Mottle game rules
Survive each round’s Seek timer without the Alert meter reaching 100%. Fireflies give points, clearing a round gives more, and you have three lives. Below is every rule, with the exact numbers the game uses. We read them from the game’s own published code, so they’re not guesses.
The goal
Mottle is an endless survival game. There’s no final level: each round you clear makes the next one harder, and the run ends when you’ve been spotted three times. Your result is a single number, your score, plus how many rounds you reached.
Round structure
- Hide! — 3 seconds. Everything is frozen while the Seekers count. You start in the centre of the garden.
- They Seek — 13 seconds in round 1, +2 seconds each round, capped at 26 seconds from round 8. A tick sounds for the last 3 seconds.
- Round Clear when the timer reaches zero. You don’t need to collect anything to clear a round.
- Spotted! when Alert hits 100%: you lose a life and the same round starts again from “Hide!”, with a full timer and the fireflies back in their spots.
Scoring
| Source | Points | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Firefly | 10 | Run within reach of one to collect it. 4 per round at first, one more each round, max 9. |
| Round Clear | 100 × round | Round 1 pays 100, round 5 pays 500, round 10 pays 1,000. |
There are no combos, multipliers or time-survived points. That makes the maths simple and a little surprising: in round 1, all four fireflies are worth 40 points while surviving is worth 100. By round 6, nine fireflies are worth 90 and surviving is worth 600. Fireflies are a tip; the round bonus is the wage.
One more rule worth knowing: your score is kept when you’re caught, and the fireflies reappear in the same places when the round restarts. So a round you fail once can pay out its fireflies twice.
Camo and visibility
- Stopping: Camo fills from 0 to 100% in 0.75 seconds. You become undetectable a little before that (about 0.7 s), once your visibility drops under 10%.
- Moving: the instant you move you’re at least half visible, and fully exposed within 0.22 seconds. A tiny nudge counts as moving.
- Ground colour: the creature always takes the colour of the stone it stops on. There are seven stone types (moss, fern, clay, sand, stone, pond, heather), but none of them hides you better than another.
The Alert meter
Alert only rises while at least one Seeker’s cone covers you and you’re more than 10% visible. Its speed depends on how visible you are and how many cones see you at once:
- Fully exposed in one cone: about 58% per second.
- Each extra cone adds 45% to that rate.
- Out of every cone (or fully blended) Alert drains at 26% per second.
- At 100% you’re spotted and lose a life; Alert resets to zero.
| Cones on you | Keep running: spotted after | Stop once it’s on you: Alert cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ≈ 1.8 s | ≈ 21% |
| 2 | ≈ 1.3 s | ≈ 31% |
| 3 | ≈ 1.0 s | ≈ 40% |
| 4 | ≈ 0.8 s | ≈ 50% |
Starting from 0% Alert. The second column is why letting go late still hurts: the cone is already on you during the 0.7 seconds it takes to blend. Try other situations in the Alert lab on the tips page.
Seekers and their light cones
- Cone: about 57° wide. It reaches 30% of the arena’s width in round 1, growing a little each round to a maximum of 42%.
- Patrol: Seekers walk from point to point at about a third of your speed, a little faster each round.
- Scanning: when a Seeker reaches a point it stops to look around about half the time. For 1.7 seconds its cone widens to about 109° and sweeps side to side.
- Chasing: if a Seeker sees you while you’re clearly visible, it turns its cone on you and follows at 1.45× its normal speed. That’s still slower than you. It gives up 1.1 seconds after losing sight of you.
- Bumping: running right into a Seeker gets you seen even outside its cone. A fully blended creature, though, can be walked past.
How each round gets harder
Slide through the rounds to see what the game sets up for you.
Round planner
Round 1
| Round | Seekers | Seek time | Fireflies | Clear bonus | Max total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 13 s | 4 | +100 | 140 |
| 2 | 2 | 15 s | 5 | +200 | 390 |
| 3 | 2 | 17 s | 6 | +300 | 750 |
| 4 | 3 | 19 s | 7 | +400 | 1,220 |
| 5 | 3 | 21 s | 8 | +500 | 1,800 |
| 6 | 4 | 23 s | 9 | +600 | 2,490 |
| 7 | 4 | 25 s | 9 | +700 | 3,280 |
| 8 | 4 | 26 s | 9 | +800 | 4,170 |
| 10 | 4 | 26 s | 9 | +1,000 | 6,250 |
| 13+ | 4 | 26 s | 9 | +1,300 | 10,120 |
“Max total” is the most you can have after clearing that round if you take every firefly and never get caught. By round 11 Seekers reach their top speed, and by round 13 their cones reach their full length; after that the game stays at the same difficulty, but each round still pays more.
Lives, game over and your best score
You get 3 lives per run and no way to earn more. When the last one goes, the “Caught Out” card shows your score, your best, and the round you reached, with a “New Best!” badge when you beat it. Your best score is saved in your browser, so it survives a reload but not a different device. When you play on 8x.gg while signed in, the game also sends your best score to the platform.
Ready to put this to use? Read the strategy guide or jump into a run.