A pirate arena should drop treasure.

The Loot Compass

The brass Loot Compass is a time-limited pickup-range specialist. It pulls nearby neutral treasure and the carrier's own wake loot. It does not vacuum another player's rival hoard or objective rewards.

That boundary is the whole design. A pickup-range effect that hoovered up everything on screen would quietly delete the part of the game where you decide whether a pile is worth contesting. Restricted to neutral field treasure and your own spent mass, the compass rewards sweeping open water efficiently — and leaves the risky treasure exactly as risky as it was.

Why the treasure is readable instead of anonymous

Most arena games of this shape drop identical coloured dots and call it food. It works, and it tells you nothing. A dot cannot say where it came from, who paid for it, or whether picking it up is a good idea.

Wormifi's treasure is sorted into classes you can identify at a glance, because each class carries a different piece of information. Neutral field treasure — doubloons, skull rubies, anchor sapphires, spyglass emeralds, pearls, keys, maps — is ordinary growth, uncontested until someone contests it. A chest announces before you commit that the reward is large, so approaching one is a decision rather than a surprise. Rival hoard is marked as what it is: the conserved mass of a crew that was cut here, recently, by someone who is probably still nearby. Wake loot carries the colour of whoever burned size to make it.

The result is that the arena floor is a readable record of what has already happened in it. You are not just collecting points; you are reading where the fights were, who won them, and which direction they went afterwards.

Nothing appears from nowhere

One rule sits underneath all of this: reward comes from somewhere. When a rival is cut, its mass is not deleted and replaced with an unrelated bonus — that same mass becomes the hoard on the floor. When you sprint, the size you spend is not simply burned; it drops behind you as loot that anyone can collect, including you if you double back.

This is what keeps a big lead from being a safe one. Every advantage you accumulate is physically present in the arena and can be taken from you in a single mistake. It is also why chasing a much larger crew is worth doing: their size is not an abstract score, it is a pile of treasure walking around with an exposed head.

Common questions about treasure

Is any treasure worth more than the rest?

Chests are the high-value field objects, and they are drawn as chests specifically so the size of the reward is readable before you commit to going for one.

Where does rival hoard come from?

From a crew that was cut. The defeated crew's mass is conserved and dropped as marked hoard treasure rather than vanishing.

Can someone steal the loot I dropped while sprinting?

Yes. Wake loot is collectable by anyone. It keeps your colour so it is always clear who paid for it, but the colour is a label, not a lock.

Does the Loot Compass let someone steal my hoard from a distance?

No. It pulls neutral field treasure and the carrier's own wake loot only. Another player's rival hoard and objective rewards are outside its reach.

Can I buy treasure or pay to grow faster?

No. There is nothing to buy. Everything on this page is earned in the arena.