Published July 19, 2026
This is the FAQ we'd actually want to read as a new player — no marketing filler, no invented features to pad the list. Every answer below is grounded in how the game actually works today. If something isn't built yet, we say so plainly instead of describing it as if it exists.
Yes, completely. There's no paywall on launching a match, no energy system, and no skin that's cash-only. The only real-money purchase anywhere in the game is stardust packs — optional bundles of the in-game currency, priced at $4.99, $9.99, and $19.99 — and stardust itself is fully earnable just by playing. Every skin, decal, and cosmetic in the catalog can be unlocked with stardust you grind out for free; the cash packs exist purely to skip the grind for players who'd rather spend a few dollars than a few days.
No. Launching a match creates an anonymous session automatically through our authentication system, and that anonymous account still earns and stores stardust server-side, not just in your browser. The one thing that requires actually signing up is spending stardust on a purchase — unlocking a skin or decal requires a real (non-anonymous) account, specifically so a purchase is tied to something more durable than a browser session. If you're just here to play and see how far you can climb, you never have to sign up at all.
None, once it's in your balance — they spend identically. Every session earns stardust from a formula based on how much mass you collected (orbs and kills both count) plus small one-time bonuses for hitting a 4× or 6× kill streak or taking down the boss. A cash pack just adds a lump sum to that same balance instantly instead of you accumulating it over multiple sessions. Both paths credit the exact same server-authoritative `lifetime_stardust` balance, and both can buy any skin or decal in the catalog at the same listed price — there's no separate "premium currency" tier that only cash can reach.
Your stardust balance and owned skins/decals are stored server-side in our database, not just in your browser, so they persist across devices and sessions as long as you're signed in (or stay on the same anonymous session). What resets on death is only your current life — your trail length, your level for that specific run, and any in-life perks you've picked up all reset to zero on your next spawn. That's intentional: the level/stage system is a per-life mechanic, while stardust, cosmetics, and your best-ever leaderboard score are permanent.
No — self-collision was deliberately removed a while back and hasn't existed in either single-player or multiplayer since. You can cross your own trail freely. The only way to die is colliding your head with another player's or bot's body segment (or their head), so if you died unexpectedly, replay the moment mentally: it was almost certainly a body segment belonging to someone else that you didn't see in time, not your own tail. This trips people up specifically because a lot of other .io games in the genre do still kill you on self-collision, so the instinct to blame your own trail is reasonable — it's just not how this game works.
You bounce back — you don't die, and you don't wrap around to the opposite side either. The arena is a 7,000×7,000 unit bounded space, and both players and bots get physically redirected off the boundary rather than being killed by it. This applies to human players in multiplayer too, not just bots — there's an explicit override in the server code to make sure real players bounce the same way bots do. So if you're boosting toward the edge to escape a chase, expect a bounce, not a wall of death and not a teleport to the far side.
Your level (internally called "stage," shown in the HUD as "LEVEL") is derived directly from a single mass score that resets every life — orbs collected plus 10 mass for every kill. There are 1,000 levels total, and the mass required per level isn't a flat curve: it's fast early (level 10 in about a minute, level 100 within a typical first session), keeps getting steeper through the low hundreds for anyone still playing, then deliberately flattens out past level 510 so the last few hundred levels stay a long, steady grind instead of an ever-steepening wall. Your best-ever level reached in a single life is what gets saved to the home-screen leaderboard — dying doesn't erase that permanent record even though it resets your current run.
Perks are permanent, stacking bonuses you unlock as you level up — one of ten possible perks every 10 levels, cycling through all ten identities before starting over at a higher rank (level 10 grants perk 1 rank I, level 20 grants perk 2 rank I, and so on up through level 100, then level 110 grants perk 1 rank II, all the way to level 1000 granting perk 10 rank X). Each perk does one thing and scales that same effect at higher ranks rather than changing what it does — Orb Magnet widens your pickup radius, Afterburner boosts your boost speed, Bounty Hunter adds bonus mass per kill, Iron Skin banks death-saving hits, and so on across ten total perks. Because perks reset with your level at the start of each life, a longer, more successful run genuinely plays differently by the end than it did at the start.
The Cosmic Leviathan is a scheduled boss event that spawns roughly every 5 minutes whenever no boss is currently alive — a five-times-scale, always-boosting, hex-bodied creature that's visible to every player on the map the instant it appears, marked with a pulsing double-ring icon on the minimap regardless of your distance from it. It has a 60-second despawn timer shown as a countdown badge at the top of the screen; if nobody kills it in time it simply escapes and the five-minute cooldown restarts. Killing it drops a wide-spread ring of 48 orbs (24 golden, 12 shield, 12 normal) plus a flat 200 stardust bonus, which makes it one of the single best rewards in the game if you can get a group of players to actually converge on it in time.
CosmicDrift.io runs in a browser and responds to touch input, so it's playable on a phone or tablet without installing anything — the HUD, minimap, and boost controls all adapt to smaller/narrow viewports (the minimap shrinks on screens under 700px wide, for example). There's no separate native app; it's the same web build whether you open it on desktop or mobile. If you're asking specifically about a dedicated app-store release, that's not something we've built or documented as planned — what exists today is the responsive browser version.
We use Supabase for authentication and storage, which covers your account identity (including anonymous sessions if you haven't signed up), your stardust balance, which skins/decals you own, and your session and leaderboard data (like your best-ever level reached). If you buy a stardust pack, Stripe handles the actual payment and card details — we never see or store your card information directly. None of this is used for anything beyond running the game and its purchase system; the full breakdown, including the "why an account is required to spend stardust" reasoning, is in our Privacy Policy linked from the main menu, and that's the authoritative source if you want the complete picture rather than the summary version here.
Right now, no — there's no party system, friends list, or private-lobby feature. Matchmaking is public-room based: you and everyone else launching a match land in the same shared arena together with the game's bots filling in the rest of the population, scaling down as more real players join. If you and a friend both launch around the same time you may well end up in the same room, but there's no way to guarantee or request it. We're not going to pretend a friends system exists just to pad this list — if that's something you want, it's a fair thing to want, it's just not built yet.
That's intentional scaling, not a bug. Bot visual size follows the same level-based curve players do — a front-loaded ramp from level 1 to 100 (roughly 1× to 2× scale) so early progress feels visible fast, a controlled linear climb from level 100 to 500 (2× up to 5×), and then a flat cap at 5× scale from level 500 onward so high-level entities don't become absurdly, unplayably huge. A bigger bot isn't automatically a harder fight in terms of turn rate or reflexes — bot AI runs the same collision-avoidance and orb-targeting logic regardless of size — but a larger body does cover more space on screen and is a bigger target to avoid running into.
Zones are drifting circular regions — Nebula Core (purple), Gravity Well (orange-red), and Void Rift (cyan) — each centered on a single collectible key orb. Standing inside a zone by itself does nothing; the entire benefit comes from actually reaching and eating that zone's key orb, which grants a real temporary effect (extra scatter on your next kill, an 8× collection radius for 10 seconds, or 3× boost fuel regen for 10 seconds depending on the zone) and then instantly relocates the zone somewhere else on the map. Only the human player can trigger this — bots can see and are drawn toward zones but can't collect the key orb or cause a relocation themselves.
Multiplayer is server-authoritative — the server, not your screen, decides who actually died and who actually ate which orb, and what you see locally is an interpolated approximation of that server state arriving over the network. Under normal conditions this is seamless, but real network latency or a busy tick can occasionally make an orb look reachable on your screen for a moment after the server has already resolved it, or make a collision feel like it happened slightly differently than what you saw. This is an inherent property of any real-time multiplayer game built this way, not something specific to CosmicDrift, and it's a deliberate tradeoff: server authority is what prevents client-side cheating on collisions and kills in the first place.
Yes — spending stardust is fully server-authoritative. Every purchase goes through an atomic database check on the server (an update that only succeeds if your real, stored balance actually covers the cost), and that check can't be bypassed by editing anything in your browser. This wasn't always the case: an earlier version of the game kept your balance in local storage only, which meant it really could be edited through devtools, and that was fixed specifically because it was reported as exploitable. Today, local storage is only a client-side display cache of your real balance — the database is the actual source of truth.
This list covers the questions we hear most, but it's not exhaustive, and we'd rather leave something off than make up an answer for it. If something about how the game actually behaves doesn't match what's written here, treat this page as due for an update rather than assume the game is wrong — mechanics do change over time as we tune the game based on real play.