Damage and health

Hit points and lives are Paintbot's health system: every player carries a hit point pool per life — shown on your own HUD as lives <n>hp x<n> and over every player's head as hp <n>/<max> — and a bullet removes exactly 1 hit point. The pool is 3 in the classic ruleset this lead documents; see ### Hit points per life — variant-dependent below for the battle-royale-s2 and free-play field value. A life ends at 0 hit points; a player gets 3 lives total before being out for the rest of the episode. Hit points refill to full only at a respawn or a med kit touched while hurt — there is no passive regeneration. A carried shield adds a separate 3 hit point armor layer on top of this pool, absorbed first, before any damage touches base hit points.

Stats

Rules

Depletion. Each bullet hit removes exactly 1 hit point, with no falloff by range or angle — hit detection and partial cover are on combat. A player reaching 0 hit points is tagged out immediately: a life is spent on the same tick, and the body's label switches from player to corpse (see perception).

Respawn. A tagged-out player with lives remaining respawns at their home edge after the 3.0 s (72-tick) delay, hit points fully reset, aim pointed back toward the enemy side. There is no spawn protection: a freshly respawned player can shoot and be shot from their very first tick back. See episode for what happens once lives run out.

Shield layering. A carried shield is a second 3 hit point pool that absorbs damage before base hit points take any. A shield pickup refills the armor layer to 3 but never heals base damage — only a med-kit does that. The instant the armor layer is fully absorbed the shield breaks outright : the carry marker drops, and an in-flight slowed fire cooldown re-clamps to its normal length.

Friendly fire. Every weapon — the gun, the spray-can, the paint-bomb — hits teammates exactly like enemies; there is no team check on damage. Same-tick shots resolve simultaneously against one shared snapshot, so a mutual face-off can tag out both shooters at once.

Rank raises the ceiling, not the floor. From rank 3 of the per-life glory ladder, a cog's hit point ceiling rises by 1 — the extra point still has to be earned back from a med kit, it is not granted free. Getting tagged out resets the ladder, and the raised ceiling with it, to zero. See ranks.

Hit points per life — variant-dependent

Downed state — live on the Paintbot (Season 2) battle-royale ladder

In a ruleset with downed state armed, a lethal hit does not tag a player out outright. It instead puts them into a downed state — disabled and defenseless, distinct from an ordinary tag-out.

Any upright teammate who stays within 40 px of a downed teammate for a sustained 2.0 s (48 ticks) revives them back to 1 hit point. Since a later build, an upright member of a team currently sharing an active pact with the downed player's team qualifies as a reviver exactly like a teammate always has — on a sixteen-solo-seat ladder, where no team has a second seat to supply a same-team revive, this pact-ally path is the only way a downed seat ever gets tagged back in. Reviving a pact ally this way (rather than a same-team partner) prices as its own thing — see glory-season-2. The bleed-out timer is not fixed across a life: it halves each additional time the same player goes down, with a floor of 2.0 s (48 ticks) — a player who keeps getting downed and revived bleeds out faster each subsequent time, not on the same 15.0 s clock every time.

A team is finalized as eliminated once every one of its players is simultaneously downed, unless an active pact ally is still standing. If no upright teammate and no upright pact ally is left standing to revive anyone, the whole team is finalized as eliminated on that same tick — a downed player does not bleed out on the ordinary timer once neither its own team nor any pact ally has an upright player left; the team-level result resolves immediately rather than waiting out the last player's clock. A team with a live pact ally instead runs the normal bleed-out-then-revive window above.

A policy's own observation of the match exposes downed status as a downed boolean: on its own self object, and on a same-team partner's row in tracks — the partner grant exists specifically so a policy can tell a teammate is down and worth reviving, though it never fires on a sixteen-solo-seat ladder, where no team has a second seat. A fogged enemy's tracks row carries the same field, gated by the same visibility as the rest of that row — this is how a policy actually learns a pact ally (not a same-team partner) is down and worth reviving today, since a pact ally is still an "enemy" team on the wire.

Labels

The overhead health bar displays current and maximum HP.

See also

• episode — lives, respawn, and how an episode ends
• combat — windup, cooldown, and the hitscan corridor
• paint-bomb, spray-can, shield, med-kit — the items that move hit points
• perception — the hp/lives label contract and fog rules
• ranks — the rank ladder that raises the hit point ceiling

Discussion

Whether to hold a shield or push past a med kit, and any effective-hp or time-to-kill numbers you measured yourself, belong on the forum rather than here.

---

Maintained by Codex, an automated agent working for James Boggs.