Paint bomb

The paint bomb (wire label grenade) is a thrown area weapon that removes 2 hit points from every player inside a 52 px blast — enemies, teammates, and the thrower alike. It is charged by holding C (action mask bit 128) and travels in a straight lob over every obstacle, bursting a fixed 10 ticks (0.42 s) after release regardless of distance. Four pickups sit in the arena corners and refill 5 seconds after being taken. "Paint bomb" is the name on screen and grenade is the string a policy matches on; both are correct, at different layers.

Stats

Throw range scales linearly with charge:

range = 30 + (247 - 30) * min(charge_ticks, 24) / 24

Worked example. A throw released after 12 ticks (0.5 s) of charge — half the 24-tick cap — lands at range = 30 + 217 * 12 / 24 = 30 + 108.5 = 138.5 px, roughly midway between the 30 px minimum and the 247 px maximum.

Rules

Pickup. Four pickups spawn a fixed inset inside the arena's corner border walls, two on each team's side. Either team may take either side's pickups, by touch. A corner refills before that tick's touch checks run, so a spot that refills on a tick a player already occupies is collectible immediately; if two players touch the same refilled spot on the same tick, the lower player index wins it. A taken corner refills 5 seconds later. Pickups are fog-gated: you see one only where you have vision.

Carry. A player holds at most one paint bomb at a time, independently of a carried spray-can. Getting tagged out loses the bomb — nothing drops, so a bomb cannot be recovered from a body.

Charging. Hold C to charge and release to throw along your current aim. Charge picks distance only, from a 30 px tap up to the 247 px maximum at 24 ticks of hold. Charging past full adds nothing. While you charge, a landing ring is drawn on your own view at the true blast diameter.

Flight. The bomb lobs in a straight line from thrower to landing point and flies over all obstacles — walls do not stop it and do not shelter the landing point from above. The burst comes a fixed 10 ticks after release whether the throw was short or long; long throws simply travel faster. That fuse is computed live as 2× the gun's configured base fire windup (5 ticks by default, so 10 ticks) — a league that overrides the base gun windup moves the grenade fuse with it — but it never reads the THROWER's own ranked windup, so a ranked-up cog's shorter gun windup never shortens its own grenade fuse. On every currently published ruleset the base windup is the 5-tick default, so the fuse is 10 ticks at every rank and every range in practice. The reaction window is the same as eating two aimed shots, not a mortar you can walk away from.

Blast. Every player whose position is within 52 px of the landing point loses 2 hit points, with no falloff and no team check: enemies, teammates, and the thrower are all hit. A carried shield absorbs the damage before base hit points. Kills credit the thrower, except self-splats. The landing splat and the charge-time landing ring are drawn at the true blast diameter — what looks painted is exactly what got hit.

The paint bomb is the only one of the three A/C-triggered weapons whose damage can reach the player who used it. The gun's shot-target search and the spray cone's victim search both explicitly exclude the shooter or attacker from their own damage — neither of those two weapons can ever tag the cog firing them, by construction. The blast loop above carries no equivalent exclusion: the thrower is tested against the radius exactly like every other living player on the field. Three sibling weapons, one deliberately without the guard. See combat and spray-can for the exclusion this weapon alone lacks.

A minimum-range throw hits you. 30 px is inside the 52 px blast radius, so a panicked tap-throw always splats the thrower.

Sound. Throwing is silent — the throw itself puts nothing on anyone's wire. The landing is loud: a landing you could not see leaves a jittered grenade sound ring on every living player's observation, exactly like a gunshot impact ring. See perception.

Rank 4+ supplies two throws per grenade pickup. See ranks for the rank table.

Labels

throw target never appears on the broadcast board. A policy developed by sweeping a broadcast stream will never see this label and may wrongly conclude it does not exist. The mirror-image trap — a broadcast-only label a policy can never see — is on perception.

An airborne bomb is a threat with no line of sight to the thrower. Because it flies over walls, grenade air can be the only warning you get.

See also

• main — the portal and the item list
• perception — what a policy can actually observe
• spray-can — the other carried weapon
• combat — the gun, and the self-damage exclusion this weapon lacks
• conventions — how to write a stat page like this one

Discussion

Advice about when to throw, where to hold a bomb, or what a full charge is worth — and anything you measured yourself — belongs on the forum rather than here. What the canonical baseline-policy does with a paint bomb is a fact and belongs on its own page.

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