Ranks

A rank is a cog's per-life level, 0 through 5, driven by XP — a currency separate from glory that a cog earns for itself within a single life and forfeits completely on death. Five cumulative XP thresholds gate ranks 1 through 5, and each one crossed buys a small bundle of combat buffs: faster windup, bonus hit points, faster fire cooldown, a faster spray-cone reset, and — at max rank — a waived carrier speed tax. The chrome name for the ladder's six steps, lowest to highest, is recruit, tagger, marksman, ironhide, quickdraw, legend.

Stats

The XP column below is doubled in the live battle-royale-s2 ruleset. Battle royale's XP comes almost entirely from damage dealt (healing, pickups, and flag actions all pay zero or don't exist without a flag to carry), so a single solo tag would otherwise insta-level a cog under the unscaled thresholds. Doubling every rung keeps rank 5 an exceptional, whole-match haul instead of the default outcome. The "Classic" column is the unscaled table; it does not apply to the only ruleset currently live.

Buffs by rank

The buff table is the mechanic layer: six separate integer arrays, one per rank, that change combat numbers directly. Every value below is causal — it enters the replay hash the same way a hit-point or a windup tick does.

Rank 2's chrome name, "marksman", already collides with an unrelated achievement tier of the same name on achievements. A future rename of either one would silently create or destroy that collision, and nothing would flag it — check both lists before renaming either.

Windup Δ is ticks off the base fire windup, not a percentage or any other unit — a negative value shortens the pull by that many ticks, so rank 1 trims one tick and rank 5 trims two, matching combat's own windup numbers. Fire cooldown and spray reset are percentages of the baseline duration — lower is faster, not a probability. Gun range does not increase with rank. The range multiplier is 100% at every rank. Rank 4+ grants two throws per grenade pickup. The broadcast rank card displays the configured rank buffs; gameplay uses those values for windup, cooldown, HP and charges.

Rules

Rank resets to zero the instant a cog dies. The reset fires at the exact moment of death and zeroes XP, rank, and every per-life counter tied to it — in the live battle-royale-s2 ruleset that is XP and rank only, since the supply-drop credit and count described below do not exist to reset in this build. A ranked-up cog carries none of it into its next life — the buffs in the table above have to be re-earned from rank 0 every respawn. This is a per-life ladder, not a per-episode or per-career one; the same reset also runs once at the start of a new game.

A team's Glory scoreboard is untouched by a rank reset. Ranks and Glory are two separate ledgers on two separate schedules: a rank dies with its cog, but a team's banked Glory survives every individual death in the episode. See glory and scoring for the ledger that does not reset here.

A friendly-fire kill also de-levels the killer, mid-life, with no death required. Killing a teammate costs the killer 20 XP on top of whatever it costs the team's Glory ledger — XP cannot go below 0, and the killer's rank is re-evaluated against the thresholds above immediately, so a bad friendly kill can knock the killer back a rank on the spot. This is a third, separate consequence of one act, distinct from both of the other two: the Glory penalty prices the team's scoreboard, this XP penalty prices the killer's own rank ladder, and neither is the ordinary death-triggered reset above, which only fires when the killer's own cog dies — not when it kills. See glory for the Glory-side penalty on the same act.

Crossing a threshold pays power, not Glory. Ranking up mints 0 Glory and 0 drama — it fires the same deed-accounting path as every other award (so it is still counted for audit purposes) but the payout is zero, and the generic "+N glory" pop is explicitly suppressed for it so no empty toast appears. What actually happens on screen is a dedicated RANK UP pop with one asterisk per rank reached — a celebration that carries no payout. What the rank-up genuinely buys is everything in the buffs table above, plus Ace status at rank 3.

Ace rank (3) lights the ember-plume marker; the supply drop it was designed to unlock does not fire in the live game. From rank 3, a cog gets a visible ember-plume marker any teammate can spot — see perception. The rest of this rule is currently inert in the live battle-royale-s2 ruleset: its maps carry no heart to produce a drop from, and this build never wired the supply-drop pickup path in at all. The designed rate — one drop per 20 new XP earned, at least 90 ticks (3.75 s) apart, capped at 4 per life, cycling med kit, then grenade, then spray can, then shield — describes a rule that does not run today. The achievement tier gated on sharing a supply drop is unreachable for the same reason — see achievements.

The kit cycle a supply drop was designed to rotate through is likewise inert today — the same dead rule the paragraph above flags, not a second one. As designed (not as shipped): a cog's first supply drop in a life would be a med kit, the second a grenade, the third a spray can, and the fourth — the last one the per-life cap would allow — a shield, never wrapping back to med kit within one life. None of this can be observed in the live battle-royale-s2 ruleset because no supply drop is ever produced to demonstrate it.

Mechanic and chrome, kept separate on purpose. The thresholds and the six buff arrays above are the mechanic: stable, causal, integer values that a policy's outcomes actually depend on. The six rank names are chrome: a single display-string table with no gameplay effect of its own, read only for the feed, the log, and the HUD. Because the split is real in the code, not just in this page's layout, the numbers above hold regardless of what the display names are — see conventions for the general rule.

See also

• main — the portal, quick facts, and the objective/currency overview
• glory — team Glory: deeds, pricing, and the mint formula
• achievements — the 8 kit-keyed trees, one of which gates on Ace rank
• scoring — win/loss/timeout match reward, and why it never reads rank or Glory
• perception — the veteran mark <n> label and the rest of the label contract
• combat — fire windup and cooldown, what the rank buffs modify
• paint-bomb — the item-side half of the grenade-charges buff
• conventions — the mechanic/chrome layering rule this page follows

Discussion

Whether staying alive to bank a rank beats trading down for tempo, which rank buff matters most, and anything you measured yourself belong on the forum rather than here.

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