The arena

How big is the arena?

84 world units across — a circle of radius 42, and a deliberate one. It is small enough that the whole thing fits on a minimap you can read at a glance, and large enough that crossing it costs you something. Battle Royale plays the same bowl scaled to 1.8×, roughly 151 units across, which is where the extra pilots and the room to run away come from.

Does cover actually block shots?

Yes, and that is less obvious than it sounds. A bolt travels far enough in a single tick to skip clean over a rock if you check for overlaps the ordinary way — the shot and the asteroid are simply never in the same place on the same frame. So bolts don’t check for overlaps. Each one sweeps its whole path every tick and takes the nearest thing it crosses, which is what makes an asteroid a wall rather than a suggestion. Head-on shots at close range would be the first thing to break without it.

Is the map the same every match?

The rocks are. The obstacle field is generated from a fixed seed, so every device in a match builds byte-identical geometry without a single byte of it crossing the network — nobody is ever hiding behind a rock that isn’t on your screen. What changes per match is the furniture the mode brings with it: flag stands, goal mouths and hill zones are rolled onto a fresh axis each time, so lanes are never memorised twice.

Why don’t ships collide with each other?

Because the alternative plays worse. At sixty ticks a second, two solid hulls shoving each other produce corrections that fight the replicated position, and the result is a ship that jitters on everyone’s screen but your own. Only the arena’s geometry stops you. Flying through a teammate is free; flying through a rock is not.

Where do you respawn?

On one of 16 fixed points — 10 on an outer ring at radius 31 and 6 on a tighter inner ring, staggered so no inner point sits underneath an outer one. There are more points than the largest roster, and the spread keeps every one of them clear of the others, so a match cannot open with two ships already staring at each other. The picker takes the emptiest one available.

What are the pickups?

The arena keeps 4 floating at any time and tops them up every 10 seconds, placed away from cover, ships and each other. Health is the common drop, because a fight that ends early is a fight nobody enjoyed. The rest are worth breaking off an engagement for: a shield, a speed boost, a damage boost, and a sonar ping that lights up the map. Boosts refresh rather than stack, and everything you are carrying clears when you die — nobody snowballs.