Gosh, what a nice day! I bet you can't wait to spend it doing repetitive physical labor instead of relaxing or doing any of the other dumb things people do on beaches.
You grab your comb and head to the start of the beach to find a good spot.
On subsequent visits:
You grab your comb and head back to the start of the beach to find another good spot.
(You have X free walks down the beach left today.)
Wander along the beach for
minutes.
Go
Wander to a random spot
Grab Common Items (Uses 10 Free Beach Walks)
You look around and grab one of each of the most common things off the beach.
You begin with 11 free beach walks, resetting at rollover or ascension. Otherwise, a beach walk costs one adventure.
You can comb the beach while falling down drunk.
Choosing a number of minutes to walk (1-10,000) puts you on a beach, where you can choose a spot to comb. Beaches have rough sand, combed sand (if this spot was already combed by you or another player) and, rarely, a beach head, sand castle or whale.
Further explained in the Beach Basics and Tile Types section, below the beach heads table.
Beach Heads
There are eleven beach heads, each at a fixed location. Combing a head gives you 50 adventures of an effect. You may comb each head once per day.
You comb the beach head, trying to not think too hard about what that thing is, exactly. It gives you some kind of magical blessing as a tip.
You acquire an effect: ... something (duration: 50 Adventures)[[Data:{{{effect}}}]]
After combing a beach head, a button allowing you to conveniently access it will appear on subsequent days.
Beach Basics and Tile Types
The beach is composed of 10000 minutes that are all composed of a 10x10 tile grid. The available tiles of each minute on a given day, however, is subject to the tides, which are independent of the moons and span the whole beach, showing as few as 6 rows. The tides increment up a row or down a row on the beach daily, depending on where in the cycle it is, and it takes 8 days for a full cycle (that is, if the tide is at its lowest on day 1, it will be at its lowest again on day 9).
The "Grab Common Items" option permanently unlocks after getting enough common items when searching(?) and only appears when you have 10 free beach walks available.
Each tile on the beach is one of three rarities, which have no official name and therefore will be referred to as "frequent", "infrequent", and "scarce" for the purposes of this page. Each rarity of tile requires a different amount of time before it becomes available to comb again. Any given tile on the beach will never change its rarity.
Frequent tiles make up most of the beach, and always drop grains of sand. They reset after 2, 3, or 4 hours.
There are 48,976 Infrequent tiles. They reset approximately in the range of 4 to 7 days.
There are 1,001 Scarce tiles. They reset approximately in the range of 12 to 21 days.
Combing an already-combed tile acts as though the tile is a frequent tile, regardless of the tile's base type.
Likewise, sandcastles always act as frequent tiles.
By asking Grandpa about "hierfal", you can permanently gain the ability to see sparkles where infrequent or scarce tiles are.
Whales drop significant amounts of meat. Whales show up on the beach with their own image, instead of a normal beach image (or sparkling image, see puzzle for details).
Messages
Combing a frequent tile:
You comb the area and find something kind of interesting, as well as some sand, which is not particularly interesting unless you personally happen to be interested in sand, in which case boy howdy are you in luck. That stuff is everywhere.
You comb the area, but don't find anything interesting except for a weird rock. Which on closer inspection turns out to be a very interesting rock actually, so never mind that first sentence!
Sometimes, when combing the beach, you may find a message in a bottle:
You comb the area and under the sand you find a bottle. It looks like it contains some sort of message? You pop the bottle open and look at the piece of paper inside. It says:
LIFE ON A DESSERT ISLAND -- SHOULD BE HARD, BUT REALLY IT IS A PIECE OF CAKE
Is that some sort of joke?
The distances between each sandcastle, in minutes, starting from the high end, when computed will give either 11, 33 or 55. For example,
which can then be turned into Morse code, where 11 represents a dot, 33 a dash, and 55 a break. Using this, we get the Morse code . / ...- / . / by counting from the back to the front, which translates to "EVE". Repeating this all the way down to 1 minute, we get the message:
EVERY TWENTY SECOND LETTER OF THE BOTTLE MESSAGE LOOPED THRICE
The message above prompts us to record the twenty-second letter of the bottle message -- "LIFE ON A DESSERT ISLAND -- SHOULD BE HARD, BUT REALLY IT IS A PIECE OF CAKE" after looping it three times. Doing that, we get:
LIFEONADESSERTISLANDS H
OULDBEHARDBUTREALLYIT I
SAPIECEOFCAKELIFEONAD E
SSERTISLANDSHOULDBEHA R
DBUTREALLYITISAPIECEO F
CAKELIFEONADESSERTISL A
NDSHOULDBEHARDBUTREAL L
YITISAPIECEOFCAKE
which gives us a word -- "hierfal".
Going to Grandpa and asking him about "hierfal" will lead to this message, which tells a story of Silas Hierfal, a being who was supposedly able to find many things easily by just eyeing them.
After talking to Grandpa, players gain the ability to spot infrequent and scarce tiles on the beach via a twinkling effect.
Scarce Tiles
A specific beach tile's status as scarce, infrequent, or frequent is static over time. In 2021, a public spading project was released that outlined 698 scarce tiles that had been encountered by members of the community and released them to the broader public. To access this list of scarce tiles for your own usage, please see this google sheet.
The list is also used by Mafia script combo, which automatically visits known scarce tiles.
All tiles can be viewed on an interactive page on github.
