Bosses

Every wave that is a multiple of 5 is a boss wave. Bosses have an HP bar, a dive countdown, a head-only hitbox, and they rain assist balls while they are alive.

Rules every boss shares

• HP is 2,000 × wave — 10,000 at wave 5, 200,000 at wave 95. The three finale bosses are a fixed 500,000 instead.
• Head-only hitbox. Your shots have to land on the boss’s head, not its body.
• A dive countdown. The white-yellow bar under the HP bar drains over wave × 25 seconds (20 for Twirly). When it empties the boss abandons whatever it was doing, dives straight at the nearest player and explodes on contact for wave × 2 damage — to every living player, not just the one it hit.
• Assist ball rain. While the boss lives, an assist ball spawns every 5 s for up to max(wave × 5, 60) seconds, stopping the instant the boss dies.
• A gold ball on death. Worth wave × 500 multiplied by how much of the dive countdown was still left — so a fast kill is worth almost the full amount and a last-second kill is worth almost nothing. It only drops when the boss is killed, never when it reaches you.
• Bosses are unpushable and immune to knockback, sandstorm lift and tidal-wave shove.
• A boss counts as a large kill: +20 charge, and a Pinball ball shatters on it.

Boss wave chart

Each boss is listed by its in-game name with its formal name alongside. A slash-separated list of minions means each summon is an independent random pick from that set. “Bullets” is the boss-gun volley fired every 2 seconds from wave 50 on.

Wave	Boss	Summons	Bullets / 2 s
5	Bitey·Tabanidae	1 Scooter / 3 s	—
10	Glow·Photuris	1 Blinky / 3 s	—
15	Shiny·Chrysina	1 Chompy now, then 1 / 4 s	—
20	Sea King·Hippocampus	1 Seabit / 1 s	—
25	Queenie·Cecille	1 Scooter or Blinky / 1 s	—
30	Twirly·Dabiana	1 Scooter / Blinky / Seabit / 1 s	—
35	Buzzby·Wasap	1 Scooter / Blinky / Seabit / 1 s + word puzzle	—
40	Stinger·Vespula	none — 4 orbit-homing stingers / 3 s	—
45	Sky Diver·Pithecophaga	none — moving orbit / dive boss	—
50	Big Buzz·Equador	1 Scooter / Blinky / Seabit / Finn / 1 s	1
55	Bitey·Tabanidae	2 Scooters / 1 s	2
60	Glow·Photuris	2 Blinkies / 1 s	2
65	Shiny·Chrysina	2 Chompies now, then 3 / 10 s	3
70	Sea King·Hippocampus	2 Seabits / 1 s	3
75	Queenie·Cecille	2 Scooter / Blinky / Seabit / 1 s	4
80	Twirly·Dabiana	2 Scooter / Blinky / Seabit / 1 s	4
85	Buzzby·Wasap	1 Scooter / Blinky / Seabit / 1 s + word puzzle	5
90	Stinger·Vespula	none — 4 orbit-homing stingers / 3 s	—
95	Sky Diver·Pithecophaga ×2	none — moving orbit / dive bosses	6
100	Spike King / Frosty / Blaze	One finale boss chosen by your planet — see below	—

The boss archetypes

Summon bosses — Bitey·Tabanidae, Glow·Photuris, Shiny·Chrysina, Sea King·Hippocampus, Queenie·Cecille

These hold steady in the upper-centre and pump out minions on a timer. They never move until their dive countdown expires. Each has a themed minion: Bitey summons Scooters, Glow summons Blinkies, Shiny drops Chompies, Sea King sends Seabits, and Queenie mixes them. From wave 50 on they also fire the boss gun.

Bouncing bosses — Twirly·Dabiana (30 / 80), Big Buzz·Equador (50)

Twirly is the mini-boss: she bounces diagonally around the arena, avoids the middle 120 px, and dives after wave × 20 seconds — the shortest fuse of any boss. Big Buzz is the level-10 boss and bounces the same way with a 25-second-per-wave fuse. Both explode on contact and summon a mix of minions.

Stinger·Vespula (40 / 90) — the turret

A big stationary boss that summons nothing and does not fire the normal boss gun. Instead every 3 seconds it launches a fan of four accelerating homing stingers, one from each of its four top nozzles. They launch outward, then curve back onto the nearest player. Your ship auto-targets them like any enemy, so they can be shot down — and every interception feeds your Charge Skill.

Sky Diver·Pithecophaga (45 / 95) — the eagle

The only moving boss. It orbits the nearest player at a wide 330 px, and if you stop hitting it for half a second it gains a shield and dives. A shot during the dive is absorbed — no HP damage — but interrupts it, sending Sky Diver back to its ring. A dive that connects deals only floor(wave / 2) damage and swoops away; it does not explode.

It also carries a yellow timer bar, and that one is a deadline rather than a decoration. It drains over a fixed 30 seconds — not scaled by wave, since Sky Diver only ever appears on 45 and 95 — and when it empties the boss commits to a final dive: a lethal kamikaze that explodes on contact for wave × 2 area damage instead of swooping away.

Buzzby·Wasap and the keycap word puzzle

Buzzby (waves 35 and 85) is a normal boss you still have to kill, but while it is alive a row of scrambled keycaps appears in the middle of the screen. It is a side objective worth a large pile of gold.

• A random 4–6 letter word is picked and its letters scrambled onto keycaps.
• Add a letter by tapping an unplaced keycap or typing that letter. Placement is never blocked — on-beat or off, it always works.
• A placement within the beat window lands green (on beat, counts toward the bonus); off-beat it lands amber, still valid.
• Undo by tapping a placed keycap or pressing Backspace. Free, any time.
• It solves when every letter is placed and they spell a valid word — any anagram counts. A non-word just flashes “NOT A WORD!”; nothing ever resets on you.

The window is wave seconds long — 35 seconds at wave 35. In co-op every player gets the same letters on their own device and it is a race: the first solver rewards the whole team. With the rhythm game disabled, every keycap lands amber and only the base reward is possible.

Boss guns (wave 50+)

From wave 50 on, every boss except Stinger and the three finale bosses fires a burst every 2 seconds of 1 + (wave − 50) ÷ 10 pink-red bullets — one at wave 50, six at wave 100. Each bullet:

• spawns from a random part of the boss sprite, so they scatter rather than streaming from one point;
• is spread round-robin across every living player;
• flies straight at 100 px/s and deals a flat 10 damage;
• can be shot down — your ship auto-targets them, and each interception adds +1 to your charge meter.

The wave-100 finale

Wave 95 spawns two Sky Divers. Wave 100 spawns one finale boss chosen by your planet — all three are stationary, upper-centre, 500,000 HP, with the usual dive countdown. Clearing wave 100 ends the run in victory with the “Thank You” screen, and defeating the boss permanently unlocks its ship for everyone who took part.