You asked
what happens if i already have a school of fish on a spot, can i still put another smaller fish there (hatch an egg?)
Answered counted as answeredIf you already have a school of fish in a slot, you cannot put another school there; you may never have more than one school in the same slot [1]. If you hatch an egg that would result in 3 or more young sharing a slot, you only form a school if there is not already a school on that slot [2]. Additionally, if you have 3 or more young in a slot that already contains a school, nothing happens [1].
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- unset-dev (corpus lane freezes the deploy value)
- timings
- search 151 ms · ask 6074 ms · total 6226 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 6226 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 9, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "A school forms whenever 3 or more young share the same slot in your ocean. When this occurs, immediately return 3 young from that slot to the supply and replace them with 1 school token (shown as this icon in the game: ). At the end of weeks 1 through 3: a. Score points for this week's achievement. ", "headingPath": "IMPORTANT NOTES SCHOOL TOKENS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "Play a fish from your hand on an empty or occupied slot on your ocean mat after paying its cost. As a cost: Discard a fish card from your hand. As a benefit: Draw a fish card from the deck. As a cost: Discard an egg from a fish. As a benefit: Put an egg on a fish (in your ocean) that doesn't already", "headingPath": "ABILITY ICONOGRAPHY", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Some fish have two-part abilities with coral requirements. When you activate one of these abilities, start by choosing whether to gain the first benefit. Then, if you meet the coral requirement, you may gain the second benefit. If you do not meet the coral requirement, you may still gain the first b", "headingPath": "NEW FISH ABILITIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 55}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "In Finspan, the fish you discover over 4 weeks will generate a series of benefits as you dive deeper into the ocean. Each dive site specializes in a key aspect of expanding your research: Grow your collection of fish. Discover freshly laid eggs. Hatch eggs into young, and nurture the young into scho", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW AND GOAL", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Throughout the design of this game, we have made every effort to be true to the science of marine biology. We carefully selected fish to represent the broad diversity that exists in the oceans, and we consulted with marine biologists. However, we did take some artistic license on some aspects for th", "headingPath": "MARINE SCIENCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "CONSUMING FISH: You may place the fish on top of a shorter fish (card or forage) already in your ocean either by choice or to satisfy a cost. The played fish must have a longer length (shown at the bottom left) than the fish it consumes. Any tokens (egg, young, or school) on the consumed fish transf", "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "You place a diver at the top of the middle dive site to select it as your dive location. Starting at the top and moving down the column, you evaluate each zone's dive site bonus and activate the fish in that column. 1 Gain the topmost dive site bonus, since you have at least 1 fish in the Sunlight Z", "headingPath": "SAMPLE DIVE TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "1 Place all egg/young and school tokens within reach of all players to form the general supply. 2 Shuffle the 10 starter fish cards and place them face down near the general supply. These 10 cards have dark gray corners and a different back than other fish cards. 3 Shuffle the deck of 125 fish cards", "headingPath": "SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "IMPORTANT NOTES SCHOOL TOKENS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "DIVE", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
- gate not evaluated for this ruling (boost, supersedence, and wrench all off at ask time), and the base-rulebook arm went unrecorded for the same reason — the wrench that would have stored it was off; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=false, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=false
- answered-before recall
-
this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- debug row retained until
- Oct 7, 2026 16:38
retrieval — what the search arm returned
score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.
per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| fused rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | IMPORTANT NOTES SCHOOL TOKENS | p.9 | 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | ABILITY ICONOGRAPHY | p.12 | 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) | 300 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Sharks & Reefs Expansion (corpus doc 55) | NEW FISH ABILITIES | p.5 | 0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | OVERVIEW AND GOAL | p.1 | 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | MARINE SCIENCE | p.11 | 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | PLAY A FISH CARD | p.5 | 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | SAMPLE DIVE TURN | p.7 | 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS | p.2 | 0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | IMPORTANT NOTES SCHOOL TOKENS | p.9 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | DIVE | p.6 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 151 ms · first delta n/a · total 6226 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 0 ms · retrieval 151 ms · ask 6074 ms · gateway work 6226 ms · total 6226 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 41s ago)
- stream path
- not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
- watchdog
- first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
- num_ctx · think posture
- both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.
disposition
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
- answered — no abstain rationale applies
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- decision
- NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 5), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one
Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.