Core mechanics
Mass
Your score and your size, in one number. Gained by eating; spent by boosting; ~70% dropped on death.
Pellet
The glowing food dots scattered across the arena. Each has a color and a small mass value.
Color match / ×2.5 bonus
Eating a pellet of your own color yields 2.5× its mass. The engine of all fast growth.
Boost
Double speed while held, paid for with a continuous mass drain. Unavailable below 220 mass.
Eject (W)
Fires a large pellet backwards from your tail. Used for feeding allies or laying bait.
Collision law
Head touches body → the head's owner dies. Bodies can't hurt each other; head-to-head kills both.
Life cycle
Spawn shield
Post-spawn invincibility: 10 seconds on first join, 5 on respawns. Your snake blinks while it's active.
Newcomer protection
For your first 60 seconds in a room, AI rivals actively steer away from you.
Starter pellets
Five guaranteed color-matched pellets ringing every fresh spawn.
Corpse drop
The pellet trail left when a snake dies — roughly 70% of its mass, laid along the body's final shape.
Respawn
Rejoining after death. Automatic after 3 seconds unless you cancel; also instant via button or Space.
Progress
Mass milestones
Celebrations at 100 / 250 / 500 / 1K / 2.5K / 5K / 10K / 25K mass. Each fires once per life.
Survival milestones
Celebrations for staying alive 60 seconds, 2 minutes, and 5 minutes.
Best mass
Your personal record, stored in your browser. Beating it mid-run triggers a "new best" flash.
Leaderboard
The live top-8 of the room by mass. Your row is highlighted when you're on it.
Kill feed
The "A ▸ B" lines announcing every death — and therefore every fresh corpse drop.
Daily challenge
A rotating daily goal (e.g. "chain a ×5 combo") shown on the home screen with progress.
Combat vocabulary
Encirclement
Wrapping your body in a closed ring around a smaller snake until it has no legal path left. The full playbook is in the PvP guide.
Sealing
The final move of an encirclement — bringing your head around to meet your own body, closing the ring.
Baiting / cross-cut
Darting across a bigger snake's head-path to force a panic turn into a wall. The small snake's primary weapon.
Head-duel
Two heads meeting: both die, both drop everything. Almost always a mistake for at least one side.
Wall-drag
Luring a boosting chaser along a third snake's body so their wider turning arc clips it.
Map & economy
Mid-ring
The zone between the arena's crowded center and its empty edges — the safest farming ground for small and mid snakes.
Pellet shadow
An area stripped bare of pellets — the wake of a large snake that fed through recently. A proximity warning.
Boost economy
The discipline of treating boost as spendable currency: every press should buy more mass (or survival) than it burns.