Two inputs, and one rule about walls

Two inputs. That is the whole cabinet.

There are two inputs and there will never be more than two. Anything that cannot be expressed as a direction plus are you boosting is out of scope by design, on every platform.

Eat, dig, cut off, go again

1. Drop in

   You join a shared arena already in progress. Empty slots are filled with bots so the field is never thin, and a real player arriving takes a bot's place.

   You are told which ones they are. The standings put a dot before every bot's call-sign — ·SLAT rather than SLAT — and the column heading says what the dot means. Your own row is never marked. A bot that dies keeps its dot on the way out, because who was in the field is exactly what you want to know when you are reading back over a fight.

   The dot says which seats are bots and nothing else. They grow, kill, die and leave remains by the same rules you do, and the standings rank the whole field together rather than sorting the humans into a list of their own. You were fighting all of them, so you are ranked against all of them — a board that quietly re-ranked around the dot would make the number less honest, not more.

2. Eat

   Mineral pellets are scattered through the rock, and every digger that dies leaves remains that are worth eating. Eating is the only thing that makes you longer.

3. Pick up a power gem

   Power gems are the bright, rare pickups — a couple of dozen in the whole arena against hundreds of pellets, so one is a moment you detour for rather than part of the diet. Every kind is equally likely in every country; no map gives anyone better odds. What each one does.

4. Dig

   Moving through solid rock at normal speed carves a tunnel. It costs nothing, it is permanent for the life of that arena, and it counts toward your country's explored percentage whether you survive the round or not.

5. Boost — carefully

   Boost doubles your speed and eats your own body to pay for it. It is the only way to close a gap or break one, and it is the only speed at which impassable terrain and the arena's edge become lethal. See below.

6. Cut someone off

   You have no attack. You kill by making a rival run into something solid — your body, or a tunnel wall you steered them into. That is the whole offensive game.

7. Die, and keep going

   Your remains become food for whoever is nearby, and you get a short account of the run — what killed you, how long you got, what you mined, where you placed. One tap anywhere puts you in a fresh arena in a new digger. Nothing to confirm, nothing to navigate.

Power gems

Two kinds, told apart by colour alone — you never have to stop and read one. Both are good for you. There is nothing in the gem field that punishes you for taking it, which is a deliberate rule rather than a coincidence of the current list: a pickup a player crosses the arena for has to be worth crossing the arena for.

Boost costs body

Boost does three things at once, and it is worth being explicit about all three, because most new players only notice the first.

• It doubles your speed. That is the part you wanted.
• It shortens you, continuously, while held. The length you spend came from pellets you ate. A long boost is a real amount of body.
• It makes impassable terrain lethal. At either speed, ordinary un-dug rock tunnels through harmlessly. Boosting into impassable terrain — solid rock, bedrock — or off the edge of the arena kills you — no rival required.

There is also a floor: below a minimum length you simply cannot boost. A digger that has spent everything is a digger that cannot chase and cannot escape, so the resource runs out at exactly the moment it matters.

Because the third of those is lethal, boost does not fire the instant you press it. It charges for half a second first, drawn as a ring winding around your drill head, and the game spends that half second telling you what the boost is about to hit: a marker on the exact cell and a banner across the screen. Let go before the ring closes and nothing was spent — you never boosted. It is the cheapest escape in the game and the one most players do not know they have.

Two kinds of rock, and how to tell them apart

Almost everything dark around you is carvable — plain rock with a fine grain, which you tunnel through at either speed without a scratch, boosting included. Some of it is not, and the map says so in one unmistakable way.

• Diagonal stripes with a jagged edge mean you cannot dig it. Solid rock cores and the bedrock floor of the world are struck through with 45° hazard banding and a saw-toothed rim where they meet open ground. Nothing else in the world is striped. At normal speed you slide along that face; boosting into it kills you.
• Open tunnel is lit at its edges, never striped. Ground you or somebody else has already dug is a lighter floor with a thin bright cut-line where it meets rock. That is the one thing you can move through freely.

The five ways to die

Every death in GORGED is one of these, and the game tells you which. Three of them have somebody to blame and two of them do not.

What you ate is on your back

Pellets come in mineral types drawn from the geology of whichever country the arena is set in, and every segment of your body renders the mineral you ate at that point. A Mexico tail does not look like an Iceland tail.

This is purely cosmetic. Every pellet is worth exactly the same length — there is no mineral that grows you faster and no build to optimise. What the tail buys you is information: you can look at a rival across the arena and read how much they have eaten and where they have been, instead of looking at a scoreboard.

Each mineral is drawn from how that stone actually grows or breaks. Pyrite is a cube, because pyrite grows cubes clean enough to look manufactured; quartz comes to a point, calcite cleaves to a rhomb, opal is a rounded nodule shot through with colour, and pumice is a froth of holes. So the four minerals of a country stay apart even where their colours sit close together — and stay apart if you cannot separate those colours at all.

One mineral in every country is rarer than the other three, and it is marked: a bright rim, and a four-point sparkle where the others carry a plain dot of light. It is worth no more than anything else — nothing here is — but a tail carrying several of them belongs to somebody who has covered ground.

Wormholes: a place, not an event

Some of the ground you have already dug has small square holes cut in it, in pairs. Put your head in one and you come out of the other a long way off — never less than forty cells in an arena a hundred and twenty-eight across, and the pair you start with is forty-eight apart — facing the way you were facing, having spent nothing. They are the only thing in GORGED that moves you somewhere you did not dig to.

• Hollow means it cannot take you yet. A mouth appears outlined and stays that way for a second and a half, then fills in. That is the same vocabulary the rest of the game uses — outlined is a thing that is about to be true — and it is the rule that makes a hole in the floor fair: nothing in GORGED takes you anywhere without showing itself first.
• Up to three pairs, and then no more. The first is placed with the arena, so there is always one somewhere before you have moved. The others are not on a clock you can count: the arena tries every eight seconds and needs two spots that are already dug and far enough apart, so early tries often find nowhere to put one. Six mouths is the ceiling rather than a promise — and once the slots are full nothing new opens, because nothing ever closes.
• They stand for the whole arena. No timer, and they do not shut behind whoever goes through. A mouth you noticed in your first minute is still a mouth in your fifth, which is what makes walking to one a plan instead of a bet.
• Five seconds before you can take another. Straight after a ride the doors ignore you: you cross a mouth as if it were ordinary floor, no bounce and no refusal. It still draws armed, because it is — you are the part that is not ready.
• Where it comes out is not drawn. There is no line between a pair. The two mouths of one pair pulse on the same beat, in the world and on the minimap, and that shared beat is the only clue you get about which hole is the far end of which.

The ride itself is worth knowing in advance, because it looks like something has gone wrong the first time. Only your head moves. Your body stays lying where it was, at the mouth you left, and feeds through the pair as you keep driving — so for a second or so you are a digger in two pieces a third of a map apart, which is exactly what you are. You keep every segment; a warp costs no length. And the ground at the far end is re-opened for you as you arrive, so you never surface inside rock.

One last rule, and it is the one that decides how much a wormhole is worth to you: the doors close when the endgame opens. Every mouth in the arena goes on the tick the arena enters its finale — in a shared arena that is the same moment the edge starts closing, and in the campaign, where the walls do not move at all, it happens just the same. The endgame is about having nowhere left to be, and an exit that still worked would quietly undo it.

Endless for you. Not for the arena.

Your side of GORGED is endless. The arena's side is not, and it moves through four states.

Then the ground comes back

One thing happens, on a clock, and you can watch it the whole way in.

• The edge closes. An outer boundary contracts from both sides on a fixed schedule, toward a full-height shaft. It does not fill anything with rock — the ground beyond it simply stops being survivable, and it is drawn in the arena and on your minimap from the moment it starts moving. This is what guarantees the round actually ends.
• Nothing else is coming. The interior used to cave in at random as well, and that is gone: no tunnel fills back behind you in the endgame, and no death arrives without having shown itself first. The arena you finish in is exactly as open as you dug it.

Expect ninety seconds to two minutes from the moment the collapse starts to the end. The closing edge kills on contact regardless of speed and does not care whether you were boosting — but it never surprises you: it has been visibly closing for the whole minute and a half, and getting caught by it is a place you failed to leave.

What you keep

• Live rank — inside an arena you are ranked by your current length, right now. It is visible, contested, and anyone can take it off you. The standings in the top corner list every digger in the arena, yours highlighted, updating as they eat: a row climbing past you is the thing that just cost you a place.
• Explored % — every tunnel you carve is banked to that country's permanent exploration total the moment you dig it. Dying does not take it back, and neither does the endgame collapse burying the tunnel you carved. This is the long game, and it is the one thing in GORGED that never gets revoked.
• The crew, and a career — the campaign is a single-player mode against nine bots, with a difficulty dial you set before every run and a career total that unlocks the other eight diggers. Only a win banks it, and the total is ranked: the server replays your run from your own inputs to work out what it was worth. A handle is all it needs; adding an email — proven with a six-digit code the game mails you — is what lets the career follow you to another browser or device. The systems page has the roster, the rungs and the arithmetic.

Two ways to dig

There are two modes, and they differ on one axis: whether you are in it with other people. Offline is not a third mode — it is the arena when the server is out of reach, the same rules against the same bots, marked on the status line.

Want the roster, the difficulty dial and how the board works? Read about the systems → Ready for the parts that are not obvious? Read the strategy guide →