Rules

Coworld Battle Royale — Game Rules

Coworld Battle Royale is a free-for-all shooter for the Coworld platform (config.br.json, mode: "ffa", 12 seats; the manifest ships the br-12 and br-16 variants). Every seat is its own team and receives its own identity color. Each player has a single life, spawns unarmed on an evenly spaced ring, and fights with fists until they pick up a weapon tier. A shrinking ring (ringShrinkSec 150 s, to a 3%-of-the-arena floor) forces the survivors together, an armed victim drops a one-use gun at the death site (dropWeaponOnDeath, GV46), and placements decide the results. Vision is fog-of-war: the map is always visible, but enemies only appear inside your forward vision cone or your small omnidirectional bubble. The engine also retains the original two-team capture-the-heart (CTF) mode; sections below that describe teams, hearts, and captures apply to that mode, and Battle-Royale-specific rules are called out where they differ.

It is a fork of Crewrift: it keeps Crewrift's continuous 2D movement, line-of-sight, sprite protocol, server, and replay infrastructure, and replaces the social-deduction game layer (roles, tasks, voting) with teams, guns, hearts, and fog-of-war vision.

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Overview

The bullets below describe the legacy CTF mode.

• 16 players, 8 vs 8. Red team spawns along the left edge, Blue along the right edge.
• Two team hearts, one on each team's home pedestal inside its spawn pocket (classic two-object CTF, with hearts for flags).
• GameVersion 42 makes standing on the pedestal enough to take the heart. The steal radius was 12px around the heart's exact center — a fifth of the 60px sprite drawn on a 96px pedestal — so the visible target overstated the real one fivefold, and players and policies alike stood plainly on the heart without picking it up. The radius is now 34px, derived from the drawn heart's own half-extent, so anywhere the art is under your feet is a grab. It still stops well inside the pedestal's spawn pocket, so no steal reaches through a wall.
• The arena is filled with staggered cover (a slalom of offset wall stubs, diamonds, discs, and diagonal chevron walls, mirrored symmetrically so neither team has a positional advantage): no straight shot crosses the field, so every approach is a series of corners. GameVersion 16 thinned the disc column to every other disc, opening real gaps in the mid-field slalom.
• The eight diamonds flanking the center spin, and since GameVersion 28 the spin is real geometry: the rotating silhouette you see is the exact footprint that stops your feet, your bullets, and your line of sight. A quarter turn takes ~2.7s (16 frames, one every 4 ticks), the two halves turn in mirrored directions, and the angle derives only from the tick — so every viewer and every replay sees the same stone. The blocked lane through the center therefore opens and closes on a clock: a vertex that covered you a second ago may have swung away. A player the sweep engulfs is pushed to the nearest free floor rather than trapped inside stone, and never onto another body.
• GameVersion 31 makes sprayed paint hurt. Two changes close the same gap — paint visibly covering a cog that walked away clean. First, the cone hits bodies, not center points: a sprayed cog is tested as a 17 px disc (half its 34 px body), where it used to be the bare point its 1 px collision box describes — largest effect point-blank, where the cone was narrower than the cog it covered. Second, the reach grew 4 → 5 squares, with the width grown to match so the 14° half-angle did not change; the 5th square is exactly what it takes to cover the tip of the plume the game draws. See the Spray can section for the shape.
• GameVersion 38 makes the spray one directional shot, not a sweep. A fired cone now locks its aim at the moment of firing and keeps it for the whole 5-tick window: spinning the cog after you press no longer rakes the cone around you. The cone's origin still rides its owner, so a moving sprayer drags the stream forward — only the rotation is pinned. See the Spray can section.
• GameVersion 30 puts every team's pickups on the map's own symmetry. A team's shield and spray can are Red's spots carried over by whichever symmetry the terrain was built with — mirrored, rotated 180°, or turned a quarter at a time on the 4-team boards. Only that image lands in equivalent terrain: a mirrored copy on a rotational map sits in the rotation of Red's other pickup, so one team's shield had cover and sightlines the other's did not. See "Shields" and "Spray can".
• GameVersion 29 extends the live spin to generated terrain, fairly. Which diamonds spin is decided by a band down the center column, and that choice is closed under each map's own symmetry — on the 90°-rotational 4-team boards the band's closure is a cross, so a diamond never turns while its quarter-turn twin sits as solid stone. Spin direction follows the same logic: a mirror map turns its two halves opposite ways (a reflection reverses a rotation), while a 180°- or 90°-rotational map turns every diamond the same way, because a rotation does not. The terrain generator also judges a spinning diamond from both ends of its turn — sightlines and the cover floor against its narrowest footprint, corridors and the cover ceiling against its widest — so a map cannot pass validation on a firing lane that is only blocked at rest. Two seeds in the previous curated pool did exactly that, and the pool was re-drawn without them.
• In the outermost stub column of each half, the glass alternates in from both ends: the second stub from the top, the middle stub, and the second from the bottom (GameVersion 27) are glass windows: they block movement, bullets, and spray cones exactly like stone, but vision passes straight through them. Glass draws as a pale pane with diagonal sheen — cover you can be seen behind is not cover.
• The old midline chevron zigzag is now a square-bracket wall pair framing the flag ring ([ … ], GameVersion 16), and the middle of each bracket's bar — dead on the center row — is a glass window: the mid lane stays closed to movement and fire, but both teams can watch the center corridor through the glass.
• Trenches — walkable dug-pit squares — are a config-gated terrain feature: the default arena has none; generated maps (below) place them procedurally, steered by mapPits / mapPitDensity. See the Trenches section for their rules.
• Paint puddles — damage-over-time floor hazards — are a config-gated terrain feature: no map has any unless mapPuddles requests them. See the Paint puddles section for their rules.
• Cardboard barriers — placeable paint-blocking cover — are a config-gated pickup: no map has any unless barrierPickups requests them. See the Cardboard barriers section for their rules.
• Procedurally generated terrain is available as a config option (mapPath: "pool" draws from a curated 20-map pool, "gen" + mapSeed generates directly; mapSize / mapSymmetry / mapColumns / mapWindows / mapCenterFeature / mapEndzone lock individual draws). Generated layouts keep every arena invariant — exact team symmetry (vertical mirror or 180° rotation), no straight cross-field shot, corridors at least twice the player footprint, a bounded cover budget — and draw their size class (small / standard / large / huge / giant — giant is the old large ceiling doubled, up to 3211x1713 on a 2-team board; obstacle sizes never scale, bigger fields draw more cover columns instead), obstacle columns, glass placements, center feature, endzone archetype, and med-kit pair per map. The exact geometry is pinned into the match config/replay as mapSpec. The default league map remains the hand-tuned arena described above; leagues opt in through their own config.
• Compact endzones are one of those draws. Half of generated 2-team maps keep the classic home column; the rest pull the base well off its home edge and wrap it in a disc or square endzone (mapEndzone: "column" / "disc" / "square"), which turns the whole home border strip into ordinary wilderness — cover, glass and pits wrap all the way around and behind the base. Scoring follows the shape: a carrier scores by crossing the painted ring from ANY side, including from behind. Such maps are validated for an OPEN FLANK — four clear cardinal approaches into the ring, and a route from behind the base to midfield that never enters the endzone — so a deep base cannot be defended as one front line.
• A round ends when at most one team still stands: capturing a heart eliminates its team (GV32 — every player on the captured team dies with no respawn, and the heart leaves play where it was captured), and a team with no live players is wiped out. In classic 2-team play a capture therefore still ends the round on the spot.
• A dead team's heart leaves play with it (GV33): the moment a team is completely killed — captured or wiped — its heart is retired and no longer drawn. If an enemy was carrying that heart when the team fell, it drops straight off their back (restoring full speed and fire rate); a retired heart cannot be stolen or captured.

Teams & spawns

• Players are assigned to Red or Blue by slot (8 each).
• A slot may configure a cosmetic skin (slots[i].skin in the game config; currently default or crown) that restyles that player's body art. Skins are cosmetic only: no gameplay effect, and the player, corpse, and selected-player observation labels are unchanged, so policies cannot (and need not) distinguish them.
• Each team's players get a fixed identity, alpha through theta, by slot order within the team — deterministic across matches and replays. A small Greek-letter badge (Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ) rides each living player's sprite, and the badge object is labeled identity <color> <name> (e.g. identity red alpha). Badges are fog-gated with their player: seeing a player means seeing who it is. Existing player <color> <side> labels are unchanged.
• Each team has a home edge: Red = left, Blue = right.
• Players start just inside their home edge. When killed they respawn at a random spot inside their own endzone (GameVersion 25) — the respawn point cannot be camped.

Four-team mode (config-gated)

The default game is the classic 2-team arena above; nothing changes unless a config opts in. With "teams": 4 (and "mapPath": "gen"), the game seats FOUR teams — Red, Blue, Green, Yellow — in a free-for-all on a generated square map:

• Layouts ("mapLayout", or drawn from the map seed): "corners" puts a team in each corner (Red top-left, Blue top-right, Green bottom-left, Yellow bottom-right) with a DIAGONAL endzone — a 45-degree threshold line cut across the corner; "plus" puts a team at each edge midpoint (Red west, Blue east, Green north, Yellow south) with an arm-mouth endzone — the corners are open battlefield. Both are fully open square boards whose terrain replicates a generated quadrant by 90-degree rotation, so all four quarters are exactly fair: the WALL MASK a team plays against is pixel-for-pixel the quarter turn of every other team's, homes included. Each team's spawn pocket rotates with its home, so the north and south pockets of a plus board lie on their sides relative to the east and west ones — a pocket that stayed upright everywhere would be a different shape than its own rotational twin.
• Every team has its own heart on its own pedestal, and its own capture zone behind it. Steal ANY other team's heart and carry it into your own zone to eliminate that team (GV32): its players all die for good and the captured heart is out of play for the rest of the round. A team wiped out by kills loses its heart the same way (GV33): it retires on the spot — even straight off an enemy carrier's back — and is no longer drawn. Allies do not exist: 4-team play is pure free-for-all, and a "2v2" is simply two policies splitting one classic team's seats.
• Seats deal round the teams by slot order (slot mod 4): 4 players per team on a 16-seat roster, 8 per team on a 32-seat roster (the Paintbot 4ffa8 variant, always on a giant generated map). Identities stay per-team (alpha..delta at 4 per team, alpha..theta at 8).
• The last team standing wins: the round ends when at most one team still has live players — so a 4-team winner either captures all three rival hearts or outlives the field (captures and wipes mix freely); an eliminated or wiped team just sits out until then.
• Scoring is zero-sum by construction: the winning team scores +1 per losing team, each losing team scores -1. Classic 2-team play stays +1/-1; a 4-team win pays +3 to the winner and -1 to each loser. Time-limit draws still pay -1 to everyone. (Under scoring: "pot" the 4-team win pays +4 instead — see "Scoring".)
• Labels are unchanged in shape: the same player <color> <side>, <color> flag [planted], shout, and identity vocabulary — green and yellow simply appear as team color tokens alongside red and blue.
• Med kits become a rot90-fair diamond of four; each team gets one shield and one spray-can pickup near its endzone; the four grenade pickups move to the edge midpoints (corners layout) or a rot90 orbit around the center (plus layout).

Movement

• Movement is continuous (acceleration, friction, max speed, wall-sliding) — the d-pad drives it.
• Movement is pure locomotion: it never changes where you aim or look.
• Player bodies are solid: you cannot drive over or through another live player (friend or foe). Contact is a slightly elastic collision — equal masses, playerBouncePct restitution (default 40%): ramming a standing player shoves them forward and keeps a little of your speed; a head-on meeting bounces both back at 40% of the closing speed. Glancing contact slides around the body the same way wall-sliding works. Corpses never block.

Aim

• Every player has a continuous aim angle reported in brads (256 units per full turn, integer — deterministic): 0 = east (+x), increasing counter-clockwise on screen in map coordinates (64 = north, 128 = west, 192 = south).
• The aim is decoupled from movement. Hold B to rotate the aim counter-clockwise, hold Select to rotate clockwise, at aimTurnRate brads per tick (default 5 ≈ 7°/tick; a full turn takes ~2.1s). Holding both rotate buttons cancels out. The d-pad never touches the aim.
• The aim drives everything directional: the gun fires along it, the vision cone centers on it, and the sprite flip follows it (you face left while aiming left-ish).
• On spawn and respawn your aim points toward the enemy side (Red → east, Blue → west).
• A player's facing is shown by the soldier sprite itself: the held gun sweeps to the aim angle (the sprite reports a coarse right/left side in its label), and — for anyone you can see — the direction they can shoot is exactly the lane their body faces. There is no longer a separate floating aim-dot indicator; the vision cone and the swept gun convey aim.

Vision (fog of war)

Every player observes the full map — the terrain is static knowledge and is always drawn — but moving entities are fogged:

• Your vision is a forward cone of half-angle visionConeDeg (default ±60°) around your aim angle, reaching 1.5× the gun range (1575px stock, since GameVersion 34 — sight outranges paint by half again), plus a small omnidirectional bubble of visionBubble (default ~90px) around you that the range cap never shrinks.
• Stone walls block vision — the same walls that block bullets — with one exception: glass windows (the second-from-top, middle, and second-from-bottom stubs of each half's outer stub column) block bullets but NOT vision. A long open lane is visible (and lethal) end to end; anything behind stone is not; anything behind glass is seen but safe from direct fire.
• Your aim carries your vision. You look where you aim, not where you walk, so watching a lane, sweeping an arc, and turning your back are deliberate rotation choices - and moving somewhere no longer reveals it.
• Everything outside your vision is masked: enemies, an enemy carrying a heart, and death splatters from unseen events are simply not in your observation. The unseen area is dimmed by a fog overlay.
• Bullets are invisible to players. Shot tracers and muzzle flashes are spectator/replay rendering only — no player observation ever contains them, whether the shot crossed your vision or not. Players learn of gunfire only by sound (below).
• Always visible regardless of fog: the static map, both heart pedestals, your own heart's state (its pedestal heart is never hidden — an empty own pedestal means your heart is stolen), and yourself via a distinct self marker. Teammates are fogged like everyone else — there is no team radio; keeping track of your own side takes eyes too.
• Only a shot's landing is audible — and sound is all a player gets. Every shot leaves every living player one brief hollow impact ring (label shot impact) near where it landed, for ~0.5s, regardless of line of sight. Firing itself is silent: the muzzle emits no signal, so pulling the trigger never reveals the shooter's neighborhood — only where the paint lands. The ring is randomly (but deterministically, per shot) offset by up to ~20px, so it tells you something was hit roughly there — never the exact spot, the shot's line, or which team.
• Another soldier's drawn gun angle is approximate (since GameVersion 24; self exempted since 26). Every OTHER soldier sprite in a player's view — enemies, teammates, and corpses — renders its gun rotated by the true aim plus a deterministic pseudo-random offset of up to ±20°, re-rolled about twice a second: watching another bot never reveals its exact aim. Your OWN self marker shows your TRUE aim — your gun is your own state, not a leak. Every soldier sprite (self included) draws its gun at the nearest of 16 pre-rendered steps, 22.5° apart — so the self marker is true aim rounded to within ±11.25° (±8 brads), with no fuzz on top, while other soldiers carry the ±20° fuzz before the same rounding. (The spectator broadcast board also shows true aim.)
• There is no global heart tracking: once a thief carries your heart into the fog, finding it again takes eyes on it.
• Death does not lift the fog: a dead player sees the whole map fogged — only the terrain, the pedestal hearts, and their own corpse — until they respawn (their inputs are ignored).

The walkability map is a connect-time snapshot

A policy receives the walkability map sprite once, when it connects, and never again. The eight centre diamonds spin, and since GV28 each spin frame restamps the movement, bullet and vision masks — every 4 ticks, a mean of 1299 map pixels (max 1376, measured on the arena) change under the ring. The snapshot does not follow them, so near the centre a policy's copy of the mask disagrees with the live world: measured over one full spin on the arena FFA board, 3.80% of standable point pairs within 70px of a centre med kit look blocked on the snapshot while the live mask is clear, and 2.11% look clear while it is blocked.

Two observations already carry the live truth, so a policy does not have to reconstruct the geometry:

• Diamond objects arrive every frame with their live bounds, labelled diamond (a diamond that has been shot carries diamond <i> paint <n>, so match on the prefix). Treat snapshot pixels inside those bounds as unknown rather than as wall.
• Enemy sightings are already FOV-gated. The server ships a player object only when its own live vision says that seat is visible, so a sighting IS the line-of-sight answer. A policy that re-derives line of sight from its snapshot and vetoes the shot is overriding a truthful observation with a stale one: trust the sighting.

Refreshing the snapshot itself was measured and rejected: the mask is a whole-sprite payload of 171 KB compressed, so a truthful resend costs 501 KB/s per player even at only every 8 ticks (8.0 MB/s at 16 seats) against a bot's 6.8 KB/s steady stream.

Combat

• Every player has hitPoints (default 3) per life. Each bullet that hits removes one hit point; at zero you die. Hit points reset to full on every respawn. Your own remaining HP shows on your HUD next to your lives.
• Press A to fire. Firing has a short cooldown between shots (it is not a continuous beam).
• Pressing fire starts a short windup (~0.2s): your aim locks the moment you pull the trigger, and the bullet leaves at the end of the windup. A target that peeks out and ducks back behind cover before the release survives the shot.
• The bullet is hitscan along your aim ray: it travels down the locked aim direction and hits the first player whose footprint crosses its narrow corridor — it never passes through a body to hit someone behind, and walls stop it.
• Range is a fixed 1050 px on every map (since GameVersion 34) — the small generated map's field width. Only on the smallest board is the gun map-wide; on larger fields paint simply falls short, so closing distance matters. Paint that runs out of range hits nothing and marks nothing.
• Aim is fuzzed (since GameVersion 34): every released shot's direction gets a small random angular error (~0.6° sigma), calibrated so a fully visible body at max range is hit 80% of the time. Accuracy sharpens fast as you close: ~99% at half range, effectively perfect inside a third. The noise also rides shots at partial cover — a sliver target at long range is doubly hard.
• Cover is partial, not binary. A target's body is sampled across its silhouette: only the part of the body that is both inside the bullet corridor AND visible from the shooter can be hit. A corner-hugger showing a sliver is exactly as hittable as that sliver — no more (fully hidden body parts cannot be tagged through the wall), and no less (the poking shoulder is fair game even when the body's center is safely covered). More exposure means more aim angles connect.
• Friendly fire is ON. A shot hits the first valid target regardless of team, so firing into a cluster of teammates can kill your own escort.
• Same-tick shots resolve simultaneously. Every trigger pulled on the same tick picks its target against the same snapshot before any kill applies: a mutual face-off duel kills both shooters, and neither team gains an input-processing-order advantage.

Shot micro (frame data)

The full life of one shot, at 24 ticks/second:

1. Trigger pull (tick 0). Fire is edge-triggered: a shot arms on the tick the button goes down — holding it does nothing, and a second pull during a pending windup is ignored. The pull is refused entirely while the cooldown is still running.
2. Windup (5 ticks, ~0.2s). Your aim angle locks at the pull; turning during the windup does not bend the pending shot (it only re-aims the next one). Your position stays live: movement is full-speed and unrestricted during the windup.
3. Release (tick 5). The bullet resolves instantly (hitscan) from your position at release, along the angle locked at the pull. All movement for the tick happens first; every shot releasing that tick then resolves at once against the post-movement snapshot.
4. Cooldown (12 ticks, ~0.5s; 3x that for a shield carrier — and, since GameVersion 26, 3x for a HEART carrier too: carrying the heart no longer means free full-rate fire; shield+heart take the max multiplier, not the product). The cooldown starts at release, so the sustained rate is one shot per cooldown — the windup does not slow your cadence.

What that means in practice:

• Strafe-firing works. The shot line translates with your movement (new position, old angle), so lead your own strafe when you pull.
• Fire-and-duck can waste your own shot. Line of sight is checked from your release position: step behind a wall during your windup and the wall eats your bullet.
• Targets can dodge the windup. Anyone who breaks line of sight during your ~0.2s windup survives; the aim lock is the price of the shot.
• The corridor is forgiving. The bullet is a ray with an 8px half-width corridor sampled against the target's ~12px-wide silhouette — near-misses connect; precision beyond the corridor width buys nothing.
• Respawners are live immediately. There is no spawn protection: a freshly respawned player can shoot and be shot (and blocks bullets) from their first tick.

Battle Royale weapons

FFA players spawn on an evenly spaced ring, but pad ownership is not tied to the platform seat: a deterministic offset derived from the match seed rotates which seat receives each existing pad on every episode. The ring radius, spacing, geometry, and nearest-walkable snapping are unchanged, and the assignment remains a one-to-one mapping. CTF keeps its original team spawn positions.

Battle Royale starts every player unarmed. The fallback attack is a fist: it reaches 70 px, deals 2 damage, and has twice the normal fire cooldown. A punch has no windup, tracer, or stain; it hits the nearest living player in the ±48-brad aim cone. Fists are only available while the player has no gun or spray can.

A landed punch does leave one mark, and only on the spectator board: a small knuckle spark (fist contact stage <n>) at the damage site, drawn from the contact the sim records where fist damage is applied. Player observation streams carry nothing for it — with no windup, tracer or projectile, a punch stays invisible to policies, which is deliberate.

Punch geometry in detail: reach is measured center to center (70 px, so two bodies whose 34 px silhouettes touch are always inside it), the cone is ±48 brads of the 256-brad turn (±67.5°), and the target needs a clear line of paint. Inside reach, cone, and line of sight a punch always connects — the fist rolls no aim jitter and no trench duck, and pays no trench or shield fire slowdown, so it is the only FFA attack whose outcome is fully determined by geometry.

FFA gun pickups form a permanent upgrade ladder. Every number below is the shipped value at the default gunRange (1050) and fireCooldownTicks (12):

• Heavy's advantage over mid is rate and damage, not reach: both stop at the same 1050 px. Low is the only tier with a shorter envelope.
• Cooldowns are fireCooldownTicks × pct div 100, floored at 1 tick, and are multiplied (never compounded — the largest single factor wins) by the 3× shield/carrier/trench fire slowdowns. Guns also pay the 5-tick fireWindupTicks before each shot; fists do not.
• Mid is the only tier whose damage is configurable (ffaGunDamage); every other number in the table is a bare constant with no knob (https://github.com/Metta-AI/coworld-battle-royale/issues/18).

No weapon has ammo, durability, or a magazine. A tier is a permanent property of the player: it is set to unarmed at match start, raised by touching a higher-tier pickup, and never decremented by firing, by time, or by taking damage. There is nothing to reload and nothing to run out of, so the only way to lose a gun is to die — and FFA is single-life. The two consumables behave differently and are the only "supply" in the mode:

• Grenade — at most one carried, thrown to use, and lost on death (nothing drops for a scavenger).
• Spray can — at most one carried, kept across bursts, and lost on death. It is not consumed by spraying: each burst runs 5 active ticks and then repressurizes for 20, i.e. one burst every 25 ticks, indefinitely.

The FFA dropWeaponOnDeath rule is armed in the shipped battle-royale configs as of GV46 (config.br.json and the hosted br-12/br-16 manifest variants). When it is on, a non-unarmed victim leaves their gun as a one-use pickup at the death site: it never expires, is visible only inside field of view, and is consumed by the first living player within pickup range whose tier is strictly lower than the drop — equal-or-lower drops are ignored and stay. Grenades and spray cans still drop nothing. With the knob off, a death removes the player's gun without leaving a pickup, exactly as before GV46.

Aim jitter is calibrated once, against config.gunRange — not per tier. The GV34 contract ("a fully visible body at max range is hit exactly 80% of the time") is written for 1050 px, and sigma stays at 0.596° whatever tier fires. Sigma is asin((PlayerHalf + BulletHalfWidth) / config.gunRange) / AimJitterCentralZ — a ±14 px acceptance window at 1050 px over Φ⁻¹(0.90) — and the hit rate at any distance d is 2Φ(asin(14 / d) / sigma) − 1. Mid and heavy therefore land on 80% at their own 1050 px edge, while low — whose envelope stops at 700 px — is more accurate than the contract at its own maximum, ~94.5% (and every tier is ~99% at 525 px). Low's weakness is reach and cooldown, not precision. Whether that is intended is filed as https://github.com/Metta-AI/coworld-battle-royale/issues/19.

FFA also re-points the two thrown/sprayed weapons at its deeper 20 HP pool. Against CTF's numbers:

The third row is the one to note: CTF triples a grenade's damage when the blast lands in the victim's own trench, and FFA has no analog — the same-trench branch resolves to the ordinary ffaGrenadeDamage, so grenading a trench camper is worth no more than grenading them in the open (https://github.com/Metta-AI/coworld-battle-royale/issues/20).

No weapon tier touches movement. Max speed, acceleration, friction, and the carrier/trench speed rules are identical for a fist-only player and a heavy carrier; the only speed modifiers in FFA are the ones every mode has (trench climb-out, paint puddles, thruster perk). Carrying the heavy costs nothing in mobility.

The fist's aim cone is symmetric at ±67.5°, including across the 0-brad seam. A punch with no living target in that cone hits nothing. A kill counter is credited only when a hit ends a living player; environmental and elimination deaths do not award a kill.

Pickups only upgrade a carrier. A pickup at or below the current tier remains on the map; a higher-tier pickup is consumed and the new tier lasts for the episode. All three families are present from tick 0 and use the offensive FFA respawn cadence. The bands are anchored to the rectangular playable arena rather than the shrinking ring floor: the center cluster remains compact even at the 3% final floor, low-tier pickups use the full per-axis board extent, and mid-tier pickups offer an intermediate route. The center therefore offers the strongest weapon at the greatest contest risk, while low-tier pickups provide a safer but weaker alternative away from the opening fight.

The own HUD and visible cogs identify weapon fist, weapon low gun, weapon mid gun, and weapon heavy gun; map pickups use low gun, mid gun, and heavy gun. CTF retains its armed start and ordinary gun behavior.

The baseline FFA doctrine changes in the late game: when three or fewer players remain, bots close on the nearest living enemy instead of disengaging while hurt. They still respect safe-zone safety and the normal aim and fire gates.

Grenades

• Four grenade pickups spawn in the arena corners — two on each team's side — a fixed inset inside the border walls. Anyone may take either side's pickups by touch; a taken corner refills 5 seconds later.
• Each player carries at most one grenade. Dying loses the carried grenade (nothing drops).
• Throwing: hold the C button (input mask bit 128) to charge, release to throw along your current aim. The charge picks the distance, from a short tap (~30 px — inside the blast radius, so a panicked drop can hurt you) up to a full-charge maximum of one fifth of the field width (~247 px) after ~1s of holding. While you charge, a throw target ring marks the landing spot on your own view (and is readable intel for anyone who can see you, like your aim line).
• Grenades fly over every obstacle in a straight lob from thrower to target and explode on landing. The burst comes a fixed two shot windups (~0.4s) after release, near or far — long throws just travel faster. A grenade is a snap weapon: the reaction window is the same as eating two aimed shots, not a mortar shell you can stroll away from.
• The blast hurts everyone whose body touches its radius (~52 px): enemies, teammates, and the thrower alike, removing 2 hit points in CTF or 4 in FFA in the open; a blast in the victim's own trench removes 6 in CTF or 4 in FFA, while a victim in a different trench takes 1. It is your BODY that must reach the circle, not the point you stand on — the same rule the gun's bullet corridor uses — so a cog centred up to ~58 px away is still caught. The landing splat and the charge-time throw-target ring are drawn at the blast diameter, so anything painted was hit, but a cog clipping the rim from just outside it is hit too. Kills credit the thrower (except suicides).
• Throwing is silent; landing is loud. A landing you could not see leaves a large jittered sound ring (label grenade sound) — landing-only audio, exactly like gunshot impact rings. The throw itself leaves nothing.
• Observation labels: pickups grenade, airborne grenade air, the marker above a carrier grenade carried, the charge marker throw target, the landing flash blast stage N.

Spray can

• Two spray can pickups spawn high in the side back columns — Red's in the TOP half (a quarter of the map height down, between the top corner grenade and the side midpoint), nudged to the nearest walkable floor. The shields hold the matching bottom-half spots. Both spray cans are present when the game starts, and a taken one respawns after 30 seconds.
• The other team's can is Red's spot carried over by the map's own symmetry (GameVersion 30), not simply mirrored across the midline. On a 180°-rotational map that puts Blue's can in the BOTTOM half, because that is where the rotation sends Red's — mirror it instead and it lands in the rotation of Red's shield, so the two teams fight for the same item in differently-shaped terrain.
• Each player carries at most one spray can, independently of their grenade. Dying loses the carried can; nothing drops.
• While carrying a spray can, A sprays a forward paint cone instead of firing the gun. The cone reaches 5 squares in front of the player (170 px — one square is one 34 px cog body) and widens linearly to 2.5 squares (85 px) at max reach, a constant half-angle of atan(1/4) ≈ 14°. The gun is disabled while the can is held; C still throws a carried grenade normally.
• The cone hits bodies, not center points (GameVersion 31). Those reach and width figures describe the cone's centerline; a cog is tested as a 17 px disc (half a 34 px body) against it, so paint that visibly engulfs a cog takes its hit points. In effect the cone covers 187 px forward and 17 px extra to each side at every distance — which matters most point-blank, where the centerline cone is narrower than the cog it covers (±10 px at 40 px out, against a ±17 px body). Spraying backwards still hits nobody: the can points forward, so a cog behind the sprayer is out regardless of its body.
• The mist is inscribed in the damage it depicts. The plume is a chain of round puffs, each riding the cone's own centerline and sized to the clearance the cone allows at its distance, so no puff is drawn outside the region a touch actually hits — the centerline cone plus the same 17 px victim disc the sim tests against. Lengthwise the chain stops short of the reach rather than overhanging it, and nothing is painted behind the nozzle, where a spray hits nobody at all. So paint on a cog means the cog took the hit, edge included; the fix was to stop drawing the puffs oversize and off-axis, not to widen the cone — PlasmaArcReach, PlasmaArcMaxWidth and the 14° half-angle are unchanged.
• The cone stays on for 5 ticks, riding the attacker's position but holding the aim it was fired at (GameVersion 38): one press is one directional shot, so turning the cog mid-spray no longer sweeps the cone across a fan of targets — only the origin moves with you, not the direction. Then the can takes 20 ticks to repressurize (one burst every 25 ticks). The cone shuts off if its owner dies.
• A touch removes 3 hit points in CTF or 4 in FFA, once per victim per burst — in CTF this is instantly lethal to a bare 3 hp cog, while a 6 hp shield carrier survives the first touch with 3 hp left. The cone affects teammates too and requires line of sight. Kills credit the attacker.
• A spray touch paints its victim (it stamps the same paint-hit tick the paintball gun and grenade do), so a sprayed seat's first-person view takes a paint splat across the visor.
• Observation labels: pickup spray can, carrier marker spray can carried, and the fading cone spray paint puff (a run of team-colored paint-mist puffs along the attacker's aim each active tick).
• A carrier visibly holds the can: the cog's held paintball marker is replaced by the spray can while one is carried (sprite label cog spray can <color> in place of cog gun <color>), so the silhouette shows which weapon is live.
• The cone's puffs jet outward from the nozzle to full reach as each burst ages, then thin out; overlapping per-tick snapshots make a held trigger read as one continuous plume. Purely cosmetic: the damage cone is the full 4-square shape from the first active tick, regardless of how far the animation has travelled.

Shouts

• Any living player can shout: a short text message, at most 10 characters (longer messages are truncated; non-printable characters are dropped). Send it as a chat packet (0x81, the standard sprite-protocol chat message); in the browser client press Enter, type, and press Enter again.
• Anyone within one fifth of the field width (~247 px) hears it — through walls and fog, like gunfire. Outside that radius the shout does not appear in your frame at all.
• A heard shout appears as a speech bubble labeled <team> shout <name>: <text> pinned at deterministically jittered coordinates (~±20 px, like gunshot impact rings): you learn roughly where the shouter is, never exactly.
• <name> is the shouter's anonymous slot letter (alpha..theta, ranked within its own team — the same identity the identity badges use), never the connecting player's name. Listeners on both teams read these labels, so the label deliberately carries no clue about whose policy is talking. Split the label on the first ": " and treat the rest as payload; ? in the name position means the shouter left while the bubble was still up.
• Rate limit: one shout per second per player, and each player has at most one live bubble (a new shout replaces the old). Bubbles fade after 3 seconds. Dead players cannot shout and hear nothing.
• The global/replay view draws every bubble at the shouter's actual position, following them while they live.
• Shouting is free: it never consumes, delays, or modifies any other same-tick action — you move, aim, and fire exactly as if you had said nothing; its only limit is its own one-per-second cooldown.

Trenches

• A trench is a 56×56 px walkable dug-pit square that draws as a recessed dark pit in the floor. It is not a wall: it never blocks movement, bullets, or vision. Trenches are config-gated and ship without a game-version bump, exactly like procedural terrain: the default arena has none, and a league opts in through its own config (generated maps dig them per seed; a mapPits: 1 lock reproduces the classic single center pit).
• Generated maps dig additional trenches procedurally, drawn per seed in three placement classes: instead of an obstacle (a slot that would raise cover digs a pit — cover you stand in rather than behind), in the gaps between a column's obstacles (the corridor stays open; crossing it the slow way is a choice), and in each endzone around the flag — behind the pedestal toward the home edge, and above and/or below it. Every dig is mirrored under the map's team symmetry, so neither team gets a private pit, and the exact trench set is pinned in the replay's mapSpec like the rest of the geometry.
• Two runtime knobs steer the digging (game config, generated maps only): mapPits locks the exact TOTAL pit count (0..64) — even counts place symmetric pairs; an odd count anchors its extra pit at the exact map center, the one spot that is its own image under both mirror and rot180 symmetry, so odd and even counts are equally team-fair. When the candidate spots can't host the full request the map places as many as fit. mapPitDensity (0..1000, default 100) scales the per-class draw chances instead when no exact count is locked — 0 digs nothing, 200 digs roughly twice as much. mapPits wins over mapPitDensity.
• You are "in" the trench exactly while your body center is inside the square; every effect below applies instantly on entry and ends instantly on exit.
• Getting in is fast; climbing out is slow. Dropping into a pit and moving around inside it run at full speed — momentum carried in is kept. But while your center is inside, any movement away from the pit's center — climbing a wall to leave — has its speed cap and acceleration divided by five, and outward momentum sheds to that cap. A pit is easy to take and costly to abandon.
• Occupants fire their gun at 1/3 rate (each shot's cooldown is three times the normal length). This composes with the shield/heart-carrier slowdown by taking the maximum, never the product.
• 70% of gun shots that would hit an occupant fly straight over instead: the occupant is below grade, so the bullet misses, deals no damage, counts as a miss for the shooter, and carries on down the ray — it can land on an exposed body behind the trench, or on the far wall. The duck is rolled per crossed occupant on the deterministic sim RNG.
• Shots fired from inside the same trench are never ducked — the protection is against fire from outside; two players inside the same trench duel normally.
• The fly-over protection applies to gun shots only. Spray cones deal their ordinary damage regardless of trenches on either side.
• A grenade blast's damage depends on the trench it lands in, not the trench radius. A blast that lands in the SAME trench as a victim traps them below grade with nowhere to duck: 6 hit points, GrenadeTrenchDamage — three times the open-field amount, and lethal to a bare cog through a 6 hp shield in one blast. A victim standing in ANY OTHER trench — the blast landed in the open or in a different pit — is mostly shielded by their own pit's lip: 1 hit point, GrenadeTrenchSplashDamage. Anyone outside every trench takes the ordinary GrenadeDamage (2) exactly as before. The landing splat and blast-flash animation are truncated to the trench's own 56×56 footprint when the blast is trapped in one, instead of spilling out to the full open-field blast size — what you see burning is what's amplified.
• Occupants are still subject to normal fog-of-war visibility — the trench itself grants no concealment.

Paint puddles

• A paint puddle is an organic splat-shaped floor hazard, nominally ~64 px across — a union of overlapping paint discs (one core plus a few flung lobes, reaching at most 45 px from the anchor) drawn as a violet spill on the ground. The painted spill IS the gameplay footprint — you take the damage roll exactly where you see paint. It never blocks movement, bullets, or vision, and never slows anything — its only rule is damage over time.
• Every full second (24 ticks) your body center spends CONTINUOUSLY inside a puddle rolls a puddleDamagePct (default 20%) chance of 1 damage. The roll's damage goes through the shield layer first, like every weapon's. Stepping out — even for one tick — restarts the second; dying resets it too.
• A lethal puddle roll is an environmental death: no player is credited with the kill (the log reads "dissolved in a paint puddle"), but it counts as a normal combat death for lives and respawn.
• Puddles are config-gated and ship in NO map by default. mapPuddles (0..64, COUNT mode only — there is no density mode) places that many on a 2-team generated map: even counts place mirror-symmetric pairs, an odd count anchors its extra puddle dead center. Each blob's shape is drawn from the map seed; a placed pair is the blob plus its exact symmetry image (bit-exact integer transforms), and the center blob's ring is stitched self-symmetric, so the hazard is always team-fair. Spots land on open floor clear of walls, trenches, other puddles, and both teams' base pockets; the exact set is pinned in the replay's mapSpec, so playback never re-rolls it. 4-team maps do not support puddles yet (an explicit request errors).
• Each puddle is stated to policies as an init-snapshot marker, puddle <x0>,<y0> <x1>,<y1> — see the stated-marker section below.

Med kits

• Two med kits sit on the center line — at one third and two thirds of the field height, nudged to the nearest walkable floor.
• Touching one while hurt restores your hit points back to full. A healthy player walks over it untouched — a kit is never wasted.
• A taken kit respawns 30 seconds later in the same spot.
• Observation label: med kit. Kits are fog-gated like the grenade pickups: you see one only where you have vision.
• Med kits never block anything — not movement, not bullets, not line of sight. They are floor pickups, not cover.

Shields

• One shield sits deep in each team's endzone. Red's is in the same back column as the corner grenade pickups but in the BOTTOM half (three quarters of the map height down, between the side midpoint and the bottom corner grenade), nudged to the nearest walkable floor. The spray cans hold the matching top-half spots. On a compact endzone (disc/square) there is no back column: the shield sits inside the zone below the pedestal and the spray can above it.
• Every other team's shield is Red's spot under the map's own symmetry (GameVersion 30) — mirrored on a mirror map, rotated on a rotational one, and a quarter turn round on the 4-team boards. Only that image sits in terrain equivalent to Red's; a mirrored copy on a rotational map lands in the transpose (4-team) or in the spray can's terrain (2-team), which is a fairness difference in cover and sightlines, not a cosmetic one.
• Touch a shield to pick it up — either team may take either endzone's shield. A shield is a 3 hp armor layer on top of your base hit points: damage depletes the shield layer first, and only then your base hp. The layer draws as blue pips appended to the overhead hp bar (base hit points stay green) and as the shield <s> tail of the bar's label. A pickup refills the layer to 3 but never heals base damage (med kits do that) — so a worn carrier can take another shield to restore the layer, while a carrier whose layer is intact leaves the spawn untouched.
• A depleted layer breaks the shield outright (GV23): the moment the last shield hp is absorbed, the shield is gone — the carry icon and the shield label drop, the fire slowdown ends (an in-flight slowed cooldown re-clamps to the normal length), and the player may take a fresh shield.
• While carrying a shield you fire 3x slower. A fresh player with a fresh shield has 6 effective hp (3 base + 3 shield). Each shot you fire starts a cooldown three times the normal length until the shield breaks or you die. You can still move, carry the heart, and throw grenades.
• A shield is lost when you die and is not dropped on the ground; the taken endzone shield respawns 30 seconds later in the same spot.
• Observation label: shield. Shields are fog-gated like the med kits and grenade pickups: you see one only where you have vision, and a small marker floats over a shield carrier you can see.

Cardboard barriers

• Config-gated (barrierPickups, default 0 = none): when on, each team gets that many folded-cardboard pickups (1 or 2), staged on the line from the team's base anchor toward map center — one at the midpoint, two at the thirds — nudged to the nearest walkable floor. Every other team's spots are Red's under the map's own symmetry, like the shields and spray cans.
• Touch a pickup to carry one folded barrier. Either team may take either side's pickups. A barrier and a grenade cannot be carried together — both are spent with button C — so a grenade carrier walks over the pickup untouched and vice versa. A taken pickup respawns 30 seconds later; the carried sheet is lost when you die (never dropped).
• Press C to place it where you stand. The cardboard unfolds instantly into a standing half-hex — three sides of a hexagon, vertices BarrierRadius (24px) from your center at aim −90°/−30°/+30°/+90° — with the flat middle side across your aim (~21px in front), wrapping your front. Placement is a press-edge, no charge; the grenade's hold-to-charge lives on the same button but the mutually-exclusive carry keeps the press unambiguous.
• Cardboard blocks paint, never sight. The ~5px band stops gun shots and the spray cone (both damage and the drawn mist) exactly like a wall — but fog-of-war vision, movement, and grenades (which fly over every obstacle) ignore it entirely. Cover you can see through and walk through.
• It takes 10 paintball hits (BarrierHp): each blocked gun shot splats on the cardboard and chips one hit; the tenth shreds it. The spray cone is blocked but does no damage to it; grenade blasts ignore it.
• Any cog that drives into the band flattens it instantly — including the placer walking forward through their own front wall. Standing inside the half-hex is safe: the band is ~21px out, well clear of a body.
• At most 16 barriers stand at once (MaxBarriersPlaced); placing past the cap folds the oldest standing barrier.
• Observation labels: barrier (folded pickup, fog-gated), barrier carried (marker over a carrier you can see), and the standing half-hex itself: barrier up <x>,<y> f<brads> hp <n> — placement center, facing, and hits left, updated live as it takes paint.

Lives & respawn

• Each player has a fixed number of lives.
• When you die, you respawn at a random spot in your endzone after a short delay — as long as you have lives remaining (GameVersion 25; the spot is drawn fresh each death, anywhere in the home capture column, full map height, so campers can't sit on a known respawn point).
• When you run out of lives, you are out for the rest of the round.

The hearts

• Each team's heart sits on its home pedestal inside the team's spawn pocket.
• Stand on the ENEMY pedestal to steal its heart (GV42). The steal fires the moment you are on the heart — there is no grab button and no pinpoint to find. The touch radius (FlagPickupRange = 34px) covers the drawn heart, which is 60px across on a 96px pedestal disc, so any spot where heart pixels are under your feet takes it. Your own heart cannot be interacted with by your own team. While carrying you move slower but can still shoot.
• If the carrier is killed (or disconnects), the heart returns instantly to its own pedestal. A heart is never left loose on the ground: it is either carried or sitting on its pedestal.
• Your own heart's state is always observable: its pedestal is never fogged, so an empty own pedestal means it is stolen — but the thief itself is fogged like any other enemy.

Winning

A round ends immediately when either condition is met:

1. Capture — carry the enemy heart into your own home capture zone.
2. Wipe — the entire enemy team is out of lives.

If neither happens before the time limit, the round is a lose-lose draw — there is no tiebreak, and both sides are penalized.

The clock only counts down (GV41): nothing extends it — the GV23 "action floor" (kills and heart steals banking overtime) is gone. maxTicks is the exact scheduled end, and the broadcast clock counts honestly to 0:00. With the grenade barrage configured, 0:00 does not end the round at all (see below); without it, the scheduled end is still the scoreless-draw ceiling.

Grenade barrage (config-gated endgame)

An anti-stalling mode that makes timeout draws effectively impossible. Off by default; a league turns it on with barrageMaxPerSec > 0 (requires a time limit).

• When the game clock reaches barrageStartSec seconds remaining (default 30 — 4:30 elapsed on the default 5:00 clock), environment grenades start raining onto the field: 4 per second (barrageStartPerSec) landing within a 40px band inside every map edge at first.
• The barrage escalates linearly over barrageSaturateSec seconds (default 30): the target band deepens until it covers the whole board, and the rate ramps to barrageMaxPerSec (10-20/s recommended, hard cap 50) — with the defaults, the entire arena is under maximum bombardment exactly as the clock reads 5:00 / 0:00 remaining.
• Shells are ordinary paint-bomb blasts (same radius, damage, trench rules, shield soak, and floor stains as a player lob) with nobody to credit: no kill/multi-kill stats for the environment, and a victim's death logs shelled by the grenade barrage. Deaths, lives, heart return, and respawns behave like any blast death.
• The clock is not the end (GV41): with the barrage on, a round ignores the time limit entirely. Past 0:00 the whole board stays under maximum bombardment until at most one team has live players — the survivor wins, and a draw requires the last players of two teams to die on the same tick. (Without the barrage, a timed round still ends at the limit as a scoreless draw.)
• Observability: incoming shells are ordinary grenade air orbs and blast stage <n> landings on both streams, and an invisible marker states the escalation outright: grenade barrage depth <n> rate <n> start <n>, present from the first tick whenever the mode is on (depth and rate 0 until the barrage latches). Shells only land within depth map pixels of some edge.

Scoring

Scoring is sparse and win-only:

• Decisive round (capture or wipe): every winner scores +1, every loser scores -1. (Four-team free-for-all generalizes this zero-sum: the winning team scores +1 per losing team — see "Four-team mode".)
• scoring: "pot" (config-gated; the default "classic" is the rule above) replaces the payout with an ante: every team contributes one point and the winning team takes the whole pot, the losing teams splitting the forfeit evenly. Two teams pay +2 / -2; four teams pay +4 to the winner and -1 to each of the three losers. Draws are unchanged.
• Time-limit draw: -1 for both sides (GameVersion 21). Running out the clock is never better than losing, so stalling has no upside for anyone.
• Mutual-wipe draw (both teams eliminated on the same tick): 0 for both sides — both at least fought to a decision.

Kills, deaths, heart pickups, carry time, and captures are still recorded in the episode results for leaderboards and analysis — they just do not award points. This keeps the training objective tied purely to winning.

FFA (battle-royale) scoring is different. In FFA the episode score — results.scores, the per-player reward — is the quantity the platform rates on: Elo is each policy's mean episode score; placementSlots and win are not read. The score is survival 1 point per whole second alive + kill 50 to the last damager (environmental deaths credit nobody) + assist pot 25 split evenly (integer, remainder dropped) among the victim's other damagers within 240 ticks + podium 100/40/15 by final placement. These are the hosted br-12/br-16 and config.br.json values under GV47; the repo default constants are 10/4.

Controls

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Tuning defaults (configurable)

These are starting values, exposed in the game config and tuned in self-play.

Engine tick rate is 24 ticks/sec (inherited from Crewrift); all second-based values above convert at that rate.

Observation render scale: the PLAYER observation stream (what bots parse) is 1x map resolution -- object coordinates and sprite pixel sizes are map pixels directly, so an object's center IS its map point: map_x = object.x + sprite.width / 2 (same for y), no divisor. Only the SPECTATOR/replay stream supersamples its zoomable board layers (2x, RenderScale); the sim, the gameHash, and everything above (map size 1235x659, ranges, speeds) stay in map pixels. A 0.6.0-era build shipped the wire at 3x -- any advice about dividing coordinates by 3 is stale. The invisible walkability map sprite is 1235x659 in every stream.

The episode parameters are stated outright at t=0. The init snapshot carries an invisible 1x1 marker labeled game teams <count> map <width>x<height> — the number of teams sharing the arena (2 or 4) and the exact map size in map pixels for THIS episode. Match the prefix game teams ; the tail splits on spaces into ["<count>", "map", "<width>x<height>"]. Generated maps come in several size classes and team layouts, so a policy should read this marker (or fall back to the walkability sprite's dimensions and counting Room <color> Base markers) instead of assuming the classic 1235x659 two-team arena.

So are the endzones. The same init snapshot carries one invisible 1x1 marker per team labeled endzone <color> <shape> <x0>,<y0> <x1>,<y1>: the team's home capture region stated outright. <x0>,<y0> / <x1>,<y1> are the INCLUSIVE top-left and bottom-right corners of the zone's bounding box in map pixels, and <shape> says how the zone fills that box:

Match the prefix endzone ; the tail splits on spaces into ["<color>", "<shape>", "<x0>,<y0>", "<x1>,<y1>"], each corner splitting once more on the comma. Validate <shape> against the five tokens above: the SPECTATOR stream also emits endzone <color> power <n> glow overlays under the same prefix (the player stream does not). Scoring rules are unchanged — these markers restate the geometry the sim already plays; before they existed a policy had to reconstruct it from the room markers and its own copy of the zone formulas.

So are the handicaps. The same init snapshot carries one invisible 1x1 marker per team labeled handicap <color> <permille> hp <n> lives <n> spd <n> miss <n>: the team's authored handicap fraction in permille (0..1000, 0 = unhandicapped) plus the ENGINE-resolved gameplay deltas it interpolates to — hit points per life, lives, max speed as a percent of the base max speed (100 = full), and the percent of point-blank shots dropped (0..50). Match the prefix handicap ; the tail splits on spaces into ["<color>", "<permille>", "hp", "<n>", "lives", "<n>", "spd", "<n>", "miss", "<n>"] — the hp/lives/spd/miss tokens are fixed. The marker is emitted for EVERY team, permille 0 included, so an absent marker means an engine predating it, never "no handicap". The deltas are stated so a policy can adapt to a weakened team (its own or an enemy's) without re-deriving the interpolation formula.

So are the perks. The same init snapshot carries one invisible 1x1 marker per team labeled perks <color> <group> [<group> …] mods hp <n> aim <n> nade <n> spd <n> luck <n> dmg <n>: each <group> is the comma-joined perk names one policy seat on that team carries — the vocabulary is armor (extra hit point), scope (tighter gun aim), grenade (longer throws), thruster (faster top speed), luck (a fraction of landed gun shots deal extra damage, default double) — or the literal - for none. One group means the whole team shares it; two or more deal to the team's distinct policies in join order (CTF-Doubles; policy-name-pinned config groups emit in config order, without names). After the fixed mods token come the ENGINE-RESOLVED magnitudes the sim actually plays, so a policy never assumes the defaults: hp armor's extra hit points, aim/nade/spd/luck the scope/grenade/thruster/luck fractions in permille, dmg a lucky shot's hit points. Match the prefix perks ; the tail splits on spaces into ["<color>", "<group>", …] up to the mods literal, each group splitting again on commas. The marker is emitted for EVERY team — an unperked team reads perks <color> - with no mods tail — so an absent marker means an engine predating it, never "no perks".

So are the trenches. The same init snapshot carries one invisible 1x1 marker per dug pit labeled trench <x0>,<y0> <x1>,<y1>: the pit's INCLUSIVE bounding-box corners in map pixels, one marker per entry in the map's trench list. Match the prefix trench ; the tail splits on spaces into ["<x0>,<y0>", "<x1>,<y1>"], each corner splitting once more on the comma. Trenches are dug pits you can stand in for cover: climbing OUT (moving away from the pit's center) costs 1/5 max speed, firing from inside triples your cooldown, and an incoming gun shot has a 70% chance to be ducked while you're inside — none of that changes line of sight. Before this marker existed, trenches were invisible to a policy: the walkability map sprite is a BINARY mask, and a trench floor reads identically to open floor on it — a policy could stand in one, or walk through one under fire, with no signal it was there at all. Trenches are a 2-team generated-map feature (never on 4-team maps, and the hand-authored default arena never digs any); a map that rolled zero pits emits zero markers, not an empty-box one. The marker pool holds up to 256 trenches per match — a wide empirical margin (an explicit mapPits count locks 0..64, but the default DENSITY roll has no fixed cap and can exceed that on a large generated map) — and a map that somehow rolls past even that loses markers for the overflow trenches rather than dropping the whole snapshot.

So are the paint puddles. The same init snapshot carries one invisible 1x1 marker per puddle labeled puddle <x0>,<y0> <x1>,<y1>: the blob's INCLUSIVE bounding-box corners in map pixels, one marker per entry in the map's puddle list, with exactly the trench marker's tail contract (split the tail on spaces, each corner on the comma). Puddles are organic disc-union splats, so the box is slightly LOOSE (conservative) geometry — treat the whole box as hazardous rather than trying to trace the spill's exact edge. A puddle is a pure floor hazard: standing inside rolls a puddleDamagePct (default 20%) chance of 1 damage per full second of continuous occupancy, and it never slows movement or fire, never blocks shots or vision. Like the trench floor, a puddle reads identically to open floor on the binary walkability map sprite — this marker is the only signal it is there. Puddles are a config-gated 2-team generated-map feature (no map has any by default); a map without puddles emits zero markers, not an empty-box one. The marker pool holds 64 — the mapPuddles cap.

So is your own aim. Every player frame carries an invisible 1x1 HUD marker labeled own aim <brads>: your turret angle as of the rendered tick, in brads (256 per turn, 0 = east, counter-clockwise). Match the prefix own aim and parse the tail as an integer. Before this marker a policy had to dead-reckon its own aim open-loop from its rotate inputs; the marker caps that drift at one frame gap (integrate held rotation between frames, resync on each frame — see docs/PROTOCOL.md).

The full wire contract, including the CTF input-protocol extensions, is in PROTOCOL.md. Labels, sprite/object ids, and layers are unchanged between streams, with one exception: while you are dead your own body is the only player sprite in frame, labeled corpse <color> <side> instead of player <color> <side>, so a policy scanning for player labels never mistakes a body for a live enemy.

The capture object is a HEART in the fiction but flag in its LABEL. Every rule, banner, and end-card above calls it a heart, and that is the real name of the thing. Its sprite labels, however, are <color> flag, <color> flag planted, <color> flag carried, and <color> flag carrier glow — scan for flag, not heart. The history: 0.7.0 renamed the object heart and renamed the labels to match, then a later renderer restore brought the labels back to flag while the fiction stayed heart. This document claimed red heart / blue heart until 2026-07-28; a policy written from that claim saw no objectives at all. The generated tests/label_manifest.txt is the ground truth if this text and the engine ever disagree again.

Walking onto the planted heart grabs it. The <color> flag planted sprite object's center is the grab point, and the touch radius is 34px (FlagPickupRange, GV42) — sized to the 60px-wide gem. So a body center anywhere on the pedestal's heart footprint takes it: navigate to the object center and you do not need to arrive exactly on it. There is no grab button. The DRAWN gem sits in the top half of a double-height canvas, standing on the pedestal with its tip at the grab point — read the object's center, never where the paint is.

This took three fixes, and the failure modes are worth knowing, because they are the classic way a "visible objective" becomes unpickable:

• Before 2026-08-08 the big planted banner was bottom-anchored, putting its visual center ~28px above the grab point — outside the then-12px radius entirely. Policies that walked onto the heart they saw could never pick it up, at any precision.
• That fix sank the gem halfway into the pedestal to hold the contract; the stance was restored on 2026-08-08 by padding the canvas instead, which keeps the object centered on the grab point while the gem stands erect.
• The 12px radius itself survived both and remained a hidden precision demand: a fifth of the gem's width, so the visible target overstated the real one 5x. Agents and humans stood plainly on the heart and did not get it. GV42 keys the radius to the art, which is what the player aims at.

Grenades add the labels documented in the Grenades section, and the throw button is input mask bit 128.

Spray cans add the labels documented in the Spray can section; their pickup and carrier markers are fog-gated like other floor and overhead item markers.

The cone weapon is a SPRAY CAN (renamed from "plasma arc"). It is the same weapon with the same numbers — only the art and the names changed, so this is a pure vocabulary break for label-scanning policies. Rename in five places:

Analysis events (tools/extract_events.nim) likewise carry weapon: "spray" instead of "plasma", and the broadcast item token is spray. The internal PlasmaArc* identifiers and hasPlasmaArc field keep their names (as the flag→heart rename kept sim.flags), so gameHash and replays are unaffected — no GameVersion bump.

The analysis stream reports gun_trigger when A locks the aim and shot when the paintball actually leaves after the windup. A correlated shot_impact records where that paintball stopped, including misses. grenade_throw and grenade_impact share the same correlation contract; active cone ticks emit spray_use. These weapon events carry a deterministic action_id, native heading_brads (0 east, 64 north), map-space x/y, and distance where applicable. Damage-capable shot_impact, grenade_impact, and spray_use events always carry damages, an array of {slot, amount, hp, blocked} rows; a miss has an empty array. The stream also emits item_pickup with the item name and player, and shout with the sanitized content and player. The older flat hit and damage rows remain for compatibility.

Since 0.7.5: shouts (see the Shouts section) add the label <team> shout <name>: <text>; chat packets, previously ignored, are now applied as shouts and recorded in replays (GameVersion 3 — older replays are rejected at load).

Anonymous shouters: that label's name field is now the shouter's anonymous slot letter. It used to be the connecting player's name, which told everyone in earshot whose policy was talking. The label's SHAPE did not change, so a policy that reads the payload after ": " needs no update. Replays are unaffected: labels are rendered, never recorded, so the GameVersion is unchanged and an old replay replays identically — under the new label.

Player-sprite labels are stable across the HD art change: the rotating high-definition soldier is a pure visual upgrade — living players are still player <color> <side> (yourself self <color> <side>, selected selected player <color> <side>, a body corpse <color> <side>), where <side> is the coarse right/left the aim falls into. The floating aim dot <color> indicator has been retired; facing is read from the sprite's swept gun and the vision cone, so a label-scanning policy sees the same vocabulary it always has. Nothing carries a player's aim angle any more — there is no absolute readback of where anyone (including a teammate) is pointing, only what you infer from a body's rendered facing. The reference bot scanned this retired label for months and got an empty answer every tick.

The labels are enforced, not just documented. tests/label_manifest.txt is the generated list of every label the engine actually emits, and tests/test_label_contract.nim fails if that set drifts or if a label the reference policy scans for stops being emitted. When this prose and the engine disagree, the manifest is right and this document is stale — that is exactly how the heart/flag claim above went wrong. The label vocabulary itself lives in src/ctf/labels.nim, shared by the engine and the reference policy.

The hp bar is true hit points: every living player carries an overhead bar object labeled hp <hp>/<maxHp>[ shield <s>] — one green pip per remaining base hit point out of that seat's OWN maximum (the hitPoints config, handicap-interpolated, plus the armor perk: an armored seat reads hp 4/4 and draws a longer bar), with one blue pip per remaining shield-layer hp appended while a shield holds. The denominator is per-seat data, not a constant — parse it from the label (the reference policy scans the hp prefix) rather than restating a max of your own. The shield tail is spelled apart from base hp on purpose: the layer depletes first and its blue pips vanish with it, so hp 3/3 shield 2 and hp 3/3 are different survivability, not different spellings of "5".

Identity badges: every living player carries a separate badge object labeled identity <color> <name> (alpha..theta — see Teams & spawns). Like the hp <hp>/<maxHp> bar, the badge is a distinct object centered on its player's body: attach it by proximity. It is fog-gated with its player and disappears on death.

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Implementation notes

This section is a build plan, not player-facing rules.

Reused from Crewrift (the engine, ~60–70% of the code):

• Continuous movement, fixed-point sub-pixel carry, wall-sliding collision against a per-pixel walkMask.
• Line-of-sight against a per-pixel wallMask. The old per-player 128×128 camera is gone: each player now gets the full map with a per-viewer fog-of-war (recursive shadowcasting on an 8px visibility cell grid, intersected with the vision cone and bubble) that culls fogged entities from the observation and dims the unseen area with a fog overlay layer.
• The Sprite v1 protocol (button-mask input + sprite/object observations), websocket server (/player, /global, /replay, /reward), replay recording/playback, JSON config loading, and reward streaming.

Rewritten (the game layer, replacing social deduction):

• sim.nim: replace Crewmate/Imposter roles with Red/Blue teams; replace tryKill (proximity grab) with directional hitscan + LOS along the aim; add lives/respawn, heart pickup/carry/return, team win-check, and a Lobby → Playing → GameOver phase machine (drop RoleReveal/Voting/VoteResult).
• Player struct: keep x,y,velX,velY,carryX,carryY,alive,color,reward; drop task/vent/vote fields; add team, lives, respawnTimer, fireCooldown, aimBrads, carryingFlag.
• global.nim observation building: team-colored player sprites, the heart sprites, a carrier indicator, the per-viewer fog overlay and fog-culled entity stream (there are deliberately no heart arrows — fog of war replaced all global tracking intel), a distinct self marker, and per-player lives / fire-cooldown UI on HUD layers.
• New symmetric arena: a new .resources map (CSS-like rects) plus an Aseprite image with walk/wall layers. Red/Blue spawn strips on the left/right edges, heart pedestal at center, obstacles mirrored across the vertical axis, home-edge capture zones at the leftmost/rightmost columns.
• New team-based config.json and coworld_manifest_battleroyale.json (slots carry team instead of role; results schema reports team/kills/deaths/captures).
• A baseline bot (Crewrift's notsus equivalent) speaking Sprite v1.
• A CTF grader scoring episodes from wins.

Resolved: CTF needed team-based seating and win/loss ranking rather than Crewrift's social-deduction scheme. This is no longer a per-game concern — the Battle Royale league runs on the platform ladder service (commissioner_key=platform), which owns seating and ranking. This repo ships the game and baseline player only; it declares no commissioner runnable.