Getting Started

Welcome to Taro Bay — a cozy idle MMO on the shore of an old Japanese village. You play an ama diver working her way down through six diving zones toward the legendary Dragon Palace. This page is your first hour: what to do, in what order, and where to read more.

Signing up

Making a diver takes one short form: an email address, a password, and the character name the rest of the bay will know you by — 3 to 20 letters, numbers or underscores, and yours alone. One box to tick as well: Taro Bay has a minimum age of 14, and you confirm you are old enough before the account is made. We ask for the confirmation, never for your birthday.

Send the form and you are in the water immediately — no waiting on a mail, no setup screens. And the village does not ask you to pick from eighteen crafts before you have wet your feet: your overview greets you with a single button — To the Tidal Pools — gather seaweed. Press it and you are already working, with a progress bar filling on your very first screen. If you would rather chart your own course, the quiet pick something else link right beside it opens the full board of crafts — nothing is locked, the button is only a first step, not a fence. There is a second way to view the game (the whole bay on one hanging scroll instead of a sidebar): after your first level-up a small note invites you to have a look, and you can compare and switch the two views any time from your character sheet.

Confirming your email

A confirmation link still goes to the address you signed up with, and it is still needed — but it is a deadline now, not a door. Until you follow it, a banner across the top of the game counts down, and:

• Everything that is yours alone stays open. Diving, fishing, gathering, crafting, cooking, farming, the action queue, offline progress — you play the whole game.
• Everything shared stays shut. The market, the chat and guilds wait until the address is confirmed. They are where you meet other people, and we would rather know an account is reachable before it can talk to them.
• The account is cleared after about a week. An unconfirmed sign-up — and the progress on it — is deleted roughly seven days in, and the character name goes back into the pool. That is what the banner is counting down to.

Worth knowing while you wait for the mail:

• Look in the spam folder. The very first mail from a small game often lands there.
• The banner resends it. Send the link again is right there in the game; the newest link is always the one that works.
• The link is good for 24 hours. After that, ask for a fresh one.

One click on the link and the banner is gone, the market, chat and guilds open up, and nothing is on a clock any more.

The core loop

Everything in Taro Bay comes back to one rhythm:

1. Gather raw materials — dive for seaweed and pearls, fish the shallows, cut wood, mine ore.
2. Process them into finished goods through a crafting skill.
3. Earn XP, level up, and unlock deeper zones and better recipes.
4. Trade the surplus with other players on the market — or sell it to the village trader for quick coin.

It is an idle game: you set an action going and it keeps working whether the tab is open or not. Come back later and your haul is waiting.

Your first fifteen minutes

• Start diving. The start button on your overview has already sent you to the Tidal Pools — the starting zone, open to everyone. Beyond seaweed there are clams and crabs to gather there. All of it trains Diving, the skill that gates your whole descent.
• Queue up. You run one action at a time, but you can line up more behind it so the work never stops. See Action Queue & Offline Progress.
• Sell what you don't need. The village trader buys almost anything at a fixed price — a reliable early income. Later, the player market pays more. The trader also posts a daily shipment — a standing order that pays a mon bounty for one set delivery a day.
• Plant a field. Farming and aquaculture plots ripen on their own, in real time, alongside whatever you're diving for. Free progress — see Farming & Aquaculture.
• Cook or brew something. A cooked dish restores your health and carries a buff from its main ingredient; a cup of tea speeds your work. See Provisions: Food, Drink & Kampō.

The eighteen skills

There are three families of skills. Gathering skills pull raw resources out of the world (Diving, Fishing, Aquaculture, Farming, Woodcutting, Mining). Processing skills turn them into something more valuable (Smithing, Weaving, Carpentry, Cooking, Brewing, Artisan). Combat skills (Blades, Archery, Onmyōdō, Vitality, Defense, Spirit) are trained by hunting once you've found your feet. Browse them all on the Skills page, and read Skills & XP for how levelling works.

Going deeper

The six diving zones are the spine of your progression, from the warm Tidal Pools down to the Dragon Palace depths. Each new zone asks for a higher Diving level and, further down, a better diving suit and boat. The full plan is in Diving Zones & Gates.

Better equipment doesn't just open gates — it makes you faster. And once you've found your feet, a guild gives you company, a shared chat and cooperative daily quests. The public channels have a handful of rules and a flag button on every message if someone ignores them — see Chat, Reporting & Conduct. Along the way, achievements quietly mark your milestones — the first one lands the moment you start your very first action, and the ladder runs all the way to a far-off level-99 mastery — and the leaderboard shows where you stand against every other diver in the bay.

That's the whole game in a nutshell. Dive in.