THE OBJECTIVE

ARC is team capture-the-flag: GREEN vs RED. Fly to the enemy base, grab their flag, and carry it back to your own flag stand to score a capture. You can only score while your own flag is home — if an enemy is running off with it, hunt them down. Kill the carrier and your flag drops where they died; any teammate can then pick it up and carry it back to its stand to re-arm scoring.

• Carrying a flag slows your ship — escorts matter.
• If you die while carrying, the flag drops on the spot for either side to contest.
• Empty player slots are filled by bot pilots so matches always have action.
• Up to four teams: maps can field GREEN, RED, BLUE and YELLOW — a team is playable when the map gives it a flag and a spawn. Sweep all flags of ANY ONE enemy team to score the round.
• Neutral flags: some maps place WHITE flags that belong to nobody — any team can take them, and capturing all of a map's neutral flags wins the round outright. Deliver them to your team's goal pad (a team-colored ring with a white core — always ready, no flag required) or, on maps without pads, to an armed flag stand of your own. Four teams brawling over one center flag is exactly as chaotic as it sounds.
• Multi-flag maps: some maps give each team several flags. Banking an enemy flag at one of your armed stands locks it in — the point is only scored once your team has captured ALL of them (the feed shows the count). You can bank at any of your stands whose own flag is home.

CONTROLS

INPUT	ACTION
WASD / arrows	Move (aim is independent of movement)
Mouse	Aim — your turret tracks the crosshair
Left click (hold)	Fire laser
Right click (hold)	Fire the selected secondary weapon
1 2 3 / mouse wheel	Select secondary: missile / bouncer / mortar
TAB	Toggle the match scoreboard
ESC	Toggle the menu (switch team, spectate, return to lobby)
Q	Drop a carried flag (regain full speed)
ENTER	Open chat (everyone) — type, then ENTER to send or ESC to cancel
RIGHT ALT	Open team chat — only your teammates see it (tagged [TEAM])
Top-left panel	Switch team or spectate; spectators pan with WASD

The crosshair changes shape with your selected secondary — amber chevrons for missile, a cyan orbit ring for bouncer, an orange artillery reticle for mortar — and dims when that weapon has no ammo.

Every key above is rebindable on the Settings page.

WEAPONS & AMMO

LASER — left click

Fast, unlimited, modest damage. Your bread and butter. No ammo needed.

MISSILE — slot 1

Slow, heavy projectile with the biggest single-hit damage. Holds up to 3 rounds; one recharges every 10 seconds.

BOUNCER — slot 2

Fast energy ball that ricochets off walls up to five times — lethal in corridors and around corners. Holds 3 rounds; fastest recharge (5s).

MORTAR — slot 3

Artillery: lobs a shell over walls to your crosshair (range ring and blast preview are shown while selected — the red inner circle is the kill core). Any ship touching the core when the shell lands is destroyed instantly; damage falls off sharply from heavy near the core to a scratch at the outer edge, and a perfect ring of shrapnel flies out from the impact. Holds 1 round, recharges in 16 seconds. It's the counter to bunkered-up defenders.

Ammo rules

• You spawn with zero secondary ammo; rounds charge up over time (watch the pips and blue bars on the weapon cards).
• Firing never costs you hull — health and ammo are separate.

HEALTH

There is no passive regeneration. Only two things heal you:

• Kills — destroying an enemy instantly restores +35 hull.
• Health packs — glowing green crates on the map restore +50 (they respawn after a while).

Below 30 hull your ship enters critical mode: it smokes, burns, and moves slower. Disengage and find a pack — or land a desperation kill.

READING THE MAP

• Walls — solid metal in several colors. Block ships and shots.
• Grates — open lattice with space visible through the holes. Ships can't pass, but shots fly straight through (both ways). Expect to trade fire through them.
• Bunkers — armored emplacements with a glowing firing slit. Shots pass out through the slit only; attackers can't shoot in. Corner pieces wrap the slit around a 90° turn and fire out both open directions. Mortars arc over all of them — that's the counter.
• Forcefields — shimmering cyan energy membranes. Ships fly straight through; every shot is stopped dead (the mirror image of a grate). Duck behind one to reload — but remember you can't fire out either. Bouncers ricochet off them.
• Pits — blue crosshatched holes. Impassable, and they block ordinary shots; mortars fly over.
• Bridges — raised walkways with space showing at the edges. Normal floor, just prettier.
• Conveyor belts — treadmills with moving gray chevrons. Riding one in its direction roughly doubles your speed; fighting it leaves you at a crawl. Great for escapes — and ambushes.
• Mines — team-colored spiked balls. Enemy mines detonate on contact (34 damage); your own team's are safe. They respawn.
• Spawn pads — pulsing team-colored rings mark where each team deploys.

ARENA ADMIN COMMANDS

If you created the arena, you can type these in chat:

• /restart — reset captures and all player stats, return flags home, everyone redeploys at spawn.
• /swapteams — every pilot switches sides and redeploys.
• /randomteams — teams are shuffled into two random halves and redeploy.

Chat is filtered for obscene language — blocked messages are only visible to you.

RANKED LADDER

The ★ RANKED ARENA is a permanent 4v4 arena with its own rules and a persistent ladder — see the Rankings page.

• Win condition: first team to 3 captures wins the game.
• 15-minute time limit: when the clock (under the score banner) runs out, the game ends immediately — most captures wins; a tie is broken by team kills, then team damage.
• You join as a spectator — pick a team when you're ready to play. Nobody is pulled into a ranked game automatically.
• Teams are locked during a game — no switching sides. Between games there's a 3-minute intermission, then everyone who chose a team is randomized across sides before the next game begins.
• Stats are recorded for every registered pilot in the game when it ends: win/loss, kills, deaths, damage, and time played (which feeds damage-per-minute).
• Leaving mid-game counts as a loss and is tracked as a leave on your record — the stats you earned up to that point still count, but bailing never erases a bad game.
• ★ MVP — each game the pilot with the highest damage-per-minute on the winning team earns MVP, tallied on the ladder and shown in match reports.
• The ladder sorts by RATING — an ELO-style number that moves on wins and losses, nudged by personal performance (K/D, damage, flag play). More stats (assists, streaks, seasons) are planned.

During the testing period, empty ranked slots are filled by bots. Bots never appear on the ladder.

FAQ

Why was I removed for being idle?

In public arenas, pilots with no input (no movement, aiming, firing, or chat) for 3 minutes are removed to free the slot — you'll get a 15-second warning in chat first. Password-protected private arenas are exempt. In ranked, an idle removal counts as leaving the game.

How do I make my own maps?

Open the Map Editor. Paint tiles (mouse-wheel zooms, Shift-drag draws straight lines, brushes up to 8×8), place flags and spawns, then EXPORT the map as a .json file on your machine. Battlefields that go live on the server are curated by the operators — send them your exported map to get it into the rotation.

Why can't I score?

Your own flag isn't home. The HUD banner will tell you whether it's being carried (kill the thief) or lying on the ground (any teammate can grab it and carry it back to its stand).

Someone is hitting me and I can't see them.

Check for grates — enemies shoot through them from off-screen. The minimap (top right) shows everyone's position.

How do bots work?

Bots fill empty slots (configurable when creating an arena) and play the objective: they grab flags, escort carriers, hunt thieves, seek health, and use every weapon. When a human joins, a bot makes room; when someone leaves, a bot backfills.