How to play kolonie
The rulebook: every mechanic in kolonie, with the numbers the game really uses. Mass and distance are given in the game's own units. Mass is area, so a colony's radius is the square root of its mass divided by π: 6,000 units of mass make a radius of about 44, and four times the mass doubles the radius.
Winning a round
A dish holds a fixed amount of living mass: loose nutrients plus every colony in it. The round goes to the first colony holding 40 % of that total; the teal bar at the top of the screen tracks your share. A round has no time limit. After a win the dish pauses for 15 seconds, then a new dish of the same arena type is generated.
Cores, suns and black holes destroy mass, and bodies that fly out of the system take theirs with them. If the mass left outside the cores falls below 1.1 times the goal, the 40 % can no longer be reached and the round starts over. The opening mass is the same 6,000 units for humans and bots.
Moving
kolonie has no engine, no brakes and no friction. Your colony moves by recoil: each push throws a packet of your own mass out at 3,080 units per second, and the rest of you gets the opposite kick.
- Mouse or trackpad: press or hold. The packet flies toward the pointer, you drift away from it.
- Touch: touch and hold anywhere; your finger takes the pointer's place.
- Keyboard: Enter starts a round from the start screen, M mutes and unmutes.
| Per push | Core, Binary, Belt, Drift | Sun, Black hole |
|---|---|---|
| Mass thrown out | 0.7 % | 0.26–0.34 % |
| Change of speed | about 22 units/s | 8–10 units/s |
| Holding for one second (10 pushes) | 6.8 % of your mass | about 3 % |
Five taps from a standstill cost 3.5 % of your mass and give you about 110 units per second, enough to cross 5,000 units in 46 seconds. The pushes around a sun or black hole are sized so that 15 of them, aimed along a circular orbit in the middle of the food band, reach escape speed. Holding never pushes faster than ten times a second, and below 60 units of mass a colony can no longer push at all.
Packets are ordinary matter once they leave you. Anyone can eat them, and so can you, but only after half a second, so pushing can't feed itself.
Taking in and being taken in
Where two bodies overlap, mass flows from the smaller to the bigger. With an overlap as deep as the smaller body's radius, the smaller one loses up to four times its own mass per second, so a deep contact is over in about a quarter of a second. A graze drains in proportion to how deep it goes, and a body completely covered by another is taken in at once. Two colonies of exactly the same mass pass through each other.
Every new colony of yours (when you join, at the start of a round and after “Play again”) is shielded for its first 8 seconds, shown by a breathing light-blue ring. In that time nothing takes it in, neither a colony nor loose matter, and bots leave it alone; it takes in no colonies itself, only food. Cores, suns and black holes still burn it.
Every body is tinted by its mass compared with yours:
- Grey means within 2 % of your mass. Just outside that band the tint is already at 70 % strength.
- Blue bodies are lighter than you, and at a quarter of your mass or less the blue is at its deepest.
- Red bodies are heavier, fully red from four times your mass.
- Gold marks a core: loose matter of 60,000 units or more (radius 138 and up), which pulls with full gravity.
Gravity and your path
Gravity follows Newton with a strength of G = 530, so a circular orbit at distance d around a mass M runs at √(G · M / d) units per second. Around a core of 88,000 units, 2,000 units out, that is 153 units per second and one lap takes about 82 seconds. Colonies pull as well, with a tenth of that strength, which is why nutrients creep toward you at close range. Loose food and exhaust feel gravity but exert none. Around a sun or black hole the centre is the only thing that pulls.
The line ahead of your colony is a forward simulation with the same integrator the server runs. In the arenas with cores it looks 10 seconds ahead. Around a sun or black hole it follows your whole orbit, up to 240 seconds, and colors the outcome:
- White: a closed orbit. You can coast on it without spending anything.
- Red: the orbit ends in the centre. Push along your direction of travel to widen it; pushing straight outward is the most expensive way to climb.
- Amber: you are above escape speed. The amber edge of the system starts to glow once you are within the outer quarter of its radius.
Orbits reward thinking ahead. A push forward raises the opposite side of your orbit, a push backward lowers it, and a lower orbit is a faster one: to catch something ahead of you on the same track, drop slightly inside it first.
Hazards
Cores and suns
Cores, suns and central black holes never grow. Whatever touches them burns, however big it is. Lost mass is not gone for good: up to 6,000 units per second return to the dish as new nutrients, placed away from every hazard. A colony that joins or comes back in the middle of a round is paid for out of that, so a dish's total mass stays the same.
Black holes
Core, Binary and Belt dishes hold between zero and six black holes. Most have one to three, and about one dish in eleven has none. Each pulls like a body of 1,800 to 4,400 units and has an event horizon 30 to 50 units in radius, so a fresh colony (radius 44) is about the size of one. The pull fades to nothing between 2.5 horizon radii and the horizon itself, which makes a close pass survivable if you push away in time. It weakens from about 7 horizon radii out and ends at 12. Past the horizon a body drains at up to three times its mass per second.
The edge
No dish has a wall. The system ends 3,700 to 6,600 units from its centre, depending on the arena, and anything that crosses that line has left the round.
The six arenas
Every round is generated from a random seed. Before a dish is used, the generator checks that the mass outside the cores covers the 40 % goal at least 1.3 times over, and it puts spawn points at least 880 units apart, never within 4 core radii of a core or 6 horizon radii of a black hole. Single nutrients weigh 150 to 1,500 units, and small ones are more common.
| Arena | Radius | Centre | Nutrients | Character |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core | 4,400–5,300 | one core of 72,000–104,000 | 152,000–209,000 | food on slightly eccentric orbits; 0–6 black holes |
| Binary | 5,300–6,200 | two cores of 62,000–78,000, 770–1,100 apart | 166,250–218,500 | orbits are stable only from about three separations out; 10 % of the food lies anywhere |
| Belt | 4,800–5,700 | one core of 62,000–80,000 | 152,000–209,000 | 85 % of the food in a ring between roughly half and four fifths of the radius |
| Drift | 3,700–4,400 | none | 137,750–190,000 | no cores, black holes or currents; only colonies pull |
| Sun | 6,000–6,600 | a sun, radius 340–420 | 152,000–209,000 | clockwise orbits from 2.5 sun radii out; 45 s per lap mid-band |
| Black hole | 6,000–6,600 | a horizon of 55–70 | 152,000–209,000 | orbits from 5 horizon radii out, fast and tight near the centre |
The start screen lets you pick an arena and shows how many players are in each. The name of the current one stays on screen while you play.
Bots
A dish seats 20 colonies, and bots take the seats no human is using. Each bot draws three traits from the round's seed, each between 0 and 1: aggression, caution and thrift. It rethinks its course every 0.17 to 0.33 seconds, cruises at 31 to 75 units per second and only hunts colonies at least 1.35 times smaller than itself, a little less for the aggressive ones. A bot sees 24 of its own radii around it (at least 380 units, never more than 7,000), less than your screen shows you, which is 54 to 67 of your radii to the corners. When a human joins or respawns in a running round, every bot above 6,000 units drops back to 6,000 and the difference is scattered as food. Bots carry a small “bot” tag after their name.
The leaderboard in the corner lists the five biggest colonies in your dish, plus your own row if you are not among them, and refreshes every second. For the daily Hall of Fame, see the FAQ.
Daily challenge
Every day brings one challenge, the same for everyone, set in one arena type: for example “In Core: reach 100,000 mass with as few pushes as possible”. It changes at midnight, Berlin time. The start screen shows today’s task with a button straight into a dish of its arena, and beside the Hall of Fame the ten best attempts of the day.
- One life is one attempt. Pushes and time count from the moment your colony appears, and start again from zero with the next one.
- Only pushes that throw matter out count. Holding down pushes about ten times a second; a tap is one push.
- Colonies are players or bots. Nutrients and the matter others push out don’t count.
- Your best attempt of the day is the one listed. A challenge ranked by pushes breaks ties by time, one ranked by time breaks them by pushes; on a full tie the earlier attempt leads.
- Doing it counts as a streak day, just like finishing a round.
While you play in the challenge’s arena, a line under the progress bar shows your attempt so far; the moment it is done, a message tells you your result and your place for the day.
Playing with friends
Invite a friend, on the start screen and on the end card, gives you a link. Where the browser has a share sheet, as on phones, it opens; otherwise the link is copied, and it is also shown to copy by hand. Whoever opens it joins the dish you are in, or the last one you were in. If that dish is full or has closed, they get a dish of the same arena. A link lasts a day, or until the game is next updated. From then on you see each other’s name in warm yellow with a “friend” tag, both on the leaderboard and in the dish, and if one of you starts while the other is already playing, you land in the other’s dish. An arena button always goes where it says.
Strategy
- Settle into an orbit early. A closed white path costs nothing to keep, and the nutrients on it come to you.
- Tap, don't hold. One tap is 0.7 %, a one-second hold 6.8 %. Small corrections early are cheaper than big ones late.
- Read the line, not the colony. Decide by where the path goes in the next few seconds, and check it again after every push.
- Treat grey as red. Inside the 2 % band a contact can go either way; only commit when the target is clearly blue.
- Mind where your exhaust lands. Every packet is food for whoever reaches it, so don't push toward a rival bigger than you.
- Slow down as you grow. Each push changes your speed by the same amount at any size, but a big colony has more mass at stake in every mistake near a core or black hole.
- In Drift, count your pushes. Nothing pulls you back, so every speed you add stays until you take it away again.
Practical questions about accounts, skins and rewards are in the FAQ; how kolonie is built is on the about page.