How to Play
Everything you need to know to survive longer than five minutes in the arena. Written by the person who made the game, from the mechanics as they actually run in the code.
1 · Controls
On your phone
- Hold and slide anywhere on the screen to steer. The snake follows the direction of your slide, not the position of your finger, so your hand never covers the snake.
- The boost button in the corner makes the snake surge, and boost is paid for with your own body: every half second one point sheds as a pellet dropped at your tail, so you visibly shrink while you hold it. Your turning radius widens too. Releasing boost right before a corner is the first skill worth practicing.
On desktop
- Keyboard is the primary control: A/D or ←/→ to turn, W, ↑, or Space to boost.
- Mouse is optional: hold the left button and drag, and the snake steers toward the cursor for as long as you hold it. Let go and control returns to the keyboard. A click never means boost.
- Boost can be changed from hold to toggle in Settings, for fingers that tire fast.
2 · Growing up: Hatchling to Predator
Score and size grow from eating fruit, from what fallen rivals leave behind, and at the very top from far bigger things. Along the way your snake passes through four size stages inside a single round, and then there is one more that can only be collected across many:
| Stage | What changes |
|---|---|
| Hatchling | Small, nimble, and nearly invisible. Almost everything in the arena can kill you, including a citizen's stomp. You have one job: eat, and stay unremarkable. |
| Juvenile | Big enough to start threatening other snakes, still small enough to slip through alleys. Citizen stomps stop being lethal. |
| Adult | Your turning radius widens and your body starts becoming a wall to smaller snakes. You stop being prey and start choosing it. |
| Predator | Begins at 20,000 score. Citizens scatter as you approach, and the ones too slow to run can be eaten for bonus score. At this stage only two real threats remain: snakes your own size, and bombs. |
| Apex | Not something reached inside one round but a per species evolution collected across many. It is deliberately far off: what gets you there is banked experience, not one lucky long round. |
3 · How you die, and how you don't
- Your head hitting another snake's body. The most common death. Your own body is safe; only rival bodies kill.
- Bombs. The only arena object that kills instantly, at any stage. Their halo is red; turn earlier, not sharper.
- Citizen stomps. Only lethal while you are still very small. A citizen bumping into your body never kills; at worst you get knocked back and dazed for a moment.
- Street props (hydrants, drums, cones) do not kill. They shove you off your line, and a shove at the wrong moment can deliver you straight into a rival's body. Treat them as indirect hazards.
When you die: the revive panel gives you ten seconds. A spare life revives you on the spot with three seconds of immunity; without one, reviving costs energy at a rate that climbs each use within the same round: 20, then 35, then 50. Sometimes the third revive is not worth it; the score you save has to outweigh the energy you burn.
4 · Coiling, the patient player's weapon
Steering rivals into your body is the most reliable kill, and its highest form is the coil: circling a smaller snake until the ring of your body becomes a shrinking cage.
- Pick a target that is clearly smaller and busy eating. A snake focused on fruit rarely checks behind itself.
- Come in from the side with boost, then release boost the moment you start circling. Under continuous sharp turning your forward speed drops automatically while your turning radius stays put, so the coil tightens instead of drifting wide.
- Shrink the circle slowly. A panicking rival will crash into your body on their own; you never even have to touch them.
- Watch for third parties. While coiling you are spinning in place and easy to read, and another big snake can cut your circle from the outside.
5 · Power-ups
| Item | What it does | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Magnet | Pulls in nearby fruit for a few seconds. | Most valuable when the arena is crowded: you harvest without crossing dangerous lanes. |
| Speed | Extra pace on top of regular boost. | For chasing, or for escaping a coil that has started to close. |
| Life | Automatic on-the-spot revive when you die, with brief immunity. | The life pouch is hard-capped at 3, for everyone, buyers included. |
Power-ups come from crates that appear in the arena (blue halo), from the shop for energy, and from reward chests. Every character also carries a starting kit that refills free each round; the higher the class, the thicker the kit. The per-snake details are in the Encyclopedia.
6 · Two currencies, two jobs
Energy: it flows, so burn it
- Caps at 100, trickles back at 1 per hour. The main source is still playing: finishing a round at rank 1 pays +20, top three +10, top ten +5, and every kill adds +4. A single round pays at most +50, so even a long round full of kills has a ceiling.
- It also arrives from the daily spin, chests, and daily missions.
- Spent on power-up stock and revives. Spend it guiltlessly; it is designed to circulate.
Diamonds: scarce, for what lasts
- They come from the daily spin, reward chests, missions and the mission ladder, your login streak, and purchases. Diamonds deliberately do not trickle from every round: this is a currency you work for, not one that arrives for showing up.
- They go toward new characters and pouch upgrades that last forever.
The principle we hold: not a single purchase adds speed, reach, or combat power. Characters are cosmetic, pouch capacity is capped the same for everyone, and free players compete with exactly the same numbers. Paying speeds up the collection, not the winning.
7 · Reading the arena
- There are four arenas: the Desert and the City full of obstacles, Lunar and Terrarium open with nothing in the way, pure snake-versus-snake tactics.
- Each arena keeps its own fixed light; nothing alternates. The Desert and the City are always bright, so sightlines run long and nobody hides in the dark. Lunar sits in earthlight and Terrarium glows like a gallery at night, and in those two the silhouettes of dark snakes like Nightscale and Obsidian are far harder to read.
- The City is dense and full of corners: good for breaking a chase, bad for a snake that has grown long. The Desert is open and honest: nowhere to hide, purely about who reads movement first. In the open arenas, bombs take over as the hazard.
- Arena whales, giant snakes that have lived a long time, move slowly but their bodies stretch like city walls. Do not fight one for a lane; follow behind and pick up what its victims drop.
8 · Five new-player mistakes
- Boosting non stop. Besides widening your turning radius, boost eats two points a second and scatters them behind you for someone else to collect. Most early deaths are corners that never finished; most snakes that shrink for no clear reason are thumbs that never left the boost.
- Chasing fruit into a crowd. Fruit respawns; heads do not.
- Fighting the whale. Its size is not decoration. Going around is always cheaper than a revive.
- Ignoring the starting kit. The free magnet and speed refill every round; unused means wasted.
- Reviving out of frustration. The revive rate climbs with each use. When a round has fallen apart, a fresh round pays better than burning 50 energy.