Strategy — GORGED

GORGED has one number and it does three jobs. Almost every real decision in the game is a fight between those three jobs, and most losses are somebody resolving that fight badly.

Length is your score, your weapon, and your fuel — at the same time. It is what you are ranked on. It is the wall you cut people off with. And it is the only thing boost can be paid for with. Spending it to chase makes you shorter, which makes you worse at killing and lower on the board. There is no separate energy bar because the tension is the game.

Do not boost in the first thirty seconds

A fresh digger is barely above the floor where boosting stops being possible. Held down, a new digger's entire boost budget is gone in about half a second — long enough to feel like an input, nowhere near long enough to catch anybody.

So the opening is not a fight. It is shopping. Get length on the board first; boost becomes a real tool at roughly the point where you can hold it for several seconds and still have a body worth having afterwards. Players who arrive from twitch shooters lose their first dozen runs to boosting on instinct at a moment when boost cannot possibly pay off.

You cannot out-turn anyone, so stop trying

Every digger in the arena turns at the same fixed rate. There is no agility stat, no character that corners harder, and no input trick that tightens your arc. Two diggers in a circling contest will circle forever.

Which means pursuit is a geometry problem, not a reflex problem. Cut the chord. Do not steer at where a rival is; steer at the point their fixed turn rate forces them to arrive at. Because that rate is a known constant and identical for both of you, the intercept is genuinely computable in your head after a few runs, and it is the single skill that separates players who get kills from players who get near-misses.

Boosting is only dangerous against solid rock, bedrock, or the edge

Ordinary rock — the dark, fine-grained majority of the map, dug or not — carves just as harmlessly at boost speed as it does at normal speed. Boost does not make plain ground dangerous. What it makes dangerous is running full speed into impassable terrain (solid rock or the bedrock floor, both marked with 45° hazard striping) or off the arena's edge.

So the read is narrower than it looks: before committing to a boost, check whether your heading crosses striped ground or takes you toward the map's boundary, not whether the ground ahead has been dug yet. Fleeing into unexcavated rock is a perfectly good escape — you carve straight through it — it just is not a trap for a pursuer the way it once was, since they carve through it too.

Tunnels persist for the life of the arena and they do not belong to whoever dug them. Kill someone and you inherit their map — their tunnel network becomes yours.

In design: cutting a rival in half through the wall

This one is not in the build yet. Everything else on this page describes GORGED as it plays today. This section describes a mechanic we are working on, so you can see where the game is going — and so nobody reads the rest of the page and assumes it already works this way.

Today a rival's body is a wall that kills you, and it does not matter how you arrive at it: through their tunnel or out of solid rock, touching a body is your death. That makes undug ground purely defensive — somewhere to escape into, never somewhere to attack from.

The change under consideration: a digger that breaks out of fresh rock into the cell a rival's body is occupying cuts that body instead of dying on it. Everything behind the cut stops belonging to them and becomes remains on the floor. If the cell you break into happens to hold their head, that is a kill.

The line is where you came from, not how fast you were going. Arrive down an open tunnel and the old rule stands: their body is a wall and it kills you. Arrive through rock you are drilling at that moment and you are the one holding the drill.

What it would do for the attacker Uncharted rock becomes an approach. Instead of chasing a longer digger you cannot catch, you read where their tunnel runs, dig a line that meets it side-on, and take half their length off the board without ever entering their corridor. It is the first use for exploring that is not just food.

What it would do to the leader Being long stops being pure safety. A long body is a bigger target with more of itself somewhere its owner is not looking — and the cut does not hand the length over, it drops it on the floor for whoever is nearest. Kills are not deliveries, and neither are cuts.

What it would do to you Your tunnel walls stop being walls. The tell is chips: a digger breaking rock throws spoil off its bit, so debris coming out of a wall beside you means somebody is on the other side of it and closing. Learning to look at that is what the mechanic would cost the defender.

The open question is fairness, and it is the reason this is a section on a strategy page rather than a patch note. A player who loses half their body to someone they never saw has to be able to say what they should have done differently — so the warning the victim gets has to be as much of the work as the cut itself. Tell us what you think of it; this is exactly the kind of change worth hearing about before it ships rather than after.

Pick your targets by reading tails

A dead digger leaves remains worth eating, and how much is there depends on how long they were. Tail composition exists so you can make that judgement across the arena instead of from a scoreboard: a rival's body visibly shows what they ate and where they have been.

A long, mineral-rich tail is a meal. It is also, usually, someone who has enough length to boost for a long time and enough body to cut you off with, so the meal is priced correctly. Read the variety as well as the length: one mineral in every country is rarer than the rest and wears a bright rim and a sparkle, so a body with several of them has been ranging rather than grazing one seam — which tells you how far from their own tunnels they may have wandered. The read that actually pays is finding somebody long and low on options — deep in open ground with no tunnel network of their own nearby, far from any cover a chase would actually favour them in.

Kills are not deliveries. The remains sit in the world and anyone can eat them. If you spent half your body boosting into a kill and a third digger is closer to the corpse than you are, you have just fed a rival at your own expense. Set up kills where you are the nearest mouth.

The head-on trade favours whoever has less

Two heads meeting kills both diggers, always. Length does not help. Nothing helps.

Read what that means competitively: a head-on is an even exchange in a game where the two players usually have very unequal stakes. If you are the longest digger in the arena, a head-on costs you a dominant position and costs a small rival almost nothing. If you are small, a head-on against the leader is one of the best trades available to you.

So: when you are ahead, never contest a straight line. Turn early, force the engagement to be side-on, and make them hit your body rather than your face. When you are behind and being hunted by someone twice your size, driving straight at them is a real threat and they know it.

Your risk appetite should invert at the lock

Arenas take joiners for a while and then lock. That single event changes what a death costs, and it should change how you play.

Before lock Dying is nearly free — you lose your length but you are one tap from a new arena, and the tunnels you carved were already banked to your country's explored total the moment you dug them. Take the aggressive line. A run that ends in a failed ambush cost you almost nothing.

After lock Nobody new arrives and nobody comes back. Every death is permanent removal, and the arena can only get smaller. Survival is now the whole game — this is the phase where the win exists, and it is the phase to stop taking even trades.

One detail people plan around wrongly: at the lock, any bots still in the field forfeit and leave — but they leave without dropping remains. There is no feast at the lock. Do not position for one.

Playing the collapse

After enough of the map has been dug out, an outer edge starts closing on a clock, from both sides, toward a full-height shaft. It kills on contact, it is drawn in the arena and on your minimap the whole way in, and from the moment it starts you have roughly ninety seconds to two minutes. It is the only thing coming — the interior used to cave in at random as well, and no longer does.

Arrive with a bank. The finale is the one time you will genuinely need several seconds of boost in reserve, and it is the worst possible time to be at the floor. Length spent chasing in the mid-game is length you do not have here.
Space collapses faster than walls do. The map's solid rock, bedrock, and edge do not move or multiply as the round goes on — wall-forcing near them is exactly as available in the finale as it was on tick one. What actually changes is room: the closing edge shrinks the playable area, which pushes bodies and head-ons into range far more often than any new wall does.
The closing edge is not a wall. It does not fill with rock; the ground out there simply stops being survivable. You cannot hide behind it and you cannot force somebody to crash into it — but you can force somebody to stay out there a moment too long.
Digging out of a tight pocket is fine — boosting out is often better. A pocket with one exit and a rival in the corridor is survivable: you can always dig a second exit, at either speed, through ordinary rock, for free. The one thing to check first is what is actually past that rock — a boost that meets solid rock or bedrock core on the other side is the failure mode the situation can still tempt you into.

Hiding works, right up until it doesn't

There is no starvation timer in GORGED, and that is a deliberate choice — a hunger mechanic would have punished aggression and rewarded sitting still, which is backwards for this game. So yes, a quiet corner is genuinely safe for a while.

The closing edge is what collects on that debt. It shrinks on a fixed schedule regardless of how anybody is playing, and it does not care that you are hidden. A player who camped arrives at the final space with no length, no boost, no tunnel network and no read on the survivors — against people who spent the round eating. The passive line does not lose to a rule. It loses to everybody else having got better while you waited.

Five ways good players still die

Boosting on reflex at the start, spending a budget that was never big enough to matter.
Chasing at speed without checking for striping. The kill was two seconds away and the solid rock was one.
Winning a chase and losing the corpse to whoever was standing closer.
Accepting a head-on while leading. An even trade is a loss when you have more on the table.
Reaching the collapse empty. Every second of mid-game boost is a second you will not have in the finale.

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The parts that are not obvious