Survival Mode is a game mode in Starblast.io, also known as Free for All (FFA). It was the former original game mode. It was the first game mode in the game. The goal of the player is to mine asteroids and gain crystals, using these crystals, upgrade their ship and proceed to the next tier. The ultimate goal is to last till the Survival Mode period begins, and then emerge as the last survivor of the game, and thus claim victory.
It is generally the case that early players often have a big advantage over later players, as higher tier ships are generally stronger than lower-tier ones. Thus, it is recommended to use Loveship's Server Listing to access new servers that have just begun by looking for the lowest time since the server has started. Mine quickly and buy the next tier ship as soon as you can, as it is generally not worthwhile to upgrade stats of lower-tier ships, except for Energy Regeneration. Players can play solo or team. While teaming gives additional protection to players, it is also not uncommon for players to betray others, and mining is generally slower in a team. It is often frowned upon to team and then attack other players, as this generally leads to an unfair game, especially if the solo player being attacked is a lower-tier ship. The bouncing lasers feature is an anti-teaming mechanic to help soloists stand a much better chance against teams.
In Survival Mode, all ships except for the Fly have three lives. Once the lives have run out, the ship downgrades to the previous tier. All upgrades on the previous tier ship are retained, just like in other game modes.
The player with the highest score is the leader and has a special trophy marker on the mini-map. This shows up no matter what; even when off the radar range for regular players, it will still point to the approximate position of the leader. This allows all other players to find them and potentially take the trophy for themselves. As such, it is often dangerous to be the leader as the leader often gets targeted by teams. However, leaders tend to also have their team and one must be fully prepared before attempting to take down the leader, as they are often aggressive and have stronger ships with more upgrades.
Once a player upgrades to Tier 7 or the match has been going on for more than 30 minutes, the Survival period begins (changed, 30 minutes plausible with increased crystal drop.changes no longer seen on changelogs). Multiple players can upgrade to Tier 7 simultaneously, provided they have full crystals when the survival period begins.
For the entire month of August 2019 and February 2020, Survival Mode used U-Series ships.
Survival Mode (Survival period)
"Survival Mode" is a mechanic in this game mode that triggers a death-match upon a server reaching certain conditions. In normal games, these conditions are:
- It has been 30 minutes since the server started.
However, in custom games, these conditions can be changed.
When this mechanic has been triggered, players whose ships have been destroyed can no longer respawn, nor can new players join in the server. Players also cannot upgrade up to Tier 7 anymore. The server ends once there is only one player left.
Once Survival Mode begins, all players have a red target on the mini-map, and all lives are lost immediately except for the last.
As of September 5, 2017, the stellar radiation mechanic has been removed and replaced with repulsive gravity fields to prevent people in fast ships from fleeing until they can one-shot the bigger but slower ship.
Repulsive Gravity Fields
Instead of draining the player's health, a force field radiates from the central star. It pushes the player(s) away from the star, until eventually due to the wrap-around nature of the map, all the remaining players are pushed to one side of the map so they must fight. As the endgame progresses, the field gets bigger and stronger. The gravity field shows up on the radar, and you can toggle seeing the fields on and off in settings. This forces players to fight, as they are pushed towards each other.
Stellar Radiation (Outdated)
A mechanic called stellar radiation will drain shield regeneration from all ships. At the beginning of the Survival period, this is at 100%, which is normal shield regeneration, and overtime proceeds to 0%, at which point ships can not regenerate shields. Players will receive warnings at 75%, 50%, 25% and at 0%. As a result of this mechanic, certain ships with high shield regeneration are rendered weaker. After shield regeneration has dropped down to 0%, the ship's shield will degenerate. When the shield drops to zero, crystals will begin draining, and once the crystal cargo is empty any further damage received will destroy the ship immediately. Any further crystals gained from asteroids are also drained. This is replaced by Repulsive Gravity Fields. This was removed due to small/fast ships endlessly running from the higher level ship until there was no shield regeneration (and when they lose them because of the end effect) to one-shot the big ship (there was an end game mechanic because of the endless running of small ships)
Game Mechanics
Bouncing lasers (Removed)-One of these new mechanics are bouncing lasers which does what it says. When there are multiple ships by each other in a team a solo player can attack (best ships to use are pulse-based like the Mercury, Advanced Fighter, and the pulse-based level 7s) the laser will bounce between the ships doing several times the damage than if the ship is solo. The bullet will lose 10% of the damage and speed with each bounce eventually disappears but depending on the original ship upgrades and what ship it is, the 2-3 ships will be dead even if they have a large number of gems. This can be exploited by teams of they have defense pods doing more damage to the solo player, but this won't work once the pods die(lasers will bounce off of them too). It can also be exploited by a team just by keeping their distance from each other while still attacking their target.
Revenge Marker- A unique mechanic of Survival Mode is the "revenge" marker, a red target marker on the mini-map that allows players to find out other players who have killed them, and hence take revenge. It is dangerous to kill other players unless fully prepared for immediate revenge. This target marker appears on all players once the Survival period begins. Survival Mode also has a 1.35x gem yield, as opposed to a 2x gem yield in Team Mode.In team mode it along with the leader symbol can also be seen out of range but in the form of a normal marker,which can still accurately be used to one’s advantage.