Rules

01

Your first flight

Use a desktop browser and a keyboard. Open Play, pick a ship in the panel, and click Launch Game. You fly under your LarkSpark name, and no account is required.

Learn to steer before you chase anyone. Hold W or Up to thrust, then let go and watch the ship keep moving. A and D, or Left and Right, rotate the ship; they do not move it sideways. S or Down applies reverse thrust relative to where the ship is facing.

Practice in open space: accelerate, release thrust, turn around, and thrust against your old direction of travel. Turning alone does not reverse your course, so leave room before entering narrow passages.

02

Survive your first fight

Your energy bar is both your health and your weapon budget. Firing nonstop leaves less energy to survive a hit, so fire short bursts with Space or Ctrl, then let energy recover before the next pass.

Tab fires the cannon and the backtick key deploys a mine. Try each one on its own to see its effect and energy cost. A mine stays where you drop it, so aim for where a pilot is going, not where they are.

Hold Shift for afterburner when you need to reposition, and release it once you have space. Afterburner also burns energy. If energy keeps falling after you stop shooting, check whether you are still boosting or running another ability.

03

Choose when to collect and when to fight

Collecting Xenite builds your ship while you learn the arena. Approach a pickup with an exit in mind: an orb in a busy corridor may cost more energy than it is worth. If someone is already firing down that corridor, circle around.

When hunting, do not sit directly behind an opponent for the whole chase. Watch their direction of travel and aim ahead of it. If shots keep missing, stop firing and change your angle. Saving energy for the next encounter beats filling empty space with bullets.

04

Core mechanics

Energy: your ship starts full (from 1,280 to 2,400 energy, depending on the ship) and slowly recharges. Energy is your health, your ammunition, and the power for every ability. Firing never takes you below 1, so you cannot shoot yourself to death, but a ship that low goes down to the next hit. At zero your ship explodes, and the next flight starts again with base stats.

Upgrades: collecting Xenite upgrades your weapon levels, maximum energy, recharge rate, speed, and handling. Dying costs some of those upgrades, so survival matters.

Physics: ships keep moving until you counter-thrust. Positioning, momentum, and timing decide fights more than raw firepower.

06

Deathmatch for Xenite

The arena is a free-for-all deathmatch. Climb the leaderboard by holding the most Xenite, collected from the field or taken from other pilots.

A destroyed ship drops its Xenite. Pick it up fast, or someone else will. Green Xenite carries upgrades such as more energy, faster recharge, and stronger weapons, so it is always worth the detour.

Every ship launches with 100 Xenite, and every wreck leaves its core: a glowing plasma battery in the ship's element colour, worth 50 Xenite and two upgrades. Whoever takes the core is always paid for the kill. At least two green Xenite always fly out with it, too.

Size up a ship before you attack. The chevrons under it show how far it has powered up, from none to five (white, then gold, then red), and a powered-up ship leaves a longer, brighter trail. The number by its name is the Xenite it carries: what its wreck is worth. How much energy it has left, you find out in the fight.

07

Rock, asteroids and a new map every time

The arena is never the same twice: every time it restarts, it builds a new map of rock masses and winding walls. The lavender metal plating is indestructible; the rest is land, and land can be broken and built.

Bullets leave rock alone, but bombs and mines blast craters in it, shrapnel chips at it, and rock that is about to give shows cracks. A Thor flies straight through rock without a scratch. A Terraformer does the opposite: it grows a new formation of land where it lands. Bouncing shots glance off the curve of a wall, so a crater can send them somewhere new. Rock that has been blasted away slowly grows back, but only once nobody has been near it for a while.

Asteroids drift in from the storm and turn as they cross the arena. They are solid: they shove your ship aside (the bigger the rock, the harder the shove), stop your shots, and bounce off land and off each other. Bombs and mines bite chunks out of them and knock them spinning, a light one far more than a heavy one, and a blast that cuts one in two leaves two asteroids; small pieces crumble into a little Xenite. When an asteroid drifts back out, the storm eats it.

Your minimap only shows the land you have flown near; the rest stays dark until you explore it. Every ship still shows on it.

08

The storm

The arena is a circle, and outside it is the storm. You can fly into it, but it drains your energy, faster the deeper you go, and your energy will not recharge until you are back inside. Run out in the storm and your ship is destroyed; if someone hit you in the last few seconds, they get the kill. The storm also eats away any rock it covers.

The circle grows as more pilots join and shrinks as they leave. A countdown warns you first, and the minimap shows where the next circle will be as a dashed ring, so start moving early. The new circle is rarely in the same place as the old one.