XS Space Glossary: Xenite, Energy, the Storm and Every Item Explained

XS Space has its own words for what you collect, what you fly through and what you carry, and it borrows a few from older space games. This page defines the ones used in the rules, the ships and weapons chapters and the strategy guide. The keys for everything are in the controls.

Flight

Newtonian flight: Flying by the rule that a moving ship keeps moving until something pushes it. Space in XS Space has no friction, so the engine changes your speed and direction and nothing else slows you down.
Inertia: A moving ship’s tendency to carry on the way it is going. It is why turning the ship doesn’t turn your course.
Drift: What the ship does when you let go of the thrust: it slides on at the same speed in the same direction. You can turn freely while drifting, which lets you fire one way while traveling another.
Counter-thrust: Thrusting against the way you are moving to slow down or stop. Turn the ship around and thrust forward, or use reverse thrust.
Afterburner: A speed boost that lasts as long as you hold Shift. It eats into your recharge, so most ships lose energy while it burns.
Rockets: An item that gives a five-second burst of speed, faster than the afterburner and with no energy cost. Every ship launches with three.
Warp: A jump to somewhere else in the arena, on the Q key. It only works at full energy and leaves you with almost none. It takes you to a random spot, or to your portal if you have dropped one.
Portal: An item that marks the spot where you drop it for a minute. Your next warp takes you back there, once, and that trip uses the portal up.

Energy and Xenite

Energy: The one bar that is your health, your ammunition and the power for every ability. Firing never takes it below 1, but a hit that takes it to zero destroys the ship.
Recharge: The rate at which energy refills by itself. It stops in the storm and while Stealth is on, and an ice bomb or ice mine freezes it for a moment.
Xenite: The orbs you collect, and the score. Blue Xenite is worth 3 to 15 an orb, and green Xenite is worth 20 and carries a prize. Every ship launches with 100, and the number by a ship’s name is the Xenite it carries.
Prize: An upgrade that comes with a green Xenite orb or a core. It might raise your energy, recharge, speed, handling or a weapon level, or give you an item or an ability.
Wreck: What is left when a ship is destroyed. It scatters the Xenite the ship carried, including at least two green orbs, and leaves a core.
Core: The glowing plasma battery every wreck leaves behind, in the color of the ship’s element. It is worth 50 Xenite and two upgrades to whoever picks it up.
Chevrons: The marks under a ship that show how far it has powered up, from none to five. They run white, then gold, then red.
Grazer and Hunter: The two ways to play. A Grazer collects Xenite from the field and stays out of trouble. A Hunter goes after other pilots for the Xenite they carry.

The arena

Hangar: The XS Space page where you pick a ship and launch. It is where you start and where you choose a different ship.
Arena: The shared space where every pilot flies and fights at once. It gets a new map each time it restarts.
The circle: The safe part of the arena. It grows as pilots join and shrinks as they leave, after a countdown, and the next circle shows on the minimap as a dashed ring.
The storm: Everything outside the circle. It drains your energy, faster the deeper you go, and stops your recharge. Run out of energy there and the ship is destroyed.
Plating: The lavender metal parts of the map. Nothing breaks it.
Rock: The land that makes up the rest of the map. Bombs, mines and shrapnel break it, a Terraformer grows more, and blasted rock slowly grows back once nobody is near.
Asteroid: A solid rock that drifts in from the storm and turns as it crosses the arena. It shoves ships aside and stops shots, and bombs and mines can break it into pieces.
Minimap: The small map on your screen. It shows every ship, but only the land you have flown near. Hold Z to zoom it.
The four elements: Fire, Water, Earth and Wind. Every ship belongs to one, two ships each, and its shots carry that element’s color and an extra effect on a hit. No element beats another.
The Heart: The fifth element, which appears in the arena now and then and shows on everyone’s minimap. The first pilot to touch it can’t be hurt for 15 seconds and fires a free, fast torrent that carries all four elements.

Weapons

Mines: Bombs that stay where you drop them and explode as a cannon’s bombs do, breaking rock in the same way. They have a level of their own from 1 to 4.
Multifire: A switch that spreads your bullets three wide. Each bullet hits as hard as before, and a volley costs three times the energy.
Rear fire: The Icarus’s own switch. While it is on, the guns and cannon fire backward at whoever is chasing you.
Bouncing: Shots that bounce off walls. Bullets bounce once you have won the Bouncing Bullets prize, the Hydra’s bombs bounce from the start, and the B key switches it on and off.
Shrapnel: The shards a bomb throws in every direction when it hits a wall, and the spray a Burst makes. Shrapnel chips rock and can catch several ships at once.
Thor: A heavy missile that flies straight through rock and asteroids and explodes like a top-level bomb when it reaches a ship. Cover doesn’t stop it.
Terraformer: A seed that grows a new formation of rock where it lands, in the look of your element. It shoves ships aside, sets off mines it covers and always leaves a passage through. It costs a quarter of your energy.

Abilities and items

Cloak: Hides your ship from enemy screens, though not from their minimaps. It switches on only at full energy. Firing a weapon, using an item or taking a hit drops it, and after a shot it stays off for five seconds. Only the Arachne and the Shade have it.
Stealth: Takes your ship off enemy minimaps while leaving it visible on screen. Your energy doesn’t recharge while it is on.
X-Radar: Shows stealthed ships on your minimap. It costs part of your recharge while it is on.
Anti-Warp: Stops every other ship inside a wide ring around you from warping away. Everyone can see the ring, and it costs energy while it runs.
Repel: A shockwave that pushes nearby enemy shots and ships away from you and turns enemy mines into drifting bombs.
Burst: A spray of shrapnel in every direction around your ship. The shards bounce off walls, so it does the most in tight spaces.
Brick: A wall you drop just behind you, eight blocks long and two thick. Ships and shots stop at it, and it stays until bombs, mines or shrapnel break it down.
Decoy: A hologram of your ship that flies on at your speed and turns when you turn. Shots pass through it, it never shows on the minimap, and it lasts thirty seconds.

The kind of game

Top-down shooter: A shooting game seen from directly above, so the whole fight is laid out flat on the screen. Asteroids is the best-known early one.
Free-for-all: A game with no teams, where every pilot is on their own side. The XS Space arena is one.
Deathmatch: A mode in which destroying other players is the way to score. In XS Space the score is the Xenite you hold, and a wreck gives up what it carried.
.io game: A multiplayer browser game in the style of Agar.io and Slither.io, named for the web address ending many of them use. You open a page and play in a shared arena within seconds.
Bot: A ship flown by the computer. The bots in XS Space are LarkSpark’s cast of characters, each with a ship and a way of flying.
Respawn: Coming back into the game after your ship is destroyed. In XS Space you launch again with base stats and the starting 100 Xenite.
Leaderboard: The list of the pilots holding the most Xenite right now. The pilot at the top wears a gold star, so everyone knows who to hunt.

XS Space glossary