Inferno Royale¶

Lyonspyre's queue-and-go PvP arena: type one command, get teleported into a sealed arena with up to seven other players, all on the same archer-dexxer loadout, with a storm closing in and bows scattered on the ground in five rarity tiers. Last one alive wins.

How to play¶

Command	What it does
`[br`	Show queue size + your queue / match status.
`[br join`	Join the queue. Eligibility-gated (see below).
`[br leave`	Leave the queue, or leave a match after you've died.
`[br status`	Print the current match's storm radius, your kill count, alive count.
`[br follow <name>`	Spectator only: snap your ghost to a living participant.
`[br unfollow`	Spectator only: go back to free-fly mode.
`[brmap`	Open the minimap overlay (it auto-opens on match start; this is the manual re-open).

You can also reach the queue from the Arena panel ([arena) — select INFERNO ROYALE in the top mode-picker bar and the CREATE pane pivots to a queue surface with the same JOIN / LEAVE buttons. The two flows are interchangeable; pick whichever you have a keybind for.

When the queue hits its threshold (defaults to 1 during early playtest; rising to 8 for public release), the match auto-starts. First you spend 30 seconds in a warmup staging area, then you drop into the arena for a 10-second countdown, then FIGHT!.

Warmup lobby (30-second staging area)¶

Before the real match, every participant is teleported to a shared warmup staging area — a small island away from the arena — for 30 seconds. This is your chance to settle in before the drop. During the warmup:

Your Inferno Hotbar is open. Bind your Wall of Stone key and get comfortable with it (see the hotbar section below).
Practice rock piles are scattered around the staging area. Double-click them to practice the mining swing and watch building stones stack up in your pack — exactly like mining in the real arena.
You can cast Wall of Stone. With practice stones in your pack, the bound key (or the hotbar slot) places real walls so you can rehearse walling a chokepoint before it matters. Double-click your own walls to practice breaking them, too.
You can use any emote you've unlocked — starter emotes and anything bought from the AP Store all work in the warmup.
A big countdown shows in the minimap panel. During the warmup the Inferno Royale minimap (which has nothing to show yet) displays a large countdown so you know exactly how long until the drop. It turns red for the final 5 seconds.
No one can hurt anyone. It's a warmup; any swing or spell that would damage another participant is clamped to 0.

A chat line greets you on arrival, and a 5-second warning fires just before the drop. When the 30 seconds elapse:

Every practice rock pile is removed.
Every practice wall you cast is removed — the staging island resets clean for the next match.
Your practice stones are wiped. Anything you mined in the warmup does not carry into the arena — lobby mining is purely for muscle memory, never an advantage.
You're teleported to the arena and the normal 10-second countdown begins.

Pre-match window (10-second countdown)¶

During the 10-second countdown you're already inside the arena with your match loadout applied. You can:

Open your inventory.
Equip armour and weapons (the arena scatters bows on the ground; grab one if you can reach it).
Drink potions, pop bandages, pre-buff.
Bind your Wall of Stone hotbar key. The Inferno Royale hotbar auto-opens during the countdown; click the slot and press the key you want bound. Pressing the bound key during the countdown shows a quick "Wall of Stone unavailable until FIGHT!" message (it doesn't fall through to chat). The instant the countdown ends, the same key fires the spell normally.

You cannot damage another participant during this window — any swing or spell that would hurt another player is clamped to 0 damage. The moment the countdown hits zero and the FIGHT! banner appears, normal combat opens up.

Eligibility¶

You cannot queue if any of these are true:

You're in combat (aggressors or aggressed in the last few seconds).
You're dead (rez and rebind first).
You're inside a dungeon.
You're already in a match (any PvP mode).
You're already queued.

The queue gate is server-checked — there's no client-trusted shortcut.

What happens when the match starts¶

Your entire inventory (backpack + equipped items) is moved into a server-side archive container. You can't lose any of it; you'll get it all back when the match ends.
Your skills are snapshotted and replaced with the standard Archer loadout:
100 in Archery, Tactics, Anatomy, Healing, Magic Resist, Wrestling
100 Str / 100 Dex / 50 Int
No magery — this is a bow-and-bandage fight. If you never find a bow, you can still throw bare-handed punches at 100 Wrestling.
You're teleported to the warmup staging area for 30 seconds (see above), then dropped into the arena alongside the other participants.
Your vitals top off; the storm grace period begins.

Ground loot¶

The arena is seeded with loot piles at match start — sacks scattered across walkable tiles, each containing a randomly-rolled bow and supplies. Run toward a sack to pick it up; double-click the sack to open it and pull out what's inside.

Bows roll at one of five rarity tiers. Rarity is visible at a glance from the bow's hue and name:

Tier	Hue	Drop rate	Damage
Common	off-white	50%	base
Uncommon	pale green	25%	+20%
Rare	ice blue	15%	+40%
Epic	deep violet	8%	+60%
Legendary	bright orange-gold	2%	+100%

Bow shapes vary too — short bow, composite bow, crossbow, heavy crossbow — the shape is independent of the rarity tier. A legendary heavy crossbow is the rarest find in the arena and hits at twice the base damage of its tier-zero version.

Every sack also contains:

20 — 40 arrows (smaller stacks for higher-rarity bows — finding a legendary doesn't guarantee an ammo supply).
5 — 10 bandages for healing.
50% chance of a Greater Heal potion.
50% chance of a Refresh potion.

Nothing you pick up is permanent. When the match ends, everything in your pack is destroyed and your pre-match inventory is restored. Loot is for the duration of the match only — the rarest finds are a temporary edge, not a permanent reward.

Mining and building walls¶

Around the arena you'll find roughly 20 rock piles scattered on walkable tiles — chunky, obvious mounds of stone. You do not need a pickaxe — every participant can mine directly.

Double-click a rock pile to mine it. Your character plays a mining swing animation (your bow stays equipped — the swing is cosmetic). After ~1.5 seconds, 3 — 6 building stones drop straight into your pack.
A pile depletes after 3 mines and crumbles away with a small dust burst.
If you double-click again before your previous swing finishes, the extra click is ignored — wait for the swing to complete.

Building a wall: open the Inferno Hotbar (it auto-opens when the match starts; the manual command is [brhotbar). The hotbar ships one slot — Wall of Stone — which you can bind to any key. With at least one building stone in your pack, pressing the bound key (or clicking the slot directly) opens a target cursor. Click any tile within 12 tiles to lay a 3-wall line oriented toward you (the classic Wall of Stone spell shape). One cast = one stone consumed = three wall tiles painted.

Walls are solid — they block movement for everyone (including the placer), they block ranged line-of-sight, and they can't be picked back up.

Breaking a wall: double-click the wall. A 2-second chipping animation plays. You must stand still for the full 2 seconds or the break is aborted. After the windup the wall crumbles with a stone-crack sound and is destroyed. Any participant can break any wall, including their own.

Walls persist past the end of the match — they only crumble via the 2-second double-click windup. Rock piles, ground stones, and other loose match-acquired items (bows, arrows, bandages, potions, supply-drop contents) are vacuumed automatically the moment the match ends. Stones go to the ground if you die (see "Death + spectator mode" below) so surviving players can scavenge them.

Inferno Hotbar (key binding)¶

Slot	Ability	Default key	What it does
1	Wall of Stone	unbound	Opens a 12-tile target cursor; consumes one stone, paints a 3-wall line on the targeted tile

To bind a key to a slot:

Click the slot. Its border begins pulsing green and the hint reads "press any key...".
Press any key. The slot stores that key for this character and the panel exits bind mode.
From then on, pressing the key inside any active match fires the ability.

Bindings persist across logout, deaths, and match restarts — the server stores them per-account. To rebind, click the slot again or click the "Rebind" button under the slot (same flow either way — the next key you press becomes the new binding). To cancel bind mode without setting a key, click anywhere outside the slot or press Escape.

The hotbar stays open for the full match — the panel auto-closes the moment the match ends, and can't be dismissed mid-match (this prevents accidentally losing your only key-bound ability). The same lock applies to the minimap.

BR bindings beat your normal hotkeys AND the chat input. If you already have a vanilla keyboard macro on the key you bind to a BR slot (W is a common collision because it would normally type "w" into your say bar), the BR ability wins while the match is live — the macro is suppressed and the chat input never sees the keystroke. The instant the match ends, your normal macro starts working again on the same key. This is automatic; you don't have to clear or reconfigure your macros to play.

The storm¶

The storm is a shrinking square safe zone inside the arena. Anyone outside the safe zone takes fire damage every second — and the longer the match runs, the harder the fire bites.

Phase	Time window	Safe radius
Grace	0 — 2 min	50 tiles (covers the full arena)
Shrink	every 60 s after grace	-5 tiles each tick
Full close	final shrinks	radius reaches 0 — the fire consumes the entire arena, leaving no safe pocket, so the match always resolves

Dynamic safe-zone center¶

Each shrink picks a new center for the upcoming safe zone, jittered randomly within the current safe zone — the new zone always fits entirely inside the old one, so anyone standing dead-center of the current zone is guaranteed to still be safe in the next zone, while anyone on the edge may need to reposition.

10 seconds before the storm closes you'll see:

A chat broadcast naming the next zone's center coordinates and a 10-second countdown.
A blue sparkle outline drawn on the ground around the next safe zone's exact footprint. Run toward the sparkles; the storm will collapse onto that footprint when the countdown hits zero.

Once the countdown elapses, the burning band advances to the new boundary and the cycle repeats.

Storm damage: ramps with every shrink. It starts at 5 HP/second when the first zone closes and climbs by 2 HP/s per shrink, reaching ~25 HP/second once the fire has consumed the whole arena — so stalling at the edge gets lethal fast. Player kills are still possible; the storm is the ratchet, not the only kill source.

Minimap¶

A small overlay panel opens in the top-right of your screen automatically when the match starts (and closes automatically when it ends). The minimap shows the entire arena footprint and updates twice per second.

Marker	Meaning
Blue translucent square	Current safe zone
Yellow dashed outline	Next safe zone (only visible during the 10-second telegraph window)
Green dot with halo	You
Red dot	Other live participant
Gray dot	Other dead participant
Gold dot	Active supply drop

The footer shows the survivor count and a countdown to the next storm move (when active). The minimap is also openable manually via [brmap if you closed it.

No criminal flag inside the arena¶

Attacking another participant inside the arena does not flag you criminal, count toward your murder count, or call guards. The arena is a lawless zone for the duration of the match — that's the point of the mode. The flag rules return to normal the moment the match ends and you're teleported back home.

Death + spectator mode¶

When you die, your backpack contents drop on the ground at your death tile — stones, ground-loot bow, anything you picked up during the match. Other living participants can grab your gear and use it. (Your pre-match inventory is safely archived and restored at match end no matter how you die.)

You don't get returned to base — you become a ghost spectator inside the arena. You can:

Walk freely (ghosts move through walls in vanilla UO).
[br follow <name> — pick a living participant; your ghost auto-snaps to within one tile of them every 200 ms.
[br unfollow — back to free-fly mode.
[br leave — give up spectating early and get returned to your pre-match location with all your gear and skills restored.

Ghosts cannot deal damage, cast spells, or otherwise affect the living. They're observers.

When the match ends¶

There are exactly three ways the match concludes:

One survivor. That player wins. Everyone gets teleported back to where they queued from; everyone's archived inventory + skills are restored.
Storm kills the last two simultaneously. No winner; everyone is restored.
15-minute hard cap. Defensive timer. Should never trigger — the storm collapses to 5 tiles before this point.

Server-wide broadcast announces the winner: "PlayerName wins the Battle Royale! N kills, M seconds survived."

Crash safety¶

If the server crashes mid-match — or you disconnect for more than 30 seconds — the archive sidecar JSON survives the restart. On the next boot, an orphan-recovery sweep walks every stashed entry, restores items to the rightful owner's pack, and resets their skills. You won't lose gear to a bad day on the host.

Achievements¶

Four BR achievements ship in Phase 1:

ID	Name	Description	AP
`br.first.win`	Survivor	Win your first Battle Royale.	100
`br.ten.wins`	Last One Standing	Win 10 Battle Royales.	500
`br.no.damage.win`	Untouchable	Win without taking any damage.	250
`br.last.man.standing`	Storm Survivor	Win a match where the storm scored every kill (no player kills).	100

Match history¶

Your last 50 BR matches are stored per-account: timestamp, participant count, placement, kills, survival time, and whether the storm killed the last survivor. Coming soon: a panel that surfaces this; for now it powers the achievements and is available to GMs via the standard match-history sidecar.

What's NOT in yet¶

Locked design questions for future phases:

Spawned Wall-of-Stone charges.
Loot piñata: kill drops 1-3 random charge items.
Class-specific ultimate picker.
Team modes (2v2, 4v4).
Public stats page on the wiki.

If you have feedback on Phase 1 — pacing, storm damage, the loadout, spectator UX — chat with the dev team. The 10-min match loop is the design pillar; everything around it is tunable.