The loop
You stake to spawn. You grow by eating. You only keep anything if you survive long enough to complete an extraction. Everything else — every pellet, every corpse, every point of value on the map — came out of a player’s stake. No value is ever created out of nothing. That constraint drives every rule below.Entering
Stakes are fixed tiers: 0.1, 0.25, 0.5 and 1 SOL. The floor exists on purpose. A one-lamport snake would be the smallest and fastest-turning body in the game — a free kamikaze against someone who staked real size. Your stake splits three ways the moment your deposit confirms:
The pellet share is the part most people misread. It is not a pool that trickles
out over time: it becomes your pellets, on the map, at the moment you join.
One player alone on a map sees only the food their own stake paid for. A sparse
map at low population is the intended behaviour, not a bug — food density follows
deposits, and there is no free ambient respawn.
Score and SOL are the same thing
Internally the game runs on score, at a fixed rate of 1000 score per SOL, and it uses the same rate in both directions — SOL to score when you join, score to SOL when you extract. That symmetry is what makes the arena conserve value exactly. So a 0.1 SOL entry gives you 84.5 score to start with, and one pellet is worth one score point. On the way out, amounts round down to the lamport: the dust stays in the vault rather than being owed to anyone.Growing
You grow by eating, and there are only three things to eat:Pellets
Worth 1 score each. They exist because someone staked.
Corpse orbs
Worth 5 score each. Someone died where you are standing.
Boost trails
Worth 1.5 score. Dropped by players who are burning score to go fast.
Dying
The arena is a disc, and its border is lethal. Beyond that, you die by running your head into another snake’s body. Head-to-head, both die. When you die, your value does not vanish and it does not all go to your killer:- 70 % stays on the ground as a corpse, exactly where you fell, for anyone to eat;
- 30 % is recycled as ordinary pellets scattered across the whole map.
Freshly spawned snakes are briefly protected. While that grace lasts they
cannot be killed — and they also cannot pick anything up or make progress on an
extraction. It buys you a moment to orient, not a moment to farm.
Disconnecting is dying
If you close the tab, lose your connection, or quit mid-run, your snake dies immediately and drops its corpse like any other death. This is intentional and the cost is accepted. An earlier rule froze disconnected snakes and left them killable, but a frozen body behaves like temporary invulnerability, and pulling the plug became a way to dodge a fight. The price of closing that hole is that a genuine network drop costs you the run.Extracting — the only way out
Growing is not winning. The only way to convert what you are carrying back into SOL is to complete an extraction.1
A point appears
Roughly every 10 seconds of downtime, a single extraction zone opens
somewhere on the map. It never spawns hard against the lethal border, but
that is the only promise about its position — you may be nowhere near it.
2
You stand in it for 12 seconds
The zone is a circle you must stay inside. Leave it, even for an instant, and
your progress resets to zero. Twelve seconds is a long time to stand still
in the open, and that exposure is the entire point of the mechanic.
3
One player wins it
The first to complete the channel extracts — and the zone closes
immediately. Everyone else’s progress is wiped and the cooldown restarts.
An extraction point is not a queue; it is a contest with one winner.
4
Your value leaves the arena
Your score converts to lamports at the same 1000-per-SOL rate, becomes a
payout claim, and your snake despawns. There is no corpse — this is the one
exit where value crosses out of the game. Playing again means staking again.