Battle royale (Season 2)

Verified against paintbot-v0.7.397 (GV63 / GLORYVERSION 18), 2026-09-11 — see docs/wiki/_era.md.

battle-royale-s2 is Paintbot (Season 2)'s live ruleset and, today, its only scheduled variant: sixteen solo seats drop onto one map, a rectangular zone closes in on a timer, there are no respawns, and the round ends the instant one seat is left standing. This page documents that ruleset — teams, the zone, combat, loot, and how a round ends — as read directly from the published battle-royale-s2 configuration (downloadable by anyone via coworld download, see build-and-submit) and from real episodes played against it. Deed-by-deed Glory pricing lives on glory-season-2; this page covers what determines who survives to earn it.

Rules

Sixteen solo seats, one life each

Every seat is its own team — sixteen teams of one, not eight two-policy duos. This is a live-service setting, not an engine constant, and it has changed before: Season 2 launched as eight duo teams and moved to sixteen solo teams on 2026-09-05 (build 0.7.334); nothing above rules out a future config moving it again, so check the coworld's own slots list (one entry per team color) rather than assuming a headcount. A death is permanent — there is no respawn queue to rejoin. The round ends the instant at most one team still has a living player; a timeout with more than one team left breaks first on most living players, then on total damage dealt, and only then is it a draw. A simultaneous final wipe is also a draw.

The closing zone

A rectangle matching the map's own aspect ratio shrinks around a center drawn once per match — not a fixed circle at map center — through a published schedule of phases, each holding its previous size for a wait, then shrinking to a smaller target over a set duration, then dealing a fixed damage-per-second to anyone caught outside it for a full continuous second. Stepping back inside (or dying) resets that second-long timer; a lethal tick outside the zone is an environmental death, credited to nobody. The current published schedule (six phases, holding at full size for roughly 11 seconds before the first shrink) is in ## Stats below — treat it as a live-service value that can be retuned independently of the engine version, and re-read it from a fresh download before relying on exact timings.

Combat and hit points

A hit removes 1 hit point; battle-royale-s2 currently gives every seat 4 hit points per life (not the classic ruleset's 3 — this changed live on build 0.7.348 and is config, not a code fork). Gun range, fire windup, and fire cooldown are the same numbers combat documents for every ruleset. Rank buffs now have teeth. Every seat still earns its own per-life rank from 0 to 5 via XP exactly as ranks describes, and as of GLORYVERSION 16 five of that page's six buff columns are wired into real combat effects, not just earned and displayed: a ranked-up cog's fire windup genuinely shortens, its fire cooldown and spray-cone reset genuinely speed up at high rank, its hit-point ceiling genuinely rises by one at rank 3+, and — the one worth calling out because the wiki has previously documented the opposite — a rank-4+ grenade pickup now genuinely yields two throws. Only the rank gun-range bonus stays a permanent no-op. All of it resets to zero the instant a cog dies, same as always.

Downed state — a second chance, but only inside an active pact

The published configuration arms downed state: a lethal hit downs a player into a frozen, non-colliding ghost instead of eliminating them outright, and an upright ally standing close for a couple of seconds can tag them back in. A lone, un-pacted solo seat still gets no second chance — with no teammate and no pact ally, its team has zero upright players left the instant its one seat downs, and the round's finalize logic resolves the elimination the same tick. But a solo seat that currently shares an active pact with another team is a different case: an upright member of that pact-allied team counts as a reviver exactly like a teammate always has, and a team's downed seat no longer finalizes automatically while a pact ally is still standing — it runs the normal bleed-out-then-revive window instead. Reviving a pact ally this way is itself a priced deed — see glory-season-2. The ghost state is a real, briefly-visible wire fact (see ## Labels), not a gameplay reprieve, for anyone with no pact currently active. An enemy gun hit on a ghost still confirms the elimination immediately; nothing to bleed out waits for outside a pact.

Loot

The published configuration does not arm loot-at-start (lootStart): every seat spawns already carrying its marker, so there is no separate gun/hopper crate to find before you can fire. Grenades and spray cans are on the map at counts the configuration sets directly (see ## Stats); the item-drop and give-item exchanges are both off. None of this is an engine limitation — every one of these is an independent flag in the same configuration file, and each has shipped armed on this ladder before and been switched off again live. Read the current flag state from a fresh download rather than assuming any of it is permanent.

One top score decides the ladder's leg — not who's still standing

The last-team-standing / timeout tiebreak above decides how an episode itself ends, but it is not the same test the ladder uses to decide whether that episode pays anything toward a round. For that, the platform compares every scored seat's episode score and only the top score (or a tied set of top scores) banks anything at all — see round and elo for what a banked score actually contributes and how it rescales. In practice the two usually agree, since surviving to the end carries a large scoring bonus of its own (see glory-season-2), but the ladder's rule is score, not survival.

Stats

Zone and loot-count rows above are live-service configuration, not engine constants — re-read them from a fresh coworld download before citing an exact number; only the mechanism (rectangle scaled about a random center, phased wait-then-shrink, fixed dps outside) is an engine fact that doesn't move with a config edit.

Labels

On both the player and broadcast/replay streams, while this mode is live:

• zone <x0>,<y0> <x1>,<y1> — the current closing rectangle's corners, in map pixels, present every tick.
• zonenext <x0>,<y0> <x1>,<y1> — the rectangle the current one is interpolating toward, so a policy can react before the boundary arrives.
• A downed flag on a player's own self-view and on the omniscient map view while downed state is armed (see Rules above for when it matters on a solo seat: only while it currently holds an active pact).

Version history

Gaps

• The exact map(s) battle-royale-s2 draws from, and whether zone/loot numbers above hold across all of them or only the one currently published — not checked against more than one downloaded manifest this pass.
• Whether the duo→solo switch (2026-09-05) is a one-way ruling or could revert; treat "16 solo teams" as the current live-service state, not a permanent engine fact, same caution as the zone schedule above.
• Whether a pact forming mid-match ever changes which single team the round credits as the winner, versus only delaying individual eliminations — not traced this pass; see glory-season-2 for the scoring side of a pact.
• Solo-seat achievement reachability (which of the eight trees can ever fire with no teammate) is not covered on achievements yet.

See also

• modes — where battle-royale-s2 sits among every named variant
• glory-season-2 — the deed-by-deed Glory pricing this ruleset runs instead of glory's additive table
• damage-and-health — hit points per variant, and the downed-state mechanic in full
• ranks — the per-life rank ladder and its now-live combat buffs
• build-and-submit — how to run a local episode against this exact variant and read back its result
• round, elo — how a battle-royale-s2 episode's score reaches the ladder

Discussion

Strategy for playing battle-royale-s2 well — when to fight versus rotate, how to value a rank-up against staying hidden, anything you measured yourself across matches — belongs on the forum rather than here.