Rules
Mottle rules
What scores, what gets you seen, and how each round gets less polite.
Updated 15 November 2026. The numbers match the game on this site.
Collect fireflies and last the Seek without filling Alert. Dragging moves you and reveals you. Releasing stops you and lets you match the ground. The cones get harder to ignore as the rounds go on.
These are the rules of the game running on this site, not a guess at a hidden formula.
Move, then disappear
The garden is a 5 by 5 grid of colour patches. When you are fully blended, you copy the exact patch you are standing on. You do not average the neighbours, so the boundary between two colours is a bad place to stop.
- A held move walks you toward the pointer at a fixed speed. You cannot outrun a cone by dragging harder.
- While the move is held, Camo drains in 0.22 seconds, and visibility stays at least 55 percent even if you were blended a moment ago.
- When you release after a move, Camo fills in 0.75 seconds. Until it does, you are still partly coral. Standing still from the opening does not count: Camo stays empty until you have moved.
Fireflies are points, not protection
Touch a firefly to collect it. Each one is worth 10 points. Collecting does not reset Alert, and it does not make you invisible. A firefly is only a reason to leave a hiding place.
Alert is the life bar
You start with 3 lives. Alert runs from 0 to 100.
- It rises only when at least one Seeker can see you and your visibility is above 10 percent.
- One cone at full visibility adds 58 Alert per second. Each extra cone on you adds 45 percent of that rate.
- When nobody can see you, Alert falls by 26 per second.
- At 100 you lose a life, the meter clears, and the same round starts again. At 0 lives the run ends.
A Seeker sees you when you are inside its cone, or when you are close enough to bump it while still quite visible. Seeing you well enough (above 32 percent visibility) makes that Seeker chase, faster than its patrol, until it has lost you for 1.1 seconds.
Cones are normally about 58 degrees wide. When a Seeker stops to scan, the sweep is wider and slower.
Rounds
Each round opens with 3 seconds of Hide. The Seekers are counting, and you cannot move yet. You start coral and exposed. Then Seek begins. If you still have not moved, the Seekers see you and Alert fills. Move, then release, and Camo can build.
Clear the Seek timer and you score a round bonus of 100 times the round number. The next round starts immediately. Fail, and you replay the round you were on, as long as you have a life left.
| Round | Seekers | Fireflies | Seek | Speed | Cone |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 4 | 13s | 0.19 | 0.30 |
| 2 | 2 | 5 | 15s | 0.20 | 0.31 |
| 3 | 2 | 6 | 17s | 0.21 | 0.32 |
| 4 | 3 | 7 | 19s | 0.22 | 0.33 |
| 6 | 4 | 9 | 23s | 0.24 | 0.35 |
| 8 | 4 | 9 | 26s | 0.27 | 0.37 |
Speed and cone length are in garden-units. The garden is a square of side 1. Both stop rising once they hit their caps, 0.30 and 0.42. Seek time stops at 26 seconds. Fireflies stop at 9. Seekers stop at 4.
Seeker count is one on round 1, then one more for every two rounds, and never more than four. Fireflies start at four and add one per round, up to nine.
Your best score is the highest total this browser has stored for the site. It is not sent anywhere.