manual

How to set up a match your way. For how the game itself works, read the rules.

Match setup

The setup screen opens when you press START on the title screen. In a multiplayer room, the LOADOUT button opens the same screen; DONE brings you back to the room.

It is five sections: MODE, WEAPONS, ARENA, SQUAD, and CONTROLS. Each heading shows what that section is set to; tap a heading to open it and change the picks, tap it again to fold it away. Weapons start open, the rest closed, so the screen fits a phone.

Mode

What the round is for. SKIRMISH is one life: destroy every enemy mech, or hold the most sectors at the clock. CONTROL is about the towers: every second your team holds one earns a point, the most points at the clock wins, and a destroyed mech respawns a few seconds later under a short spawn shield, at a tower your team holds or at base. If your legs get shot out, SELF DESTRUCT in the pause menu (or hold X) takes the respawn instead of the crawl home, with a longer wait and a base respawn as the price. SIEGE is about the enemy base, taken sector by sector: you can only capture a sector that touches one your team holds, and the enemy pad only opens once you hold a sector next to it; then stand in its ring for 45 seconds with no defender in it and you win. You respawn at the tower your team holds nearest the enemy, or at your base while it is under attack, each fall with a longer wait (8, 16, 24, then 30 seconds), and the open enemy pad resupplies you while nobody defends it. In multiplayer the host picks for the room. The rules page has the details.

Weapons

Pick one weapon per arm. The same weapon on both arms is allowed. There are no unlocks; everything is available from your first match. Two per range:

• SNIPER RIFLE: long range, one heavy shot every three seconds, 20 rounds. Two hits take an arm.
• RIFLE: long range, a lighter shot every three quarters of a second, 60 rounds. A miss costs you less.
• CANNON: mid range punch, a shot every second and a half, 40 rounds.
• MACHINE GUN: mid range hose, eight rounds a second with a scatter, 240 rounds. Deadly at thirty metres, a spray at a hundred. The belt lasts half a minute of trigger.
• GRENADE THROWER: close range, a lobbed shell that blasts everything within eight metres, 30 rounds.
• FLAMETHROWER: a stream that reaches 25 metres, 300 fuel. Walk in close; it burns whatever the cone touches.

Base and tower resupply hand every weapon its rounds at the same pace: a belt refills in the time a cannon load does.

Arena

Pick the battlefield, or leave it on RANDOM:

• DESERT: open sand and warm haze, a spread of concrete buildings
• VERDANT: the overcast green battlefield, rolling hills and cold concrete
• FLATS: no hills, no buildings, no cover; pure sightlines
• CITY: dense tall blocks and short streets; close-range fighting
• CANYON: ridge walls and valleys; long lanes and forced approaches
• NEON: the night arena, in the mek look; a dark glass floor with a grid and glow under it, black blocks lit by cyan and magenta window strips, brass towers. Your team is cyan, theirs is magenta. Mid-height blocks on wide streets, so fights land between city and verdant range

Under the arenas is TIME: RANDOM (a coin flip per match), DAY or NIGHT. By day the desert has a sun and a haze, the green arenas a cloudy sky that drifts. At night the arena gets a moon and stars, lit windows, and every mech's visor glows in its team colour. NEON is always night. Patrol drones fly over every arena at any hour; they are scenery.

In single player your picks take effect when you press DEPLOY. In multiplayer the host picks for the whole room; on RANDOM a new arena (and a new time) is dealt every round.

Squad

TEAM SIZE sets how many mechs fight on each side: 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3, or RANDOM to have it dealt each round. Bots fill whatever slots people do not. In multiplayer the host picks, and a team with more humans than the pick simply grows both sides to match.

When you have bot squadmates, SQUAD STRATEGY chooses how they play: STAY CLOSE keeps them near you; SPREAD OUT sends each one to hunt its own tower. In multiplayer only the host sets this, and it commands the blue team's bots. The enemy team makes its own plans.

Options

INVERT MOUSE flips vertical aim, for the mouse and for arrow-key aiming alike. SOUND FX and MUSIC are two sliders, 0 to 100: the effects and the arena's music, set separately, so you can play with music and no gun noise or the other way round. MUSIC at 0 turns the music off. All three apply the moment you touch them and are remembered.

Bot squadmates

Single player rounds field one to three mechs a side, your TEAM SIZE pick or a random deal, and bot allies fill your team so the sides are even. In multiplayer, bots top up both teams to matching size when the humans are uneven. Bots are fully autonomous: they capture towers, pick their own fights, and play by the same sight rules as you.

Saved on this device

Your mode, weapon picks, arena, team size, squad strategy, invert mouse, sound and music levels, nickname, and lifetime win/loss record are stored in this browser only. No accounts, nothing leaves the device. Clearing site data resets them.

Multiplayer rooms

From MULTIPLAYER on the title screen: set a nickname, then CREATE a room (REROLL suggests names) or JOIN one. Tell your friends the room name; that is the whole invite. Up to six players. Guests tap READY; the host can swap anyone's TEAM and presses START when everyone is ready. The room stays up between rounds.

If your mech is destroyed mid-round you spectate: your view moves to a living teammate, and firing switches to the next one. You only ever see your own team's view. The round carries on until a whole team is down or the clock runs out.

Playing on a phone or tablet

Touch controls appear on their own during a round: twin sticks, two triggers, AIM and MOVE buttons, and a pause button. Nothing to set up.

• The bottom half of the screen is split down the middle into two control areas. Put a thumb down anywhere in one and its stick appears right there, so you never have to find it by eye. Lift off and it goes back to the corner.
• Left side walks: up and down for forward and back, left and right to sidestep, all relative to where you are looking.
• Right side aims. Hold it over and your torso keeps turning for as long as you hold it, so a long turn takes one thumb push instead of several swipes. Push it further to turn faster. Both sticks stay where you last used them instead of sliding back to the corner, so the buttons round the right stick are where your thumb left them.
• L and R fire your left and right arm. Hold them like a trigger. They sit in a curve round the top of the right stick and follow it wherever your thumb puts it.
• AIM, the third button on that curve, is for lining up a shot in a fight when the stick is too lively. Tap it and the right stick becomes a set of four arrows: press an arrow and the torso turns that way at one slow, steady speed, like the arrow keys on a keyboard, and stops the moment you let go. Press between two arrows for a diagonal. Your left thumb keeps walking on the move stick the whole time. Tap AIM again to get the stick back.
• MOVE, above the left stick, does the same for walking: tap it and the left stick becomes four arrows that walk at full speed, like WASD on a keyboard. Tap it again for the stick.
• II in the top left is pause, the touch version of Esc.
• Tap a cell on the radar to send your bots there (the cells are numbered 1 to 9; on a keyboard, press the number). Tap it again to call them off.
• Each stick and each button tracks its own finger, so you can walk, aim, and fire at the same time.
• INVERT MOUSE does not affect the aim stick.

Aiming on a trackpad

Laptop trackpads on Linux and macOS stop reporting movement while any key is held down, so your aim freezes while you walk with WASD. That is the operating system's typing protection, not the game, and an external mouse is never affected. Ways around it:

• Use the arrow keys: they aim at a steady rate and keep working while WASD is held. INVERT MOUSE flips their vertical too.
• GNOME (Linux): Settings > Mouse & Touchpad, turn off Disable While Typing, or run gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing false
• KDE (Linux): System Settings > Mouse & Touchpad > Touchpad, uncheck disable while typing
• Other Linux (X11): xinput set-prop <device> "libinput Disable While Typing Enabled" 0
• macOS: there is no setting for this; use the arrow keys or a mouse
• Quick trick anywhere: rest a finger on the trackpad before you press a movement key

Firing from the keyboard

You can shoot without clicking. Hold Space to fire the left arm, and hold right Ctrl (Windows, Linux) or right Option (Mac) to fire the right arm. Hold a key the way you would hold a mouse button: the weapon fires at its normal rate for as long as it is down, and lets go when you do. The mouse buttons still work, and you can mix them with the keys.

• The keys only fire while you are in a round with the mouse locked. On the title screen, in menus, in the lobby, and on these pages, Space is just Space.
• Phones and tablets are unchanged: use the L and R buttons.

Testing shortcuts

These keys are for playtesting on a keyboard. They work in single player only; in a multiplayer room every one of them is switched off, so nobody can cheat with them. They are also ignored while you are typing in a text box.

• 1 to 5: damage one of your own components (legs, left arm, right arm, sensors, core) to watch the HUD and damage model react
• Shift + 1 to 5: the same damage on the nearest living enemy
• 0: fully repair every mech in the round
• P: pause or resume all bots, yours and theirs, so you can look around in peace
• G: toggle the sector grid overlay on the ground