How Scoring Works in Mottle
Mottle combines survival timing with calculated score collection. Understanding how fireflies, round completion multipliers, and the three-life pool interact allows players to post competitive scores on the local leaderboard.
Firefly Collection Mechanics
In each round, glowing fireflies scatter across the 5×5 tiled playing field. When your hider approaches within 0.055 world units of a firefly, your character automatically absorbs it.
Every collected firefly awards exactly +10 points to your accumulated run score. Absorbing a firefly requires zero button inputs beyond steering into its contact radius. Collecting every firefly on the board does not end the round prematurely. The seek countdown timer must run its full course for the round to conclude.
Fireflies serve as tactical bait. Gathering them requires moving across colored tiles, which immediately resets your camouflage rating to zero and raises your visibility to a minimum of 0.55. Skilled hiders only pursue fireflies when seekers look in opposite directions.
Round Completion Clear Bonus
While fireflies provide steady incremental points, the primary source of score acceleration comes from surviving the seek timer. Successfully outlasting the timer in any round grants a completion bonus calculated using a strict multiplier:
Clearing Round 1 yields +100 bonus points. Clearing Round 2 awards +200 points. By Round 5, surviving the 21-second timer delivers +500 points in a single payout. Because this scaling reward increases linearly with each stage, reaching deeper rounds yields substantially higher point totals than lingering on early fireflies.
The Three-Life System and Replay Rules
Players begin every Mottle session with a pool of three lives. Physical contact with a seeker does not trigger immediate defeat. Instead, losing a life requires your alert meter to reach 100%. Alert only accumulates when your visibility exceeds 0.10 inside an active seeker vision cone.
When your alert meter reaches 100%, you lose one life. The game immediately restarts the current round rather than sending you back to the beginning. Upon round reset, the 5×5 arena tile layout randomizes, all seekers reposition to their opening spawns, and uncollected fireflies respawn.
Crucially, any points you accumulated before losing a life remain locked into your total run score. You do not forfeit collected firefly points or previous round bonuses upon taking a loss. However, you only have three total lives per run. Losing your third life triggers a game over, finalizing your score.
Local Storage High Score Tracking
Mottle stores your personal best performance directly in client memory. When a run concludes, the game engine compares your final score against the record stored in your browser under the local storage key mottle:best.
If your final score exceeds the existing value, the script updates mottle:best immediately. This system requires no external user accounts, logins, or network tracking requests. Your personal best persists across browser sessions as long as local browser cache remains intact.
Scoring Strategy: Balancing Greed and Survival
Achieving a top score requires strict discipline regarding when to move. In early stages such as Round 1 and Round 2, picking up every available firefly is relatively safe because seeker speeds remain below 0.22. In late stages, the clear bonus dwarfs firefly values.
In higher tiers such as Round 3 vs Round 4 and Round 5 and beyond, prioritizing camouflage stability over scattered fireflies ensures you preserve your three lives for late-stage clear bonuses.