Please read this once before you play. It is short.
Notice
It is not the sea.
Do not try breath-holding in real water. The breath in this game lives on the screen. You do not need to hold your breath along with it, and least of all in water.
Holding your breath underwater can make you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen, and that can lead to drowning. It happens in shallow water too. Never hyperventilate before going under. Never swim alone.
Source — Royal Life Saving Society – Australia, Hypoxic Blackout. Losing consciousness underwater from lack of oxygen is called hypoxic blackout, or shallow water blackout, and the page states it "can occur at any depth of water". The advice not to hyperventilate and always to swim with a buddy is on the same page.
Haenyeo have their own word for this: mulsum — the breath taken underwater. "Do not be greedy — only as much as your own breath."
What this game is
A small game that imitates a day of a Jeju haenyeo. It does not teach you how to become a diver, how to dive, or how to survive in the sea. Do not take anything you see here into the water.
The words, tools and rules in it were read out of public sources and copied across. No haenyeo has checked them. They may differ from the real work, and where they do, that is me misreading a source. Everything I read is listed on the sources page.
Game values are game values
All of the following are game values. They are not real prices, real ecology or real rules.
- the price, size, season, depth and rarity of every species
- which fish may be taken at which tier
- the price of household goods and houses, and what it takes to reach each tier
- the moon phase and the spring and neap tides — these are shown and change nothing
Where we could not find a source and chose a number ourselves, it is marked estimate on the collection page. Do not buy, sell or decide anything real on these numbers.
Who made it
One person, as a hobby. Not a haenyeo, and not living on Jeju. This game has no connection to any haenyeo association, to Jeju Province, or to any institution, organisation or company. It does not speak for them.
Characters such as Kang Jin and Yui are invented, and the sounds are written in code, not recordings of real divers. They do not refer to any real person or village.
On liability
This game, this site and the Threads account (@sumbijeju) are provided as is. They are free, nothing is sold, and no promises are made.
To the extent the law allows, the maker is not liable for:
- accidents or losses arising from playing, or from doing or believing anything written in the game or its posts
- saved progress — record, household, collection — being lost or mixed up; clearing your browser data or changing device can erase it
- the service stopping, changing or ending, which may happen without notice
- errors in the material, and anything that differs from real haenyeo and real Jeju
The safety paragraph above is not a disclaimer, though. It is a request. Please do not try it.
The Threads posts
Posts on Threads (@sumbijeju) work the same way. They copy across what was read, and the source is named in the post or on the sources page. Wrong things get fixed, and what was fixed gets written down. Those posts do not speak for haenyeo or for any institution either.
If something is wrong
Tell me — [email protected], or Threads @sumbijeju. I will fix it and say what I fixed.
Last updated 2026-09-01
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