Rhythm & Music

From wave 3 on, when you collect things matters as much as what you collect. Tap on the beat and you build a combo that pays out in gold balls; miss and you lose the lot.

The basics

• The mini-game turns on at wave 3, announced by a cyan “♪ Beat Enabled ♪” line under the wave banner.
• The hit window is ±35% of a beat — ±194 ms on the default 108-BPM track. Inside it, your input is correct; outside it, it is a miss. It is measured as a share of the beat rather than in milliseconds, so a faster song leaves you less real time: at 160 BPM the same window is ±131 ms.
• Four things count as beat inputs: collecting any ball, spending a charge skill, clicking the beat ring, and pressing Space.
• Timing is always judged locally against your own audio, on your own device.
• No input during the inter-song gap. While the music is fading between songs there is no beat to hit, so nothing counts — a stray tap can’t break your streak.

Scoring the combo

Several inputs can land on the same beat. What the beat scores is: (number of distinct balls collected) + (number of charges spent) + 1 if a free tap happened and nothing else scored.

In short: balls and charge spends each count separately; free taps collapse into one and are absorbed by anything real.

A correct beat plays a reward blip, flashes the ring green, pulses your ship and flares your afterburner — mirrored to teammates in co-op. A miss flashes the ring red, shakes it, plays a fail cue and resets your combo and pot to zero. There is no HP loss for missing.

Payouts

Correct beats grow the combo and accrue a pot: 200 per ball collect or charge spend, 100 per free tap. There are three gold-ball sources plus a charge top-up:

Every one of these spawns a real gold ball in the arena — so in co-op your streak pays the whole team, and anyone can collect it.

On-beat crits

The combo is no longer only worth gold — it feeds your damage directly. A critical hit deals ×2 damage and draws its bullet gold.

• A shot fired inside the beat window is a guaranteed crit.
• Outside it, every shot rolls a combo-scaled chance: +2% per point of your live beat combo, capped at 50% — which you hit at a combo of 25.
• It applies to your own bullets and to the Gemini drone, and is synced in co-op, so teammates see the gold bullets too.

Fever

Hold a combo of 15 or more and correct beats start filling a Fever meter. Fill it and the run ignites for 8 seconds.

Fever’s ×2 stacks on top of everything else paying you — a Gold Rush wave entered in fever is six times the coins.

Drumming on a boss

While a boss is alive, every correct beat of yours deals damage to the nearest boss — worth 12× your effective damage per beat, which is substantial. The boss flashes on your beat, so the feedback is immediate.

It is the most direct reason to keep tapping during a boss fight: your rhythm is a second weapon, and unlike your guns it does not care where the boss is on screen.

Beat-synced spawns

The wave stream enters on the beat. Spawns accrue into a budget and up to four enemies per beat are released, so a dense late wave bursts in on the drop rather than trickling in evenly.

• Difficulty is untouched — the wave’s total enemy count is exactly what it was. Only the timing of their arrival changed.
• It is tied to the Rhythm Game setting. Turn the mini-game off and spawns go back to arriving immediately.
• Spawning holds during a vote or revive freeze, so nothing stalls or floods when the arena unpauses.

Focus mode

Once your combo reaches 2, the game gets out of your way: the Upgrade button, Settings button and Daily Bonus widget fade out over a third of a second and stop accepting clicks, and non-beat sound effects duck by 9 dB. The music is never ducked.

The state is latched — a miss zeroes your combo but does not immediately un-fade everything. It lifts only after 3 seconds with no beat input, or on game over.

The beat indicator

Bottom-right (or well above the upgrade bar on Android portrait). A pulsing cyan ring with a circular spectrum visualiser whose bars follow the real loudness of the music — so it goes flat on quiet passages.

• The ring is visible the whole time the mini-game is active, and is itself a tap target.
• The BPM readout is not here — it sits in the bottom song bar beside the track timestamp.
• Green flash = correct. Red flash and a shake = miss.
• The COMBO counter appears at 2 and pops larger on each increment.
• It hides while you are dead, so it never sits over the Revive prompt.

Custom music

A desktop host (Windows or Linux) can point the game at a folder of MP3s from the Host Music screen. Each song’s BPM and downbeat are computed so the whole rhythm layer — combo timing, ball pulses, Clavier notes — re-times to that track.

BPM preview

A song’s tempo is edited in one place: the BPM button on its row — reading Set BPM while the tempo is still unknown — opens a preview screen for that track. The song loops there behind the real beat indicator, the same ring, spectrum and falling circle you play with in the arena, pulsing at whatever number is in the field. So you can hear whether the tempo is right before you commit it.

• Changing the number re-times the ring immediately, and nothing is written until you press Save.
• A Sync −/+ row nudges the beat offset for your device’s audio latency, and the preview ring reflects the offset as you set it. The value is kept and used in-game, so you tune latency here once instead of mid-run.
• The number turns orange whenever it differs from the detected tempo — the same orange the song row’s button wears once a manual BPM is saved.
• Reset puts the song back on its machine-detected tempo. For a song the online lookup never resolved there is no tempo to go back to, so it returns to having none — and stays excluded until you set one.
• Tapping the ring or pressing Space is judged against the beat exactly as the mini-game judges you: combo, green flash, red flash and shake. It is practice only — no gold and no reward.
• Two readouts sit to the right of the practice ring. Max Combo is the whole song’s beat count — song length × BPM ÷ 60, moving live as you change the number — and 100 Combo Gold min shows the 2,500 gold a 100-beat combo is worth at minimum. Together they tell you what a tempo is actually worth before you save it.
• Back or Esc stops the preview and hands the start-screen music back.

Fixing a song that feels wrong

The in-game [ / ] sync keys are gone. Both the sync offset and the tempo are now set in the BPM preview rather than mid-run. The default arena track runs at about 108 BPM with its own tuned downbeat and is unaffected.

Metronome

Add Metronome layers a click track on top of the music, accented every fourth beat for a 4/4 feel. It plays on the SFX bus, so the SFX slider and the mute button both apply, and it is boosted enough to cut through the music. It is available in game as well as on the start screen, and it is completely independent of the rhythm mini-game — you can have clicks with the combo off, or the combo on with no clicks.

Turning off Download Host Music as a co-op joiner automatically turns the metronome on, so you get a beat reference over the default track instead of silence.

Falling Beat Circle

On by default. A ring the size of the beat ring’s peak drops from above and lands on it exactly on the beat, so you can see the beat coming instead of reacting to it. Purely visual, local to your device, and a mid-run toggle applies immediately.

Community recommendations

The Host Music screen has a Recommendations button showing the community’s top 50 most-played custom songs — title, artist and BPM — so you can find tracks that work well. Hosts contribute the songs they actually play. Only title, artist and BPM are shared; no audio and no personal data, host only, and disabled entirely when cloud features are off.

Turning it off

Settings → Audio → Enable Rhythm Game disables the whole layer. It is a start-screen-only toggle, and in co-op the host’s setting governs the session — clients and late joiners follow the host and ignore their own.

With it off:

• No combos, no beat payouts, no on-beat sound cues, no focus mode.
• The beat indicator stays hidden, and so are the Add Metronome and Falling Beat Circle settings rows.
• The metronome is silent even if it was switched on.
• Buzzby keycaps all land amber, so a solve always pays the base reward and never the on-beat bonus. The puzzle itself is unchanged.
• Clavier loses only its 10-combo mass detonation. Notes still spawn every beat, still auto-explode, and are still tappable.