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?)
Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this counted as refusedAnswered before
This question didn't get an answer just now — but Finspan has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.
The rulebook doesn't appear to cover this cleanly — but here are the closest passages retrieved, in case they help you rule.
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.
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
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
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
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
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- REFUSED_NO_RETRIEVAL — Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- unset-dev (corpus lane freezes the deploy value)
- timings
- search 105 ms · ask 5847 ms · total 5953 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 5953 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"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) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- []
- 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
-
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- ruling 64 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- debug row retained until
- Oct 7, 2026 15:15
retrieval — what the passage search returned
what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.
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 — Rulebook (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 |
what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it
what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.
the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.
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 |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 105 ms · first delta n/a · total 5953 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 105 ms · ask 5847 ms · gateway work 5953 ms · total 5953 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 34s 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
- REFUSED_NO_RETRIEVAL — Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this
- abstain rationale
- the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
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.