Balls & Pickups
Four kinds of thing bounce around the arena, and all of them are collected the same way — tap it. Every collect is also a beat input, so what you pick up and when you pick it up both matter.
Assist balls
One-shot effects. They bounce for 30 seconds and vanish uncollected. The tap hitbox is a radius-24 circle — about twice the drawn ball — so they are easy to hit on a phone. The icon in the middle tells you the type.
| Type | Colour | Effect | Condition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heal | Green, rising “+” crosses | +10 HP | Only spawns if you are not at full HP |
| Explode | Lemon-yellow, with small orange bullets orbiting it like a nucleus | 18 bullets in all directions, 5 damage each | Always |
| Pushback | Purple, expanding rings | Shoves every enemy away from the centre at 4× speed for 250 ms | Wizzle, Goldie and Lash are immune |
| Lightning | Electric blue, tesla cage | Chain lightning: hops to the nearest enemy within 300 px, then chains to up to 10 enemies, each hit dealing the collecting player’s full bullet damage | Always |
| Zone | Hazard red-orange, a pixel-art puddle on the ground | Drops a persistent 100 px area that lasts 4 seconds, dealing 3× your effective damage every 0.5 s — eight ticks in all — to everything standing in it. | Always |
Assist balls come from three places:
- Every 5 waves — the boss-wave rain, one every 5 s for up to
max(wave × 5, 60)seconds, stopping the moment the boss dies. - The Assister class — a level% chance per kill, capped at 6 alive at once.
- A max-level Assister also auto-collects any ball one second before it would expire, so nothing is wasted.
Every bouncing ball — assist, buff and gold — scales its speed with the song’s BPM. A faster track makes the whole pickup layer move quicker, so a high-tempo playlist is genuinely harder to collect from.
The lightning ball deals your effective damage per hit — Stronger Bullets, band attack buffs and charge skills all count. Late in a run one lightning ball can clear a screen. The zone ball scales the same way, at 3× per tick.
Buff balls
Buff balls are dropped by enemies on death rather than rained, and they grant a stacking, timed, party-wide buff instead of a one-shot effect.
| Type | Colour | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Attack | Light blue, bullet icon | +5% damage per stack |
| Fire rate | Pale green, speedometer icon | +5% fire rate per stack |
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Duration | 120 seconds. Collecting another of the same type refreshes it to full. |
| Max stacks | 10 per type (so +50% at full stack). A collect past the cap still resets the timer. |
| Expiry | When the timer runs out the whole stack of that type drops at once. |
| Ball lifetime | 15 seconds bouncing, up to 10 on screen at once. |
| Drop chance | 5% from Scooters, Blinkies, Itsies and Goldies · 20% from Chompies, Mama Spiders and Lashes · 100% from Twirly and Big Buzz. |
Gold balls
A glowing golden ball that drifts and bounces, leaving a trail of coin sparks and floating its value above itself. It lasts 30 seconds and pays nothing if it expires. In co-op the gold is credited team-wide — everyone gets the full amount.
| Source | Value |
|---|---|
| Boss defeat | wave × 500 × the fraction of the boss’s dive countdown still remaining. Fixed at the moment it drops. Only on a kill — never when a boss reaches you. |
| Rhythm milestone | Roughly wave × 200 per ball collected in the streak — see the combo payout rules. |
| Rhythm every-10 extra | 50 × wave on every 10th beat of a streak. |
| Song-end payout | combo × wave × 5 if your surviving combo is above 10 when the song ends. |
| Buzzby solve | wave × 200, or wave × 300 for an all-on-beat solve. |
Any gold ball still bouncing when the run ends — game over or victory — is collected automatically, before the save, so its value lands in your total and the “coins earned” readout.
Any single reward over 1,000 gold pops a rising +amount number over the source, so Goldies, boss gold balls and high-wave bosses announce themselves.
Music notes
If someone is flying Clavier, a musical note bomb drops at a random spot on every beat. Notes are tappable by everyone, including on a teammate’s screen.
- Left alone, a note auto-explodes after 6 beats (8 at max level) for a fixed 25 px radius.
- Tapped early, the blast is much bigger — 50 px at the base combo colour, growing 2 px per combo colour step up to 80 px at the top colour. The note is tinted to that colour live, so its colour tells you how big it will be.
- Damage is the owner’s effective damage × (0.2 × their Clavier level) — up to 10× at level 50.
Tapping and priority
- Every ball pulses in time with the music — a halo swell and an outward ripple ring on each beat, ramping to full opacity inside the beat window. That ripple is a “collect now” cue for the rhythm combo.
- A ball rendered over the Upgrade button or mobile upgrade bar wins the tap — anything within about 48 px of your finger is collected instead of pressing the button.
- Balls also win over your ship’s charge clickbox, so to spend your charge you tap an empty part of the bracket square.
- On-beat charge sweep: spending a full charge skill exactly on the beat also collects every tappable ball whose centre is inside your ship’s 66 px bracket square — and each swept ball counts toward the combo separately.
- In co-op, two players tapping the same ball each register their own beat input even though only one collect lands.