The Daily: one pond for the whole world
Every day at midnight, your time, the Daily tile on the home screen changes. Behind it is one pond, and it is the same pond for every player on earth that day. Here is how it is made, how the ranking is counted, and what you get for clearing it.
Made from the date
Koi Drift does not ship a list of daily puzzles. The Daily is generated on your device from a seed, and the seed is the date. The same seed always produces the same pond — the same koi in the same cells facing the same way — so a player in Hyderabad and a player in Toronto solve the identical board, and neither of them had to download anything. The generator that makes it is the same one that makes the journey ponds, and every pond it produces is checked by a solver before it is shown, so a Daily is never unsolvable.
Because it is made locally, the Daily works offline. The ranking does not, but the pond itself does.
The ranking
When you clear the Daily the game sends three things to the ranking server: the date, your time, and your number of moves. No name, no account, no device details; the privacy page spells this out. The server answers with your position among everyone who has cleared that day’s pond so far, shown as a percentile — “faster than 80% of drifters today”, for instance. Because the day is still going when you play, the number can move; it is a snapshot, not a final result.
The Daily is always drawn from the Currents tier: a seven-by-seven pond with bends and mirrors, a clock, and at most a watcher that warns but never strikes. Nothing in it can end your run, so the ranking is about speed and economy rather than survival. It is where the reading habits from the journey get measured.
Streaks
Clearing the Daily on consecutive days builds a streak, shown on the tile and on the card. A streak is counted once per calendar day; clearing the same Daily twice does not add to it. Milestone streaks pay coins. The point of the streak is the ritual — the pond is small enough to clear over a coffee — and the game never punishes a broken one beyond starting the count again.
The card
Clear the Daily and the game draws a card you can save to your gallery or share. It shows the actual pond you solved — the floor, the water and every koi in the position it started in — with the day’s date, your moves, your rank if the ranking answered, and your streak. Under the pond it names today’s koi: one of the six varieties that was in your pond, picked by the date, with its lore line. Over a month the cards make a small calendar of ponds and a slowly repeating cast of koi.
On the web the card downloads as an image; in the Android app it is written to a “Koi Drift” album in your gallery, and the Share button opens the phone’s own share sheet with the picture attached so that it goes into a chat or a post as an image rather than a line of text.
Why one pond
A daily puzzle that is the same for everyone gives a solitary game a shared moment. Two people who have never met can compare a Daily by its date, and the card is the thing they compare. The journey is yours; the Daily is everyone’s. Keeping it small and identical is what makes that work.