Controls & Settings
There is no movement control. Everything you do is a tap on something in the arena, or a menu key.
Keyboard
| Key | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Tab | In game | Open / close the Upgrade menu. |
| Esc | Anywhere | Open Settings — which also pauses a single-player run by default. If a dialog is already open, Esc closes that instead. |
| Space | Wave 3+ | A free beat input for the rhythm mini-game. Works at any combo, so you can build a streak with nothing but the keyboard. |
| A–Z | Buzzby fight | Type the letter to place that keycap. Duplicates fill left to right. |
| Backspace / Delete | Buzzby fight | Undo the last placed letter. Free, any time — the puzzle never resets on you. |
| M | Anywhere in-game | Toggle the global mute. Desktop keyboard only, and it matches the Mute button — the setting stays on this device. |
| Ctrl + N | Custom music, host | Skip to the next song. Skipping runs the normal inter-song gap, so your combo cashes out. |
Tap targets
| Target | Action |
|---|---|
| Any bouncing ball | Collect it. The hitbox is generous — roughly 48 px, far larger than the drawn ball, so it is easy on mobile. See Balls & Pickups. |
| Your own ship | Spend a full Charge Skill. The clickable square is exactly the corner-bracket frame you see when hovering. A click while the meter isn’t full does nothing. |
| A teammate’s ship | Spend their charge (the effect is their equipped buff, not yours). If they are dead, it becomes the revive hold instead. |
| A Clavier music note | Detonate it early for a much bigger blast. Teammates can tap your notes too. |
| The beat ring (bottom-right) | A free beat input, same as spacebar. |
| Reinforcement Clone button | Hold for 1 second to summon your equipped clone. A cyan arc fills while you hold. |
| Hold to Give Up | Hold 1 second while dead to end the run — it backs your progress up to the cloud first. |
| Mobile upgrade bar | On Android portrait, tap a cell to buy. Hold it and it repeats. Cells are bordered green when affordable, gold when maxed, and each carries a filled, coloured icon in its lower right. The ship cell is not a buy button: it shows your ship’s mastery level and XP bar, like the desktop Upgrade screen. |
A ball rendered over the Upgrade button or the mobile upgrade bar is collected instead of pressing the button. Tap priority is by distance — anything within about 48 px of your tap is treated as a collect.
Reading the HUD
| Element | Where | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Coin readout | Top-left | Your wallet. Green means at least one upgrade is affordable, gold means nothing is. |
| Upgrade button | Below coins | Thick green border when something is affordable, muted blue otherwise. |
| Play-mode label | Top-center | Solo Mode, Online Co-op or Bluetooth Co-op — small and translucent. In co-op the room code and its copy button sit with it. |
| Daily objective toast | Upper-left | An achievement-style toast each time a Daily Ship Bonus objective completes, and a centered one when a ship earns its buff. There is no always-on daily panel any more. |
| Band-buff stack | Top-right | One square per stacked buff, filling right to left, five per row — with the combined net total listed underneath. It carries more than band buffs, in a fixed order: the weekly planet hazard first, then the Reinforcement Pass, the Daily Ship Buff, the band buffs themselves, buff balls, charge skills and an active Reinforcement Clone. Each ticks live — seconds left for a timed buff, counts left for a count-based one. |
| Stardust readout | Upper-left | Pale blue, beside your coins. See Stardust. |
| Corner icon buttons | Screen corners | Upgrade, Mute, Settings, Wiki and PiP, each with a small text caption underneath. Mute, Wiki and PiP hide whenever any dialog or overlay is up, so a dialog reads clean; Wiki and Mute appear on the Start Screen, and Mute stays available in-game. |
| Charge bar | Under your ship | Cyan. Blinks fast when full — that means click your ship. |
| Boss HP bar + timer bar | Under the boss | The white-yellow bar below the HP is the dive countdown. It is also the multiplier on the boss’s gold ball — kill it while that bar is high. |
| Beat indicator | Bottom-right | A pulsing ring with a spectrum visualiser. Green flash = on beat, red flash and a shake = miss. The COMBO number appears at 2+. |
| Mute / PiP / Settings | Top-right corner | Speaker toggles all audio. PiP is Android 8+ only and shrinks the game to a floating window. |
Once you have a rhythm combo going, the Upgrade and Settings buttons fade out and stop accepting clicks, and non-beat sound effects duck by 9 dB so the beat cue stands out. They come back after 3 seconds without a beat input.
Settings
The top row of Settings is [Credits] [Website] [✕] — see Credits. Below it, Settings has four tabs — Audio, Video, Gameplay and Notification — plus a Players tab that appears once a run is under way. Some rows are start-screen only and disappear mid-run. Account transfer and Reset Progress are no longer here: they moved to the dedicated Account screen.
Audio
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Music Volume | — | Scales the Music bus. Never ducked by focus mode. |
| SFX Volume | — | Scales the SFX bus. The metronome click rides this slider. |
| Download Host Music | On | As a co-op joiner, opt out and the host never streams you their playlist (saving your data). Turning it off automatically turns the metronome on. |
Video
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Screen Shake | On | Also governs the beat indicator’s miss-shake. |
| More Animations | Auto | Tri-state On / Auto / Off. See Performance options. |
| Show FPS | Off | A small centred readout on its own layer. |
| Colorblind Buff Signs | Off | Adds check / cross shape badges to the band-buff vote icons and the net-total readout, so good and bad read without relying on red against green. |
| Show Buff Icons | On | Hides the top-right buff icon stack. The text readout slides up to fill the space. |
| Show Buff Text | On | Hides the net-total text readout. At least one of these two must stay on — you cannot hide the buff display entirely. |
All three are stored on this device only and are not part of your cloud save.
Gameplay
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Challenge | None | Single-player only. Cycles None / Swift Enemies / Elite Hunt, trading difficulty for gold — see Challenge modifiers. |
| Auto-Restart | Off | Restart automatically after a game over instead of sitting on the Game Over screen. |
| Pause game on Single Player | On | Opening Settings during a single-player run freezes everything — enemies, projectiles, timers and the music — while the dialog stays interactive. There is no separate pause key: Esc opens Settings, and that is the pause. Co-op never pauses. |
| Offline Reinforcement | On | Two things at once: it lets you call other players in as AI allies during a single-player run, and it puts your own ship in the pool for them to call while you are offline. Turning it off deletes your pool entry. See Offline Reinforcement. |
| Enable Rhythm Game | On | Start screen only. Turning it off disables the whole combo layer, the Buzzby on-beat bonus and the Clavier 10-combo detonation, silences the metronome, and hides the Add Metronome and Falling Beat Circle rows. In co-op the host’s setting governs the session. |
| Add Metronome | Off | Layers a click track on top of the music, accented every 4th beat. Available in game too. Requires Enable Rhythm Game — with that off the row is hidden and the click is silent. |
| Falling Beat Circle | On | A visual timing aid: a ring drops from above and lands on the beat ring exactly on the beat, so you can anticipate the tap. Purely cosmetic, works start-screen and in-game, and takes effect immediately. |
Device Vibration
At the bottom of the Gameplay tab, and only on a touchscreen device — the section is hidden entirely on desktop. Under a “Vibrate device when:” hint sit nine toggles, one per event, each buzzing the phone for between 12 and 70 ms when it fires. Toggling one on buzzes immediately so you can feel what you just enabled.
| Vibrate when | Default |
|---|---|
| Beat Window | Off |
| Called Reinforcement | On |
| Defeated Boss | On |
| Use Charge Skill | On |
| Game Over / Death | On |
| Buff Vote | On |
| Upgrade Bought | Off |
| Player Left | On |
| Boss Appears | On |
The two that default to Off are the ones that would fire constantly: Beat Window buzzes on every correct beat, which at a high combo is several times a second, and Upgrade Bought repeats as fast as hold-to-buy can spend. These are device preferences like screen shake — stored locally and never synced to the cloud, so each phone keeps its own.
Notification
The same four game events can be delivered down two independent channels, each on its own sub-tab with its own set of toggles. Turning an event on for one does nothing to the other.
| Sub-tab | Where it lands | Defaults |
|---|---|---|
| Discord | A channel on your own Discord server, via a webhook you paste in. | Game Over and Game Finished on |
| Windows/Linux · Android · Browser | A native notification on the device you are playing on — a Windows toast, a Linux notify-send, a macOS banner, an Android notification in the shade, or a browser notification. Only the sub-tab for your own platform is shown. | All off |
The platform panel has its own Send Test button, and on the web and on Android the system asks permission the first time you switch a toggle on or press Test. Both channels are stored per device and neither is part of your cloud save.
To set Discord up, paste a webhook URL from your server’s channel settings, then press Test. The event toggles stay hidden until that exact URL has passed a test, so editing the URL hides them again until you re-test it — which means you cannot arm a notification that was never going to arrive.
| Event | Default | Fires when |
|---|---|---|
| Game Over | On | A run ends, in single-player or co-op, with the wave you reached. |
| Game Finished | On | You clear all 100 waves. |
| Joined / Left | Off | Somebody joins or leaves your co-op session. |
Each post is an embed carrying your name, the wave, your gold, the planet and a picture of your ship, drawn with your own afterburner flame. The webhook is stored on that device only and the game posts to Discord directly — see the Privacy Policy. Native notifications never leave the device at all.
Settings also carries a Website button in its top-right corner, beside the close X, which opens this site.
Players
Only while a run is in progress. In co-op it is the session roster, with a host-only Kick. In single-player it lists your Offline Reinforcement allies and carries the Call Reinforcement button.
Credits
The Credits button in the Settings top row opens the third-party notices for everything bundled in the build. A shipped game is a binary redistribution, and the licences behind it — MIT, BSD-3, Apache-2.0, MPL-2.0 and the SIL OFL — require the copyright notice and the full licence text to travel with it, so this screen is where they live.
- A grouped summary first — Font, Co-op networking, Engine and MP3 decoding — with a Full Licences view rendering each one verbatim.
- The list adjusts itself per platform, showing only what that build actually ships. The web build bundles the font alone; Android leaves out the MP3 decoder.
- Godot’s own notice, and the libraries inside the engine, are read from the engine itself.
Discord Rich Presence
On Windows and Linux, PewBeat tells a running Discord client what you are playing, so your profile shows it live. Nothing to configure and nothing to sign into — it simply does nothing if Discord is not running. It is not part of the web or Android builds.
| Shown | Detail |
|---|---|
| Status | In the menu, or Wave N once a run is going. |
| Detail line | Solo — <planet> or Co-op — N players. |
| Artwork | Your ship as the large image, with a small badge for the planet. |
| Timer | How long the current run has been going. |
This is separate from the Discord webhook on the Notification tab, which posts game events to a channel on a server you choose. Rich Presence only decorates your own profile.
Performance options
More Animations is the one setting worth understanding on a phone. On is the full look, Auto drops effects when the frame rate stays under 30 FPS for 3 seconds and restores them once it holds above 52 FPS for 6 seconds, and Off keeps the reduced look permanently.
Reduced mode changes a lot:
- Planet effects are hidden and the animated backdrop becomes a flat colour — the average colour of your planet, so Sand reads brown, Ice blue, Magma red.
- Concurrent explosions drop from 16 to 2, each shortened and drawn flat.
- Bullet-hit sparks stop; enemy bullets draw a cheap static version.
- Afterburners draw a 2-layer flame at ~20 FPS.
- The concurrent-enemy soft cap drops from 120 to 70, so high waves stay lighter.
- Collectible balls throttle their beat-pulse redraw to ~15 FPS.
- HP bars on non-boss enemies hide; boss bars stay. Persistent enemy glows hide.
- The beat indicator’s spectrum visualiser is skipped, replaced by a steady compact ring — a pulsing ring judders at a low frame rate, so it is frozen at a fixed size. It still flashes green and red, so beat feedback survives.
Alt-tabbing is throttled
On desktop, sending the window to the background during a single-player run drops the frame cap to 10 FPS until you come back, which stops the game churning the GPU behind whatever you switched to. The cap is restored on focus, so it cannot stick.
Co-op is deliberately excluded: a throttled host would slow wave and enemy sync for the whole room, and a throttled client would stop pulling its weight. Web and Android are excluded too — they have their own background handling.
It also degrades gracefully with More Animations on
Reduced mode is the floor, not the only step. With the full look enabled, three of the most expensive effects watch the live frame rate and back off on their own — so a struggling device gets quietly cheaper frames instead of a slideshow.
| Effect | 50+ FPS | 30–50 FPS | Under 30 FPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beat spectrum | 64 bars | 32 wider bars | Collapses to one reactive ring |
| Afterburner flame | Every frame | ~30 FPS redraw | ~20 FPS redraw |
| Beat indicator ring | Breathing ring at full reach | Steady compact ring | |
The flame keeps its full multi-layer look throughout — only the redraw rate drops, which is why you do not see it happen. Tiers drop instantly but climb back one step at a time, and only once the frame rate is a clear 6 FPS above the threshold, so a borderline device cannot flicker between two looks. The Host Music preview always renders the full spectrum.