How to play
- Press any key to start the dive. Fish begin swimming past carrying words.
- Type a word to catch that fish. The first letter locks on to it.
- Every correct character puts a little air back in the tank, so long words pay more.
- A fish that swims off costs you nothing directly. It is simply air you did not earn.
- The deeper you go the faster the air drains, so the pace you need creeps up.
- When the tank empties you surface, and the chart of your dive appears. Escape pauses.
This one measures your stamina
Every other fish and shark typing game gives you a score. None of them measures the thing that actually decides a real typing test, which is whether you can still type properly at the end of it.
That gap matters more than it sounds. Most people practise in fifteen second bursts and then sit a three or five minute test, and a burst flatters almost everybody. Work on long typing sessions has found that speed and accuracy both fall away as the session goes on, visible in the widening gaps between keystrokes, so the figure from your best fifteen seconds is simply not the figure you will be typing at in the fourth minute.
The air is what turns that into a game. Because the tank only refills when you catch fish, there is no way to win with a sprint: you have to hold a rate. And because the drain climbs as you descend, the pace being asked of you rises the longer you last. How deep you get is therefore nothing more or less than a measurement of how long you sustained your speed.
The chart is the point
When you surface, the dive is cut into fifteen second stretches and your speed in each one is drawn as a bar. Your best stretch is marked in green. If your speed dropped and stayed down, every bar from that point is marked in red, and the game tells you roughly when it happened.
Two figures come out of it. Your peak is the best you managed, which is the number most sites would show you and the one you would quote. Your sustained speed is the average from the moment you started to fade, and that is the honest one. If those two are close, your speed is dependable and a long test will come out near your short one. If there is a twenty per cent gap, you now know exactly what a three minute test is going to do to you, and that short bursts are not the practice you need.
A dip in a single stretch is not counted as fading, because a fifteen second reading swings a few words a minute either way through nothing but which words came up. The drop has to last two stretches running before the game calls it.
Four sets of words
- Classic uses everyday English, as a general typing test does.
- My weak keys builds the words from the characters you keep missing, read from your own record here.
- Job words uses dispatch, clerical, medical and accounts vocabulary.
- Numbers uses figures and reference codes, for data entry practice.
How to dive deeper
- Settle into a pace you can hold rather than sprinting the first thirty seconds.
- Take the long words. Every character is air, so a nine letter fish is worth three short ones.
- Do not chase a fish that is about to swim off while an easier one is right there.
- Keep your shoulders down and your wrists level. Stamina is physical as well as mental.
- If your chart steps down every time at the same point, that is your current limit. Practise just past it.
Training stamina rather than speed
If the chart shows you fading, the fix is not to type faster. It is to type for longer at a pace you can already hold, and to extend that gradually. Take the three and five minute tests rather than the fifteen second one, and use this dive to check whether the fade point is moving later. That is slower work than chasing a peak, but it is the work that changes what a real test gives you.
Questions about the fish typing game
You are diving, and fish swim past carrying words. Typing a word catches the fish and puts a little air back in your tank. The tank drains the whole time, so the dive lasts exactly as long as you can keep catching, and how deep you get is the score. It runs in your browser with no download and no account.
The others score you. This one measures your stamina, which is the thing that actually decides a real typing test and which nothing else bothers to look at. Because your air only refills when you catch fish, you cannot win it with a short burst: you have to hold a pace. At the end the dive is broken into fifteen second stretches and your speed in each one is charted, so you can see your peak, the point where you began to fade and the speed you genuinely sustained.
Because most people practise in fifteen second bursts and then sit a three or five minute test. A burst flatters almost everybody. Research on long typing sessions has found that both speed and accuracy fall away as the session goes on, measurable in the widening gaps between keystrokes, so the number from your best fifteen seconds is not the number you will be typing at in the fourth minute. The sustained figure this game reports is the one worth planning around.
Every correct character puts a fixed amount of air back, so a long word is worth more than a short one, and the tank drains at a steady rate that climbs the deeper you go. Holding about fifty-seven words a minute keeps the tank level at the surface and nothing short of ninety does in deep water, which means the drain always wins in the end. That is deliberate. Every dive finishes, and the only question is how long you kept it going.
One bar for each fifteen seconds of the dive, showing your speed in that stretch. Your best stretch is marked, and if your speed dropped and stayed down the bars from that point are marked too. A flat chart means your speed is dependable and a long test will land near your short one. A chart that steps down part way through tells you where your stamina runs out and roughly what a longer test would actually give you.
It is free and needs no account. Dives stay out of your test history, your progress charts, the leaderboard and any certificate, because a game is not a measured typing test. The one thing carried over is the keys you mistyped, which are added to your weak-key list so your practice can target them.
Then sit the long test
The dive tells you what your stamina is doing. A timed test of three minutes or more tells you whether the training worked, and it is the figure that goes on your record. Dive, read the chart, practise longer, then prove it.