Co-op

Up to four players in one arena. Gold is shared, buffs are shared, and one player dying does not end the run.

Getting into a game

There is no Co-op button any more. Start Game opens the Room on your own, and it turns into a party the moment somebody joins it.

1. Start Game from the start screen.
2. Set the toggle beside Host and Join to WiFi or, on Android, Bluetooth. It picks whichever is available by default.
3. Press Host to open the room. You get a six-character Room code — the title becomes Room: CODE with a copy button. On Bluetooth, Join scans for nearby hosts instead.
4. Your friend presses Join, which has two tabs: Public Rooms lists open rooms — each row reading <host> <code> [Join n/4], where only the Join button is tappable, so a mis-tap on the row cannot drop you into someone else’s game — and Room Code is where you type a code by hand. Capitals do not matter.
5. Each player picks their own ship from their card. The host picks the planet for everyone and presses Start; everybody else presses Ready.

The code is generated for you and deliberately avoids the characters that get misread aloud — there is no I, O, 0 or 1 in it.

Until you actually host, the Room reads Solo rather than Room: CODE, and the Public/Private control stays hidden — a single-player staging screen does not pretend to be a room. The planet selector sits top-left and the planet name is the button: Planet: [Ice] cycles through the three for a host or a solo player. A joiner sees it as plain text rather than a dead button, since the host owns that choice — and Download Host Music sits to the right of the planet row as a two-line label.

Public and private lobbies

A Public/Private toggle sits in the planet row while you are hosting, and you can flip it live without dropping anyone.

• Public lists your room in everybody’s Public Rooms tab, showing your name, the code and how full you are.
• Private takes you off that list — but the room is not sealed. Anyone you give the code to can still join. Private means unlisted, not invitation-only.

Bluetooth co-op

Android only, and only where the plugin is present. It needs no internet at all: the host broadcasts the room name so nearby devices can see it in a scan, and joining is guarded by a password.

• Everything about the game plays identically — the same identity, sync, revive and late-join systems.
• The one real difference: custom music is unavailable. Bluetooth is too slow to stream a playlist, so the session falls back to the default track.
• Bluetooth must actually be switched on — the game blocks the transport rather than failing later.

What the host controls

Getting the host's music

When the host has a playlist, joiners are offered it automatically — you no longer have to go looking for the setting, and the Download Host Music opt-out still works if you would rather not spend the data.

• While the download runs you hear a metronome over silence — the default arena track is muted underneath as a beat clock — rather than default music that lurches into the host’s song halfway through. With the rhythm game off there is no metronome, so the arena track stays audible instead.
• The music bar reads Downloading Host Music N% while it works, and stops saying so the moment it finishes.
• If the host’s current song is already 80% done when your download lands, the game skips the tail-end swap and picks the next song up cleanly at the boundary.
• Songs are cached between sessions, keyed by the file’s own contents. Rejoin the same host and nothing downloads again; if they add one track to the playlist, that is the only one sent.

Mid-game joiners get the Download row too, so the choice is not lost by arriving late.

The Players tab

Settings during a run has a Players tab listing everyone in the session — their ship, their name, a crown on the host and a (You) marker on yourself. It refreshes as people join and leave.

The host also gets a red Kick button on every other row, which asks for confirmation first. A kicked player is told why and returned to the menu. It works the same over WiFi and Bluetooth. Joiners see the roster read-only.

In single-player the same tab lists your Offline Reinforcement allies and lets you summon or dismiss them.

What is shared

Death and revives

• A dead player stays visible in red with collision off. The session keeps running — waves keep spawning and advancing even if the host is the one who died.
• A living teammate revives you by tapping the red button on your HP bar. You can also self-revive from the centre prompt.
• Only when everyone is down does the 10-second window open. Enemies freeze, nothing spawns, and any revive cancels it.
• Revives cost wave × 10 from your own wallet, and each repeat restores 10% less HP down to a floor of 10%.
• Nothing except a real revive brings a dead player back — not heals, not a Health upgrade, not a band buff.

Joining mid-game

A player joining a session already in progress receives a full snapshot: the current wave, the whole band-buff stack, the host’s planet and rhythm setting, and the live enemies. They fold the buff stack into their own stats immediately, so they are playing the same run as everyone else.

Player slots re-centre automatically as people join and leave — two players pair up, three form a triangle, four form a square.

A joiner’s lobby also stays clean now: balls, bullets, effects, teammate drones and the buff vote no longer bleed onto the staging screen before the game hands over.

When it won’t connect

WiFi co-op is direct peer-to-peer only — there is no relay server. That is a deliberate choice: no provider, no bandwidth cost, no quota. The trade-off is that a network which cannot establish a direct path — strict carrier-grade NAT, some mobile carriers — simply cannot connect, and you will see a message suggesting you try another network.