in the lagoon HUD and under Saltwick's town line, and 2X Pet Bits while you are standing in the pet shop.
- Coins and XP read in trillions where they belong.
- Settings has a Discord row and a Wiki row.
- Every alpha encounter opens on its intro card with the FIGHT button, repeat alphas included.
- RESET PROGRESS now asks you to type DELETE.
- Launch cards run in a fixed order, and the tracking prompt, ad consent and the ads SDK no longer do any work while the game is starting.
- The yellow guide line runs inside the Saltwick shops too, pointing at whichever keeper is waiting on you.
BUG FIXES
- Fixed the launch freeze on the WELCOME BACK haul sheet after an update, where HAUL IT IN took no taps and only airplane mode got you in. The HUD's currency counters started at zero and jumped to their real value once on screen, which put the whole badge row into an endless layout loop whenever an unclaimed streak chest and an online rank badge sat beside a long purse.
- Fixed a second launch freeze, where the background launch profiler could suspend the app during its first minute and never let go.
- Rebuilt tap handling on iOS 27, where taps were arriving late enough to make fights unplayable. This covers casting, all 23 alpha fights, the boat-trip deck and its Megalodon fights, Pip's sorting board, the quest's carry beats, and the lagoon, Saltwick and pond worlds. It also fixes a Boss Bash arena that accepted taps it should have blocked, and tutorial taps that cast straight through the gate shield.
- Fixed the world-first Boss Bash crown counting only the ladder you had personally unlocked, so a player three waters in could claim it. It now requires every boss in the game, no boss standing in twice, and no rewarded-ad retry. The crown is unclaimed again.
- Fixed 'defeat every location boss' counting Boss Bash defeats and the bosses you happened to have available. Nobody who already claimed it loses it.
- Fixed treasure hunt clues ignoring the second fish of a double catch, for species clues and count clues alike.
- Fixed looks needing a second tap to apply while a cycle look was on screen (frozen Yeti, Bloodfin, Toast).
- Fixed accepting a lagoon invite while already in a lagoon leaving you frozen at your old spot with chat floating over empty grass.
- Putting your phone down no longer drops you out of the lagoon or pond for up to 2 minutes 30 seconds. The old window was 15 seconds, so a text message made you vanish.
- Fixed the career sheet laying out wider than the screen on iPhone 14, 15 and 16.
- Fixed the wardrobe and shop rendering zoomed and clipped in blood mode.
- Fixed the quest reroll button being greyed out against your gem balance while you held free reroll tokens. It now reads FREE.
- Fixed boat routes and Old Salt's favour re-rolling if you quit the app after the globe stopped.
- Fixed Remove Ads, Triple Rewards and the Angler Pass switching themselves back off when the App Store could not be reached.
- Fixed the Remove Ads coin bonus paying again every time the App Store redelivered the purchase.
- Fixed Rare Looks buy buttons showing a hard-coded dollar price instead of the App Store's localized one.
- Fixed the career map printing floored unlock costs, so a 1.45B water no longer reads 1.4B.
- Fixed a player wearing an outfit your build does not have drawing as a missing-texture X instead of the plain angler.
- Fixed EXTEND not retitling the daily task it doubles.
- Fixed Riptooth's logjam being drawn from rotated art, which made it look smeared.
- Fixed the missing icon on the 5-locations achievement badge.
- Cleared a leftover Wick task from an older build that could never be completed.
ONE MORE THING
The wiki has been rebuilt for this update. Every new water, every new fish, Saltwick, The Sort, Sir Inkwell, Blood Money, Look Tokens and the rest are all written up, straight from the shipped game data: pixelreelapp.com/wiki.
The crew's boat is still tied up at Saltwick's end. Nobody in town can name it.
Tight lines, angler.