Read The Job List Before You Scan
Happy Harbour is the second location the release-day recording reaches: a dense waterfront of jetties, docks, crates, moored boats and a crowd of people who each have one small problem. The game names the place, warns that your phone may ring with new work, then leaves you with a job list.
That list is the whole brief. Each entry pairs a job name with a spoken clue line, so "Fix jetty" arrives with "Handy Hank needs help nailing a board" and "Clean barnacles" arrives with "These barnacles are really hard to get off." The job name tells you what object to hunt; the clue line tells you where the trouble is.
The instinct that costs you here is aiming at whoever complained. Clues are attached to people, and those people want something fixed — they are not the thing to shoot. Shooting a passer-by kills them, and the release-day player watches his reputation dip after hitting entirely the wrong object. Slow is fine; wrong is not.
Hints are the second way to lose a shift: you can spend one for a nudge on the job list, and the release-day narrator hoards his for jobs that have stopped making sense. In demo footage a player burns one early and says his score will suffer.
- Read the clue word by word before the first shot.
- Decide which noun in the clue is the object and which is the person.
- Work one landmark at a time instead of scanning the whole harbour.
- Keep hints back until the wording has stopped helping you.
The Day-One Jobs, Clue By Clue
Approach the harbour by landmark rather than by sweeping the whole bay. Take the noun out of the clue, decide which zone it belongs to — hull, jetty, crowd, engine — and search that zone properly. Two jobs exist to punish the other reflex: "Release boat" wants the rope, line or object holding the boat rather than the boat itself, and "Fix jetty" wants the nails in the plank, not the man with the hammer. Shoot the wrong part of a boat and it sinks; the release-day player finds that out, reads "guess it was tied up for a reason", then watches a killer whale cruise past the wreck.
Completion feedback confirms whether the shot was right. Multi-part jobs tick their counter down as you connect, the character who asked usually reacts, and the entry clears off your list. The clownfish job pays off with a joke instead: in one release-day run the freed fish is eaten almost immediately.
| Job on the list | Clue as it appears | Zone to scan | What the shot should hit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clean barnacles | "These barnacles are really hard to get off." | Hulls of moored boats, working down to the waterline | The barnacle clusters themselves, one hit per cluster |
| Release boat | "Why won't my boat go?" | The moored boats; find the one still held in place | The rope, line or object holding the boat, not the boat |
| Fix jetty | "Handy Hank needs help nailing a board." | The jetty and the water's edge, where someone is working a plank | The nails in the board, usually more than one |
| Trim peg leg | "Can you trim a bit off my peg leg? It's too long." | The crowds along the docks and piers | The absurdly long peg leg, never the person wearing it |
| Find clownfish | "Poor clownfish is stuck in that fishbowl." | Land — crates, sills, tables — not open water | The fishbowl, to break it open and free the fish |
| Emergency job | "That plane needs to land. Clear the shipment of pianos." | Wherever the big red arrow is pointing | Every piano in the shipment, before the timer runs out |
| Remove cork | "This safety cork is jammed on tight." | People, not barrels: someone struggling with a plug | Whatever or whoever is acting as the cork |
| Clean engine | "My engine is really clogged up." | Engines on the boats and vehicles around the harbour | The engine that is genuinely clogged, not the nearest one |
The Emergency: Clear The Pianos Before The Plane Lands
When new work comes through, the phone rings, and answering it means shooting the handset — players in the recordings do this deliberately. The first emergency is announced with "Looks like you've got your first emergency. Emergency sniping job. Be prepared to act fast. Look out for a big red arrow. Good luck," and the red arrow then tells you where to look.
In the release-day footage the emergency is "That plane needs to land. Clear the shipment of pianos." Follow the arrow, accept the premise and shoot every piano in the shipment — there is more than one, so keep the scope moving and keep the magazine full. The job runs on a short timer: the same recording loses its window because the rifle had to reload at the worst possible second, and a demo playthrough ends with the player admitting he failed it outright.
Nothing in the footage suggests an emergency holds while you are empty, so treat the call as a reload check: top up, then answer it. Both recorded failures are reload problems, not aiming problems.
Watch the linked creator’s original gameplay. Use the current in-game clues if the setup differs.
The emergency gives you a big red arrow and very little time. Manage the magazine before you answer the phone, not after.
Later Shifts: Cork, Pelican, Beard And Engine
The recordings come back to the harbour on a later day with a changed list. Jobs that were not on the first board appear — a jammed safety cork, a clogged engine, a boat rigged with dynamite — and the earlier work may not come back around. If an entry is not on your list, it is not in play yet.
Cork and engine are the two clues that eat the most time, because both describe a fault instead of a place. "My engine is really clogged up" could mean a boat engine or a car engine, and plenty of engines in the harbour are perfectly clean, so check the one that is actually dirty. The safety cork is stranger still: "This safety cork is jammed on tight" sends players to barrels and hulls for whole sessions. In demo footage the cork turned out to be a character standing in for one.
The pelican and beard jobs are exercises in taking the clue literally. "That pelican stole my hat" is a hat job, not a bird job, and several pelicans are on screen at once — you want the one carrying the hat. "My beard's getting mighty bushy" works the same way with faces: the list can want more than one trim, and the release-day player walks past ordinary bearded pirates before finding the genuinely enormous beard; in demo footage, aiming at the right one made the game circle it in the scope.
"I was testing what it's like to be a lobster, but now I'm stuck" is another clue that reads like an animal job and is really a rescue: the target is the person shut inside a lobster cage.
- 01Cork: stop searching barrels and look for the person or object doing the job of a plug.
- 02Engine: compare engines across the harbour and shoot the clogged one, not the closest one.
- 03Pelican: check the beaks. Several birds are visible and only one has the hat.
- 04Beard: test candidates through the scope and take the biggest beard, whatever its owner is wearing.
What Changes Between Runs
The game changes some solutions between plays, so this page gives you the wording of the clue and the kind of zone it points at instead of a dot on a map: the spot you remember may belong to a different run. The release-day player spends ten minutes on the clownfish and finds it beside a rocket — a landmark for that run, not a rule.
When two candidates look equally plausible, the exact wording decides. "Too long" rules out ordinary peg legs, "jammed on tight" rules out a loose bung, "really clogged up" rules out a clean engine. The recordings are full of players shooting objects that looked right and getting nothing back.
Your job list is the only reliable progress readout. If a shot ticks nothing, you shot the wrong thing, and the price is time — or, at worst, a sunken boat, a dead bystander and a reputation change. Check the list before you guess again.
- Clue read word by word before the first shot.
- Job list checked: is this entry active on the current day?
- Counter watched after every hit, because multi-part jobs are common.
- Hints saved for the jobs whose wording has stopped helping.
- Magazine full before you shoot the phone.
Further viewing and references
For precise targets, compare your own current mission against the source footage. Older demo material and screenshots may differ from the full release.