Slither.io Observations

Slither.io

2 months ago

Here’s a simple collection of things that I would’ve found usefull if I’d known them before playing the game.

General information

The map is a huge disc. If you touch its boundaries, you simply disappear and you leave nothing behind.
When you die by touching another snake, the food that you leave behind represents only 20-23% of the mass you had when you died.
Although the game has no lobby, there are different rooms. The only way to change a room is by refreshing your browserwindow.
Most of the action happens at the center. You barely ever meet someone at the edge unless the room is incredibly full.
The “butterflies”, as I like to call them, meaning the big food pellets that move around and run away from you, have a mass of 50-60.
Normal pellets spawn only around players or other pellets. they grow in size over time, starting from 1 up to around 20.
Your boost-remains start at a mass of 1.
The remains of a dead snake consists of larger pellets with a mass of around 10 – 40.
Oftentimes when you see someone inside someone else it is usually a good idea to stick around. More often then not the outer snake makes a mistake, leaving you and the inside snake with its mass to share.
When boosting, you lose mass (you defecate it out of your tail). However, the boost-remains only represent around 30% of the mass that you actually lost while boosting. This means if you boost in a circle, you will eventually lose all of your mass.
When you leave the game without dying (closing the browser, exiting the game), your snake lives on, but from now on it is controlled by a bot.
When it gets late, the game spawns additional bots to keep the snake-density up, since the radius of the disc never changes and there arn’t enough players at night to fill the map.

Slither.io Bots

There are different types of bots. They have all the following traits in common:
– They move around in zick-zack lines.
– When close to an enemies body, they try to evade it.
– If close to an enemies head, they go towards the head, trying to cut the enemy off. They never boost when doing this though.
– If surrounded by enemies bodies, they go around in circles. If a head comes near them though, they will slightly move out of that circle.
– When almost encircled (e.g. you intentionally leave a small, but big enough to escape, gap open), they never try to go for the gap. The gap has to be at least 45 degrees wide for them to try and evade.
– If someone big dies near them, they never boost and try to grab as much mass as possible. They randomly pick around every fifth pellet they see if the pellet density is low and every pellet thats near them if the pellet density is high (the remains of a snake).
– They never try to encircle you.

They differ in the direction that the are headed:
1. The ones that control the snakes from players that left the game always head for the boundaries of the map, heading straight into it and eliminating that players mass.
2. The ones that try to imitate a normal player, who get spawned once the amount of human players drops to a certain amount. They don’t head for any specific direction, though they may travel around quite far depending on their surrounding, but if they are alone, they usually end up going around in circles. Another trait is that they never boost.
3. The crazy ones (who also get spawned). These get bursts of boosts that last can last from 20-40 seconds. They don’t stop the boost no matter what. they usually end up chasing their tail, but if an enemies head is near, they will go for the head, which can get quite dangerous for that snake. Once they stopped after around 20-40 seconds, it takes about 2 minutes until their next boosting-frenzy. Between their out-bursts, they act like the second kind of bots.

The amout of spawned bots is highest at night. The spawned bots draw their names from a pool of names, which is the same for every room. Here’s a list of bot-names I observed so far (the number means the amount of times I encountered it on several days, no number means only one encounter):

cure
holy angel
ASCII rider 2
MuSiC
nico
chost
pepe 2
Angie
Neuro
Gumby
Evil snake
Radial flora
Trauma
RuTHLeSS
Special snowflake
BaRt
Straight Edge
FoXX
ADIDAS 2
StuSSy 5
inFecTiOn
Filth
Chaos
HUGo
Banksy
Smack
The great gatsby
demention
Marvin
Wind Dragon
adio
Delphinio
Hypah (the creator’s name)

Since these bots barely try to escape an encircling, it is possible to actually “farm” these bots, resulting in easy food and a huge (albeit slow) accumulation of mass.