Enemies
Everything in the arena is in the “enemy” group, which means two things: your ship auto-targets it, and the wave cannot end while it is alive.
About the names
Every creature has two names. The in-game name — Scooter, Chompy, Goldie — is what you see on boss HP bars, the start-screen showcase and your Bestiary cards. The formal name printed after it is the species name on the Bestiary card, and it is how each creature is identified internally. This wiki leads with the in-game name and keeps the formal one alongside, so either one you remember will find the row you want.
Regular spawns
| Enemy | Spawns | HP | Speed | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scooter·Critter | Every wave | 20 × wave | 50 | Walks straight at you. The baseline enemy. |
| Blinky·Firefly | Wave 3+, 10–50% of spawns | 20 × wave | 70 | Orbits you at 250 px for three laps, then plunges straight in. |
| Sand Bug·Dune Beetle / Ice Bug·Frost Beetle / Magma Bug·Ember Beetle | Every wave, 20% of spawns | 20 × wave | 70 | The planet bug — which one you meet is decided by the planet you are on. Each spawn independently picks its movement: half beeline straight at you like a Critter, half fly the full Firefly orbit. |
| Chompy·Beetle | Every even wave (not 10) | 300 × wave | 6.0 | Extremely slow, rotates to face you, explodes on contact. On kill a fresh one respawns 10 s later if the wave hasn’t changed. Boss-summoned Chompies never respawn. |
| Mama Spider·Brood | Odd waves, plus every 30 and 50 (not 10) | 300 × wave | 3.0 | Slowest thing in the game, but spawns 2 Itsies every 3 s (flashing red each time). Killing her stops the spawner. Also respawns 10 s after death within the same wave. |
| Itsy·Spiderling | From Mama Spider | 20 × wave | 50 | A Scooter with a different sprite — and there are always lots of them. |
| Seabit·Seahorse / Finn·Hemi | Summoned by bosses; Seabit is also mixed into normal spawns on every wave above 10 (~15% of base spawns) | Always 1 | 50 | A shooter. Enters, flies out to a wide orbit around the arena, sweeps roughly one loop, then dives. It carries an intrinsic 1-hit shield — 2 bullet hits to kill, or one laser shot — and fires a shootable bullet at you every 3 − wave/50 seconds in every state. Finn is the same creature in Big Buzz’s colours. |
Seabit and Finn always have exactly 1 HP and are never wave-scaled — but the intrinsic shield eats the first bullet, and they shoot at you the whole time. They also block wave completion.
Special enemies
Three creatures appear on a schedule rather than as part of the wave spawn, and all three block wave completion.
| Enemy | Schedule | HP | Threat | Reward |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wizzle·Shaman | Twice per 5-wave band above wave 10, on two different waves in the band | 300 × wave | Seeks out other enemies and buffs them on touch. When there is nothing left to buff it dives at you and explodes — dealing no damage. Cannot be pushed back. | Killing it strips every buff on screen. |
| Goldie·Treasure Goblin | Once per 5-wave band, on a random wave; plus a 50% chance Big Buzz summons one on waves 30+ | 300 × wave | Deals no damage at all — it just wanders, bounces and blocks the wave from ending. | wave × 200, scaled by how much of its lifetime is left. Full value if killed instantly, half at 50% elapsed, and nothing if it times out after wave × 15 seconds. |
| Lash·Chantilly | Once per 10-wave band, on a random wave | 300 × wave | Traces a 10-pointed star around the arena centre and cracks a red whip at the nearest player on each inward dip for −1 HP. It never chases and has no contact damage. No lifetime — it stays until killed. | Normal Chompy-tier gold. |
Goldie is the single best gold source in a normal wave and its value bleeds away every second it is alive. Drop everything and burn it down. Its gold also gets multiplied by a positive band coins buff.
Elites
From wave 4 on, about 4% of regular wave spawns are promoted to elites — the same creature, but bigger, glowing, and carrying one random affix.
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Health | ×6 the normal enemy, before the affix |
| Size | ×1.7, so an elite is obvious at a glance |
| Guaranteed drop | A gold ball worth wave × 100 on every kill — not a chance |
| Stardust | 2% per kill, doubled by the Elite Hunt challenge |
| Mastery XP | +4 for the ship that killed it, half the time |
One affix is rolled per elite:
| Affix | What it does |
|---|---|
| Fast | Moves 1.6× faster. Drawn cyan. |
| Tough | A further ×1.6 health on top of the elite ×6 — roughly ten times a normal enemy. |
| Explosive | Detonates when killed, with a heavy screen shake. |
The guaranteed gold ball scales with the wave, so a late-run elite is a large payout for one tough target — and it is one of only two places Stardust drops from.
Elite rolls are deterministic per enemy in co-op, so everyone in the room sees the same elites. Only a kill pays: an elite that reaches a player instead of dying drops nothing.
Enemy HP chart
| Enemy | Formula | W1 | W5 | W10 | W20 | W50 | W100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scooter / Blinky / Itsy / planet bug | 20 × wave | 20 | 100 | 200 | 400 | 1,000 | 2,000 |
| Chompy / Mama Spider / Wizzle / Goldie / Lash | 300 × wave | 300 | 1,500 | 3,000 | 6,000 | 15,000 | 30,000 |
| Any boss | 2,000 × wave | — | 10,000 | 20,000 | 40,000 | 100,000 | 200,000 |
| Seabit / Finn | 1 + a 1-hit shield | Never scales | |||||
Spike King, Frosty and Blaze are the exception: each is a fixed 500,000 HP, not 2,000 × wave. Enemy speed also scales, at 1 + (wave − 1) × 0.02.
Wizzle’s buffs
Wizzle grants a buff to every enemy it touches, except bosses and other Wizzles. It cycles damage → HP → shield → damage … in order, never randomly, and its aura is coloured with the next buff it will hand out, so you can read what is coming. One buff per enemy, never overwritten.
| Buff | Aura | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Damage | Red | Contact damage doubled. |
| HP | Green | Health ×1.25. |
| Shield | Blue | Absorbs 2 bullet hits before breaking — bullets deal no HP damage while it is up. The laser ignores it entirely: one shot both damages and pops it. |
Kill Wizzle and every buff on screen is stripped at once — HP and damage reverted, glows removed. Since it blocks wave completion, buffs never leak into the next wave.
Contact damage
- Chompies, Mama Spiders, Wizzles and bosses explode when they reach you and disappear. Reaching you is a punishment, not a kill — they award no gold.
- A boss explosion is area damage: it hurts every living player, not just the one it touched. Bosses deal
wave × 2. - Normal enemies deal a flat 5 (10 with a Wizzle damage buff). Boss guns deal 10 per bullet.
- Enemies ignore dead players entirely — a downed ship has its collision disabled.
- The band-buff
enemy-dmgstat scales all of it, in either direction.
Spawn caps
Bosses and Mama Spiders spawn continuously for as long as they live, and a wave cannot end until the arena is clear — so an AFK build that survives but cannot out-damage a boss would pile up enemies without bound. Two safety valves stop that:
- A soft cap of 120 live enemies (70 when More Animations is reduced). Continuous spawners skip a spawn while the arena is saturated and resume as it clears. The normal wave spawner is never gated.
- A cap of 16 concurrent explosions (2 in reduced mode), so a big pile-clear can’t spike the frame rate.