Snake Arena guide: how to grow long and stay alive

The goal and how a match works

You are one snake in a round arena full of bot snakes. Eat food to grow; your length is your score, and the eight-row leaderboard shows where you stand against the bots. There is no timer and no final round. A match lasts as long as you want to keep climbing.

You only die one way: your head touches the body of another snake. Your own body is always safe, so you can coil through yourself as tightly as you like. The arena wall is not deadly either. If you steer into it, your head slides along it and turns back inward.

When a snake dies it bursts into a trail of rich food, and the snake it crashed into grows by 2 on the spot. You come back 1.6 seconds after being knocked out, at the starting length of 8. Bots come back straight away, so the arena never empties.

Speed, boost and burst

Every snake moves at the same cruising speed, so position, not speed, decides most fights. You have two ways to go faster, and they suit different moments.

	Speed	Cost	Limits
Cruise	6.5 m/s	free	always on
Boost (hold)	11 m/s	3.5 length per second	will not drop you below length 5
Burst (tap)	19 m/s for 1.4 s	2 length, once	ready again 7 s after it starts

A burst covers about 17.5 metres more than cruising would, for 2 length. One second of boost gains you only 4.5 metres for 3.5 length. Burst is far cheaper per metre, but you only get one every seven seconds, while boost lasts as long as you can pay for it.

Two more details matter:

While boosting, you shed a food pellet behind you for every unit of length you spend. A snake chasing you can eat what you lose.
A burst is hard to steer out of. It turns a little faster than normal, but at 19 m/s you travel about 27 metres before it ends. Aim it before you press it.

A fresh snake at length 8 can afford exactly one burst, or under a second of boost before hitting the floor of 5.

Food and growth

Ordinary food is worth 1 length per pellet, and your mouth pulls in pellets from a short distance ahead, so you do not need to hit each one exactly. Food from a knocked-out snake is worth 2.5 per pellet. That makes the scene of a crash the richest spot in the arena. Corpse food cannot be swallowed for a split second after it appears, which gives everyone nearby a fair race to it.

Your length tops out at 218.

How to knock out a bot

The snake whose body gets hit is the one that wins the exchange. So you never attack with your head; you attack with your body. The basic move:

Run alongside a bot, a little ahead of its head.
Burst or boost just enough to get fully in front.
Turn across its path so your body lies where its head is going.

If it cannot turn away in time, it crashes into you, spills its food, and you grow by 2 and earn coins. The same move is how a longer snake can trap a shorter one: circling a smaller snake with your body leaves it nowhere to go.

Bots steer away from the wall before they reach it, so the edge is a good place to pin one between your body and the boundary.

Staying alive

Watch heads, not bodies. A body only matters if a head is about to cross it. A bot's head swinging toward the space in front of you is the threat.
Don't race another snake to food head-on. If both heads arrive together, the one that hits the other's body first loses.
Keep your burst for escapes early on. When you are short, a burst is your best way out of a closing gap.
Be careful near crashes. Everyone is heading for the same food, and bodies cross in every direction.

Choosing an arena

The menu lets you pick the arena size and the number of bots. Changing the size resets the bot count to the one that size is balanced for, and you can then set it anywhere from 0 to 40.

Size	Radius	Food on the floor	Default bots
Small	46 m	340	6
Medium	74 m	820	12
Large	105 m	1,600	18
Huge	150 m	3,000	26

Food scales with area, so every size has roughly the same density. A small arena with extra bots is a fighting pit; a huge one with few bots is room to grow.

Coins and skins

You earn 1 coin for every pellet you eat and 25 coins for every snake you knock out. Coins are kept between matches and buy new monster heads:

Skin	Price
Emerald	free
Ember	250
Cobalt	400
Orchid	700
Sand	1,100
Frost	1,600

Skins are cosmetic; every snake plays the same.

If you're stuck

If you keep dying within a minute, lower the bot count on a medium arena and practise cutting off one bot at a time. If you survive but stop growing, move toward crashes: 2.5-length corpse food grows you faster than grazing. And if a bigger snake is circling you, burst out through the widest gap before the ring closes.