GAME MODES

JET3D has six match shapes, and they divide cleanly into two families. In the elimination modes you are shot down once and watch the rest. In the respawn modes you are back in the air a few seconds later and the match ends on a score or the clock. The difference changes almost everything about how you should fly, so it is worth knowing which one you are in before the whistle. The flying itself is the same everywhere — see how to fly.

Every match is capped at six minutes, apart from CHASE, which is a 100-second round. Five seconds after a match ends the room resets to the lobby with everyone still in their seats, and the next one starts when the host does.

TEAM BATTLE

Six a side, and nobody stays dead. This is what QUICK PLAY puts you in: one click from the menu finds a public TEAM BATTLE, fills the empty seats with bots and starts.

The scoring rule is the important part. Every aircraft the other side loses is a point to yours — shot down, rammed, flown into a tower, killed by the ring or the ceiling. Not kills: losses. Counting kills would make crashing free and hiding from a losing fight the best tactic; counting losses means a pilot who flies into a hill has scored for the enemy just as surely as if they had been shot. Leaving the match is the one way to go down that scores nothing.

You come back four seconds later, on your own side of the ring, pointed at the middle. The first side to 40 wins; on the clock, the side ahead wins, and level is a draw. The score sits at the top of the screen.

How to approach it

• Do not die cheaply. Your own death is worth exactly as much to the other side as your kill is to yours. A trade where you both go down is zero; a crash is minus one.
• Fight with the team. Four seconds is short, so the side that arrives together keeps arriving together. A lone pilot running deep is a point waiting to happen.
• Assists matter to you, not the score. Damage an aircraft in the ten seconds before it dies and you are credited with an assist, even if nobody finished it and it flew into the ground. It counts toward your experience.

A full page on the team mode is at TEAM BATTLE.

DEATHMATCH

Everyone against everyone, twelve places, and you respawn after four seconds. The match ends the moment any pilot reaches ten kills, or on the clock, and the scoreboard decides it: the most kills, with fewer deaths breaking a tie. There are no teams, so there is no friendly fire to worry about and nobody to protect you.

Ten was chosen from measurement rather than taste. With a higher target the clock decided every match and the headline rule never fired; ten is reachable by someone having a good match and out of reach of someone having an ordinary one.

How to approach it

A deathmatch rewards the pilot who keeps killing, and the game helps: every kill refunds part of every missile rack and refills your boost. A streak feeds itself. The danger is the third party — while you are finishing one fight, somebody else is lining up on you. Win the fight, then leave it at speed before you look for the next.

CHASE

One aircraft starts blue. Everyone else is red. Blue hunts; red runs. The starting blue is drawn at random from every seat, bots included, so you will be hunted far more often than you hunt.

• One touch converts. A red hit by anything at all from a blue — a single round, a missile, a collision — is down at once, with no five-hit decline. Five seconds later it comes back blue, beside another blue and a little above it, to help hunt the rest.
• Reds cannot fight back. A red cannot hurt or lock anyone. Being red is a flying problem, not a gunnery one.
• Blue never runs out of boost. Its tank is kept full the whole time. Without that the mode does not work: an equal aircraft running away is never caught by an equal aircraft. The reds have the ordinary tank.
• Only a blue can convert you. Dying to the ground, the ring or the ceiling costs you five seconds and leaves you red.

Blue wins by converting everybody inside 100 seconds. Red wins if anybody is still red when the clock runs out — and that is a team result, so the last red alive has won it for every red, including the ones who were caught.

How to approach it

As red, your boost is the decision. Spend it to break contact, not to cruise, and keep some for when a blue is closing — because the blue always has more. Use the towers: a blue that has to go round a building is a blue that is not pointed at you, and a HOUND behind you dies on the first wall it meets. As blue, remember that the newly converted arrive beside you, so the pack grows round whoever is doing the catching. Herd reds toward each other rather than chasing one across the map.

6 v 6, 12 v 12 and CUSTOM

The elimination modes. Two sides, one life each, and the side with the last aircraft flying wins. If the six minutes run out with both sides still in the air, it is a draw for both — deliberately, with no tiebreak on damage dealt. Nobody wins by hiding, and with the ring closing all the way down to 200 m the last minute is a hunt rather than a stall. How the ring closes is on the maps page.

6 v 6 is the default when you open a match yourself. 12 v 12 is the same thing with twenty-four places. CUSTOM lets the host set the number of places, from one to twenty-four, split into two sides.

How to approach them

The whole calculus inverts. In a respawn mode a death costs four seconds; here it costs the match, and leaves your side a pilot short for the rest of it. Take fewer, better shots. Let the aggressive pilots on the other side come to you in the early minutes, when the ring is wide and there is cloud to hide in, and save your boost and flares for the endgame in the plaza.

Bots, and how good they are

In every mode, empty seats can be filled with bots — the host's Fill empty seats with bots switch, on unless they turn it off. A bot only borrows a seat: when a person joins, they take it. Bots fly the same six aircraft with the same racks and flares that you do. There are four tiers of pilot:

The host does not pick tiers directly. They pick a squadron, which is a mix of the four:

A harder setting therefore means better pilots, not the same pilots cheating. Measured against the same evasive target, the veteran mix lands two to three times as many hits as the rookie one.

MATCHED SQUADRON keeps score. Every time a person shoots down a bot it moves one step harder; every time a bot shoots down a person, one step easier. Crashes, rams between a person and a bot, and fights between two people say nothing about the bots and do not move it. Ten more kills than deaths against them takes the room from the mixed squadron all the way to the veteran one. It changes only who climbs into a seat when a bot respawns — no bot ever improves in the air — and the room carries what it learnt into its next match.

RANKED

RANKED is TEAM BATTLE with a rating on it, and only TEAM BATTLE, so that a rating always means the same thing. It sits on the menu for everyone to see and opens once you are signed in with Google and have reached level 30. Ranked rooms are matched only with other ranked rooms, are always filled with bots, and the host cannot reshape them.

Levels

Every match a signed-in pilot flies pays experience, win or lose:

Level 2 costs 400 XP and each level after costs 120 more than the last, so level 30 begins at a little over 60,000 XP. A TEAM BATTLE with three kills, two assists and a win is worth 590. Plan on five or six hours of flying — long enough that by the time you reach the ladder, a loss is about the fight rather than about which key drops flares.

The ladder

Everyone starts at a rating of 1,000. Your first five ranked matches are placements and move your rating twice as fast; after that it settles. The result is scored team against team: your side's average rating, you included, against theirs, with each bot counted at a rating for its tier — 850 for a rookie, 1,100 a regular, 1,450 a veteran and 1,800 an ace. The bots you are dealt are drawn to match the pilots in the room, so a low-rated room is mostly rookies and regulars and a high one mostly veterans and aces.

Each tier below ACE has four divisions, IV up to I, 50 rating points apiece, shown as 0–99 LP. A fresh 1,000 is BRONZE II.

A worked example

Past placements, between two evenly matched sides, a win is worth +16 and a loss −16; a draw moves nothing. Against a side averaging 200 points above yours, a win pays +24 and a loss costs only −8. Against a side 200 below, a win pays +8 and a loss costs −24. That asymmetry is what makes farming weak rooms pointless. A win always pays at least 5 and a loss always costs at least 5, so no ranked match is a shrug.

Leaving a ranked match in progress counts as a loss, recorded the moment you go. Otherwise leaving would be a free escape from every match going badly. The ladder's top twenty are on the menu under TOP PILOTS.

Playing with friends

CREATE MATCH opens a lobby and asks one question: who may join. ANYONE CAN JOIN lists it under FIND MATCH for strangers to fill. FRIENDS ONLY gives you a four-character code — letters and digits, with the easily confused ones like O and 0 left out — and nobody without it can get in; the match is never listed anywhere. Send the code, and your friends enter it under FIND MATCH.

The host is whoever holds the first seat, and passes to the next person if they leave. The host sets the mode, the bot difficulty, whether empty seats are filled, and the sky — any, day, golden hour, dusk or storm — and starts the match once everyone has readied up. A room that is full lets you watch instead.

Tournaments

In any two-team mode the host can tick Tournament, which turns the room into a series of ordinary rounds. Up to ten are played and the first side to six wins takes it, so a decided series stops early. Drawn rounds are counted but win nothing. If the ten rounds run out with one side ahead, that side wins; if they are dead level, one more round is played with no clock at all, until one side is eliminated.

Signed in or not, you also keep a career on your device: twelve ranks from CADET to LEGEND, paid for in the same experience. It is a record of flying and buys nothing. For the sky you will be fighting under, see maps; for what to carry, see aircraft and weapons; for questions this page did not answer, the FAQ.

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