THE MAP

Every JET3D match is currently flown on one map, HIGHLANDS: a city of towers in the middle of a mountain range, with a ring that closes on the centre and a lid of cloud that comes down with it. This page is the field guide to it — how big it is, how tall the buildings are, what the ring does minute by minute, and how each of those things should change where you fly. If you have not flown yet, start with how to fly; this assumes you can bank and pull.

The shape of it

The world is a square six kilometres on a side, and the ring at the start of a match is five kilometres across, centred on the middle. Almost everything inside that ring is city. The mountains, the carved canyons with lakes in their floors, the forests and the volcano on the horizon all lie beyond it — they are real terrain, solid and lethal, but by the time you are among them you are outside the ring and taking damage. Treat them as the walls of the room, not the room.

You spawn on a circle 1.6 km from the centre at 900 m, already moving at about 430 km/h, with your side grouped on its own arc and every nose angled round and inward. That height is deliberate: it is clear of everything standing beneath the spawn circle, with a couple of hundred metres to spare.

The city

There are a little over two hundred towers, and they are not scenery. Every one is solid — the main mass, the podium it stands on, the set-back crown and the spire on top. Fly into any part of a building and you die exactly as you would against a mountain. They stop your rounds and they stop missiles.

Height falls away from the middle. The tallest towers stand in a ring round the edge of the plaza and the shortest are out at the city limit, so the skyline is a bowl with an open floor.

The street widths were set by the turn circle, not by taste. At around 500 km/h the aircraft turn in a circle 270–330 m across, and 160–195 m on the hard turn. A 130 m street is therefore narrower than any ordinary turn — you can run along it, but you cannot turn round in it. A 200 m avenue is just inside the hard-turn circle, which means a committed run between towers always has a way out if you are willing to spend the speed. Some blocks are empty — parks and open lots — and those are where you break sideways out of a street.

The trees are solid too. Inside the city they line the avenues and fill the parks, so the lowest few metres over a verge are not as empty as they look. When the line you are flying meets anything solid inside about two and a half seconds, PULL UP flashes; in the city, that is usually a building rather than the ground.

Towers that burn and fall

Shoot a tower and it remembers. A missile that ends on a building sets it alight on the spot; rounds do too, but only about two dozen landing close together, because the heat bleeds away and a stray burst does nothing. A fire burns for about seventy seconds. It is cosmetic — a burning tower is exactly as solid as before, and the smoke hides nobody.

Damage, unlike heat, does not leak. Three missiles bring a tower down. Guns can do it, but each round counts a third as much, so it takes something like ten seconds of one aircraft's guns held on one building. Hit a tower high and it pancakes, dropping to a burnt stump over about eight seconds. Hit it in the lower half and it topples toward the face you hit, over about seven seconds; tall towers snap partway and fold. A toppled tower is solid from the moment it starts to lean and stays lying across the street, solid, for the rest of the match. Fallen towers and fires both show on the minimap.

That has two practical uses. A gap you blew in the skyline is a new way through it. And every HOUND that dies against a building counts as one of the three — so a pilot who spends a match dodging guided missiles round the same tower is slowly knocking it down.

The ring, minute by minute

The ring is a cylinder: a radius you must stay inside and a ceiling you must stay under. Both shrink together and continuously — never in steps — and the damage you take outside rises as they do. The damage lands on the tail boom, which takes 140 points before the aircraft is lost, so the last column below is how long an undamaged jet lasts outside.

Read the table as a change of character rather than a list of numbers. For the first two minutes the ring is a soft boundary: sixteen seconds outside is long enough to chase someone across it and come back. By four minutes it is a wall you can lean on for a breath. In the last thirty seconds it is a cliff edge.

The final ring, 200 m in radius, fits inside the 340 m plaza. That is the point of the layout: the end of a match is a knife fight in an open square, walled by the tallest buildings on the map, with the cloud deck coming down on top of it. Nearly every one of those walls stands taller than the late ceiling, so you cannot climb over them — the way out of the plaza is between them.

In the respawn modes — TEAM BATTLE and DEATHMATCH — the ring stops closing at three minutes and holds at 1,250 m with a 1,300 m ceiling. Nobody is eliminated there, so there is nothing for it to force; left to close it simply killed people as they respawned. See game modes.

The ceiling

The cloud deck is drawn at the ceiling. Fly above it and you are outside the ring, taking the same damage as at the edge. Keep going and the sky turns black, the stars come out, and 220 m above the ceiling you are simply gone — no damage, no warning beyond what you have already seen. That margin is there so a hard pull that clips the deck does not kill you outright; it is not a place to fly.

Because the ceiling falls from 2,000 m to 400 m, the height you can use falls with it. In the opening minute you have nearly two kilometres of air to trade for speed. By the fifth minute you have 750 m, much of it below the tops of the plaza towers. Energy fights that relied on climbing away stop working late in a match, and the pilots who have not noticed are the ones who arrive at the deck slow.

The cloud band

Below the deck there is a second layer of cloud you can fly into. Inside it you disappear from everyone's markers and minimap, and nobody can lock you — but you cannot see out (the fog closes to about a hundred metres) and you cannot lock anyone either. It tracks the ceiling, and it is squeezed out as the ceiling comes down because it is never allowed to sink below 350 m.

Two consequences. First, the tallest towers are capped exactly at the band's starting underside, so early in a match the skyline and the cloud never overlap. Second, the band is cover early and nothing late: the last ninety seconds of an elimination match have nowhere to hide. In a respawn mode the ring holds at three minutes, so the band holds too, at 570–850 m, for the whole match.

How to fight here

Early: height and the band

You start at 900 m, which is above almost all of the city and below the cloud band. That is a good place to be. Climbing into the band on the way in hides your approach from markers and from guided missiles; dropping out of the bottom of it puts you over the fight with height to spend. The cost is that you arrive blind, so come out of it with a reason, not on a hope.

The towers are your flares

A HOUND has no idea a building is there. It steers at your exhaust and dies on the first solid thing between you, which makes every tower a second answer to a guided missile. When the warning sounds and you are near the city, put a tower between you and the missile rather than reaching for flares — save those for open air. The same rule cuts the other way: a target weaving through downtown is a bad target for your own HOUND, and a better one for guns at short range.

Low is fast to die in

More pilots are killed by the city than by anyone in it. Street level gives you cover from three sides and none from the ground, and the streets are narrower than your turn. If you go down among the towers, go down along an avenue with speed, know where the next open block is, and come back up before you need to turn. Do not start a turning fight below the rooftops.

Late: the plaza

From four minutes on, the fight is going to the middle whether you like it or not. Get there before the ring pushes you there: the pilot who is already circling the plaza with speed sees everyone else arriving through the gaps between the towers, slow and in a hurry. With the ceiling at 500 m and the walls above it, the only energy left is the energy you brought.

The light and the weather

Each match is lit one way for everybody in it, drawn by the server: noon about half the time, golden hour a little over a quarter, dusk with the city's lights on about one match in eight, and a storm about one in ten. The host can also pick one in the lobby. None of them changes the physics, and a storm is no foggier than a clear day, but they change what is easy to see. At dusk and in a storm the tall towers carry blinking red aviation lights on their tops — they mark the spires, which are solid, and they go dark when a tower falls. In a storm the rain falls from the bottom of the cloud band, so climbing out of the top of it puts you in the dry.

RING VALLEY

A second map exists and is finished, but it is switched off for the beta so that everyone lands on the same one. For the record: one circular canyon 1.9 km from the centre, about 260 m wall to wall, with a single narrow cut straight across the middle and rocks standing in both. There is no city and no forest, and the ring does not close — the boundary is fixed and the ceiling sits at 530 m, below the canyon rim, so over the wall is over the ceiling. Five seconds outside kills you. It is a map for people only: the bots cannot yet fly it. When it comes back, this page will cover it properly.

Related reading: tactics, weapons, aircraft, and how it works for the simulation behind the terrain and the ring.

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