Darkmass.io Glossary

The arena has a vocabulary of its own, and the rest of the site uses it freely. This page pins each term down: the meaning first, then the one detail that matters in a live run.

Your Star and its abilities

Star

You. A Star is the point of light a player steers, wearing the name and colour picked on the menu. Whether the Star beside you is prey or a problem depends only on its size against yours, and that comparison moves every time either of you eats.

Mass

The one number. Mass is your size, your place on the board and the punishment you can soak up before going dark. Abilities spend it and hazards take it from the same pool, so every hold and every graze is priced in the material you are made of.

Gravity Well

The held ability on Left-click or Space. It opens a pull centred on you that gathers in loose orbs, drifting pickups and any Star that strays too close. Holding it slows you and drains mass at a climbing rate, so the well favours short pulses over long drags.

Dash

The held ability on Right-click or Shift: straight speed, paid for in mass. What you burn does not vanish. It falls behind you as orbs, so break chases with it at an angle; run straight and you are feeding the Star behind you.

The price line

The readout on each ability box showing what a hold costs at this moment: mass per second, and beside it the hold-cost multiplier in brackets. The multiplier climbs for as long as the ability stays down and starts falling only once you release — and a giant waits longer than a minnow for the price to settle.

Orbs and growing

Ambient orbs

The arena's background food: low value, spread everywhere, replaced about as fast as the room eats them. No Ambient patch is worth fighting over, which is what makes it dependable income.

Scatter orbs

Medium-value orbs that mark where a Star has suffered. They burst out at a death and drip off anyone being ground down, so a thick spill is income with a history. Glance around before diving in; whatever caused it may still be close.

Bright orbs

The pulsing violet ones, worth far more than the food around them. A few appear at random, and events pour them out in quantity. One justifies a detour. A field of them is worth a plan.

Swallowing

How Stars kill. You swallow a rival by being about a quarter bigger and covering their centre, and most of their mass passes to you. Below that margin neither side can touch the other, so a rival near your own size cannot hurt you yet; what they can do is grow. The first to cross the quarter ends the stalemate.

The early orb bonus

Every run opens with your orbs paying out above their usual worth. Nothing later grows you as cheaply, so the opening belongs to eating. When the bonus fades, it fades for good.

Power-ups

Power-up grades

Each of the three power-ups spawns at one of three strengths, and the pickup gives its grade away: the bigger it looks on the floor, the more it does. A second copy of the same kind restarts the timer and keeps whichever grade is higher. A duplicate buys time, never strength.

Gravity

A short spell in which your natural pull reaches farther and drags harder. It multiplies the value of wherever you are standing: a windfall over a fresh spill or an event bloom, near useless over bare ground. Move to the food first, then take it.

Speed

Extra pace for a few seconds, and it stacks on top of Dash rather than replacing it. On its own it opens gaps and closes them; layered onto a Dash it makes you, briefly, the quickest thing on the board.

Black Hole

The pickup that briefly makes you a black hole. Everything nearby is dragged in, the heaviest Stars hardest, and your edge grinds mass off whatever it meets. You can be neither swallowed nor worn down while the change lasts, and a short grace period covers the moment you turn back. A smaller black hole opened by an event can itself be swallowed.

The leech

The small Star's answer to a giant, built on the Black Hole pickup. Because the drag lands hardest on the heaviest Stars, a minnow that changes form beside the leader hauls them in, grinds their edge, and eats everything they shed, untouchable for the whole window.

Hazards

The Void

A black hole fixed in the arena: nearby orbs, pickups and Stars are all dragged toward its core, and the core destroys what reaches it. Like every hazard it hurts more the bigger you are, so the radius you should treat as dangerous grows with your mass. The black hole world event is a void opening with advance notice.

Dark shards

Loose fragments that wander the arena, taking a bite of mass from any Star they touch. A single shard is a scratch for a minnow and a real bill for a giant, since the damage rises with the size of what it hits. A shard-thick corridor is a toll road, and the toll is set by your mass.

World events

The event arrow

There is never more than one event live, and never none. The next is flagged a few seconds early along the top of your screen: an arrow for the place, a countdown for the time. Everyone reads the same forecast, so the arrow predicts crowds as surely as orbs.

Light surge

A zone that floods with Bright orbs; the in-game banner announces it as a mass surge. It is the most straightforward payout of the five events and pulls a crowd to match, so the generous minutes are the early ones.

Wormhole

The richest of the events: a bloom of high-value orbs denser than any surge. Everyone inside grows fast at the same time, so the local pecking order can reshuffle in under a minute, and the Star that entered slightly bigger than you may leave slightly smaller.

Supernova

A core that swells through its countdown and then blasts, chipping every Star in range and throwing out Bright orbs. The blast never takes your last point of mass, so it cannot be what kills you; the Star standing next to you still can.

Hazard shower

A patch of the arena rains shards for a stretch. Shard scaling does the interesting part: a giant pays dearly to stay while a small Star barely feels it, so the shower doubles as farmland for the little ones, fenced by damage the big ones will not pay.

Around the board

The leaderboard and the crown

The board ranks the room's Stars by mass and moves as they eat. Whoever sits first wears a crown, drawn on their Star in the arena for everyone to see. It marks rank and paints a target in the same stroke; the arena sends its events after whoever leads, so the crown seldom sits anywhere quiet.

Spawn protection

A short shield on every fresh spawn: for a few seconds nothing can swallow you or wear you down. You also appear among Stars close to your own size, so the moment the shield drops is not the moment the trouble starts.

Going dark

The arena's word for dying. The run is over, and the screen that follows tells the story: how your mass rose and fell, the best rank you touched, the streak you nearly strung together, and the name responsible. Another run is one press away.

Burned out

The report you get when no Star finished you. If the Void or the shards grind your mass away entirely, you go dark with nobody to blame, and the screen says you burned out. No killer is recorded, which matters for the next entry.

Respawning near your killer

If the Star that ended your last run is still in the arena when you rejoin, you start your next one close to them. That is the whole offer: they have grown bigger and slower since the kill, and you come back small and quick with a fresh orb bonus. Eat first. The grudge keeps.

Regions

Darkmass.io has a European region and a North American one. The menu picks whichever gives you the lowest ping, and you can change the choice by hand. The two are separate arenas: a friend playing on the other region will never cross your board, so agree on one before pressing Play.

Definitions only name the pieces. The rules that connect them are laid out on How to Play, and the Guide covers the decisions those rules leave open. If a term here has slipped out of step with the live game, tell [email protected].