What the beta tally told me about my own game, choom
The Cozy Coast beta counted 160,966 catches and 50,418 seagull greetings. The move that pays zero eddies was the most repeated one, and the economy changed because of it.
The Cozy Coast beta kept a public tally. It counted events, opt in, no accounts, nothing tied back to any choom. These are the numbers as they stood on 14 August 2026, the day Early Access cracked open.
Look at the third column, then look at row five.
The seagull problem
Greeting a seagull does nothing. It pays no eddies. It unlocks no achievement, fills no bar, feeds no skill tree. A gull lands on the sand, you can shoo it or say hello, and if you say hello it reacts and then eventually deltas. That is the whole interaction.
Chooms did it 50,418 times.
That is roughly one greeting for every three fish caught, and the fish are the whole economy. Every system I built, tuned, balanced and rebalanced, and the thing chooms kept coming back to is the animation that pays nothing.
I want to be careful about what this proves, because a tally that counts events cannot tell you who did what. It cannot split one choom greeting a gull two thousand times from two thousand chooms doing it once. It has no idea whether anyone stuck around. What it can tell me is that a zero-value move survived contact with a live crowd at scale, which almost nothing zero-value does.
The read I have settled on is that the calm parts are carrying more weight than the progression parts. Not what I would have called from the time I burned on each.
Seven exotics
The other number worth staring at is seven.
Exotic sits above legendary: four fish, one per zone, behind ICE in the shape of the Abyssal Lure and the Moonshine Lure, which themselves sit past the Aurora Rod. It is the tier built for anglers near the ceiling.
Seven catches out of 160,966 is about one in twenty-three thousand. That is a rarity tier doing its job. You hear about an exotic before you ever see one, and by the time you are chromed up to chase one you have already put a long stretch in on the coast. If the number had come back at four hundred I would have known the ICE was too soft. If it had come back at zero I would have known nobody could crack it at all. Seven says the door is real and somebody got through.
Legendary at 124 is the sanity check under it. Rare enough to be an event, common enough that the tier is not just paint.
What changed because of it
Early Access shipped with a full economy retune, and most of it traces straight back to these counts.
Chest and seagull payouts now scale with your earning power, so they never fade into pocket scrap late in the game. That one is the seagull lesson applied where it can pay: if the small calm moments are what chooms reach for, they should not turn insulting after level thirty.
Chests got rarer and chunkier, each paying a big pop scaled to your income plus a bonus drawn off the eddies you have banked. Shop upgrade prices climb steeper at the top, so late levels are savings goals rather than a slow drip. Fish sell at the rod now, eddies landing the moment you catch, because inventory admin was the most hated part of the loop and the tally could not see one choom enjoying it.
The tally is still running, still opt in, still counting events rather than chooms. Watch it move at cozycoast.website/stats.