> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://nimbo-9ed30387.mintlify.site/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Game rules > Stakes, growth, death, extraction, disconnects and rounds — the complete mechanics of Nimbo Arena. Nimbo Arena runs on **Solana devnet**. Every amount below is denominated in devnet SOL, a free test token with no monetary value. ## The loop You stake to spawn. You grow by eating. You only keep anything if you survive long enough to complete an extraction. Everything else — every pellet, every corpse, every point of value on the map — came out of a player's stake. No value is ever created out of nothing. That constraint drives every rule below. ## Entering Stakes are fixed tiers: **0.1, 0.25, 0.5 and 1 SOL**. The floor exists on purpose. A one-lamport snake would be the smallest and fastest-turning body in the game — a free kamikaze against someone who staked real size. Your stake splits three ways the moment your deposit confirms: | Share | Where it goes | | - | - | | **5.5 %** | House fee, sent to the treasury on-chain | | **10 %** | Converted immediately into pellets scattered on the map | | **84.5 %** | Your spawn value — the size and worth you start with | The pellet share is the part most people misread. It is not a pool that trickles out over time: it becomes **your** pellets, on the map, at the moment you join. One player alone on a map sees only the food their own stake paid for. A sparse map at low population is the intended behaviour, not a bug — food density follows deposits, and there is no free ambient respawn. ### Score and SOL are the same thing Internally the game runs on **score**, at a fixed rate of **1000 score per SOL**, and it uses the same rate in both directions — SOL to score when you join, score to SOL when you extract. That symmetry is what makes the arena conserve value exactly. So a 0.1 SOL entry gives you 84.5 score to start with, and one pellet is worth one score point. On the way out, amounts round **down** to the lamport: the dust stays in the vault rather than being owed to anyone. ## Growing You grow by eating, and there are only three things to eat: Worth 1 score each. They exist because someone staked. Worth 5 score each. Someone died where you are standing. Worth 1.5 score. Dropped by players who are burning score to go fast. Boosting doubles your speed and **costs score continuously**, shedding it as orbs behind you. Running away is never free, and a panicked chase feeds whoever is behind you. Size is not a pure upgrade. As your score climbs, your body gets longer and wider, and **your turning gets slower**. Past roughly 1 SOL of accumulated value a brake kicks in and length growth flattens, capped so that no snake can ever be long enough to wall off the map. A large snake is a slower, more valuable, more obvious target. ## Dying The arena is a disc, and its **border is lethal**. Beyond that, you die by running your head into another snake's body. Head-to-head, both die. When you die, your value does not vanish and it does not all go to your killer: * **70 %** stays on the ground as a corpse, exactly where you fell, for anyone to eat; * **30 %** is recycled as ordinary pellets scattered across the whole map. That 30 % is a deliberate brake on snowballing. A kill is worth taking, but a third of it escapes your killer and goes back to the commons. It is also what keeps the map fed: player traffic, not a faucet, is the arena's food supply. Freshly spawned snakes are briefly protected. While that grace lasts they cannot be killed — and they also cannot pick anything up or make progress on an extraction. It buys you a moment to orient, not a moment to farm. ### Disconnecting is dying If you close the tab, lose your connection, or quit mid-run, **your snake dies immediately** and drops its corpse like any other death. This is intentional and the cost is accepted. An earlier rule froze disconnected snakes and left them killable, but a frozen body behaves like temporary invulnerability, and pulling the plug became a way to dodge a fight. The price of closing that hole is that a genuine network drop costs you the run. ## Extracting — the only way out Growing is not winning. The **only** way to convert what you are carrying back into SOL is to complete an extraction. Roughly every 10 seconds of downtime, a single extraction zone opens somewhere on the map. It never spawns hard against the lethal border, but that is the only promise about its position — you may be nowhere near it. The zone is a circle you must stay inside. Leave it, even for an instant, and your progress resets to zero. Twelve seconds is a long time to stand still in the open, and that exposure is the entire point of the mechanic. The first to complete the channel extracts — and the zone **closes** immediately. Everyone else's progress is wiped and the cooldown restarts. An extraction point is not a queue; it is a contest with one winner. Your score converts to lamports at the same 1000-per-SOL rate, becomes a payout claim, and your snake despawns. There is no corpse — this is the one exit where value crosses out of the game. Playing again means staking again. **The zone detonates.** An extraction point has a lifetime of about 40 seconds. When it runs out, anyone still standing inside dies on the spot and leaves a corpse. Camping the circle hoping to outlast the competition is a losing strategy — if nobody completes the channel in time, the zone kills whoever is left in it. ## Rounds The world is persistent. Behind the scenes it is divided into **rounds** of 24 hours, but you should never notice one: joining routes you to whichever round is currently open, and nobody is ever ejected from a run in progress. A round is an accounting boundary for the escrow, not a match. This matters because of one non-negotiable rule: **the end of a round is never a payout.** Paying surviving players when a round closes would be risk-free money, which is farmable by anyone willing to sit still. Extraction stays the only exit, always. ## Latency Paid play has a ping ceiling, measured by the server rather than reported by your client. Above it you are kept out of staked arenas. The reason is fairness, not gatekeeping: other players are rendered to you slightly in the past, and once that gap grows wider than a snake's own radius, collisions start killing people who genuinely believed they had room. The threshold is currently set generously — deliberately, so that high-latency players can tell us whether deaths feel unfair at that distance. It is a measurement in progress, not a settled number. This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.