The Rules

The bell

One bell a night, every night, at 8pm Eastern (00:00 UTC — the bell is pinned to the UTC clock; when daylight time ends the Eastern hour follows the published schedule). Bidding closes the instant it rings. Anything you spend after that counts toward tomorrow.

The bell settles an auction over published standings. Conditioning is your bird's standing — public, permanent, literally the size of the bird on the page. Prep is tonight's sealed bid. Fight power adds the two, and the highest total takes the title. Every input is either published before the bell or your own choice at it.

Once enough birds have grown, the card runs in two bouts: the Chick League undercard first, then the Steel main event. Until then the whole field shares one card.

Two stats

Your bird has exactly two numbers. One is permanent and one resets every night.

Conditioning — permanent · your standing

Never decays. Never resets. It sets which division you fight in, how large your bird is drawn on the front page, and where you rank in the roost. Because it is a square root, ten times the money buys about three times the bird.

Prep — resets at every bell · tonight's bid

This is tonight's training, and it is what actually decides tonight's fight. It goes back to zero after every bell. There is no ceiling — past your Conditioning every further cent still counts, at 30% efficiency. You can always outspend someone. It just costs more the further you push.

Ten percent of Prep sticks

Every cent you feed as Prep also banks 10% of itself as Conditioning for tomorrow. Nothing you spend is ever entirely gone — feeding your bird tonight makes it permanently bigger, slowly.

Feed early or pay double

When you feed matters as much as how much.

Late feed is never refused — it just costs twice as much per point. A bird needs time to train.

The weigh-in lock

Two hours before the bell, your division locks. Conditioning bought after the lock is credited to your account immediately but does not count toward tonight's division — it banks for tomorrow. Growing up is locked too: a bird cannot graduate between the weigh-in and the bell.

Two divisions

There are two — Chicks and Steel — once four birds have grown up; until then the whole field shares one card, named by who is on it. Which one you are in is a property of your own bird — not a percentile, so it never changes because other people signed up.

The shelf and the litter. The house trains fighters and puts them up for adoption at $1 flat — first come, best pick. An adopted fighter brings its banked conditioning, its gear and its record, and no feed balance: it bids from zero like everyone else. The adoption dollar is a first dollar, so the bird flies its new owner's logo and link. After every bell a fresh litter drops, sized by a published formula — clamp(3, adoptions_since_last_bell + ceil(√hatches_since_last_bell), 10) — the shelf holds at most ten, and the oldest unsold fighters retire past the cap: the house leaves the yard as real players fill it. Every input is an event in the public log.

The house fields birds of its own — unfed, dressed on comped house feed — so a card is never empty. They fight under the same formula as everyone, and they are never fed. The operator's own test birds are comped the same way, and any feed bought before real money went live was comped retroactively. A published win always shows the face value of what was fed at the published rate — comped feed included — and comped feed is never revenue.

Every bird starts as a chick. Graduation is one way and permanent. There is no relegation.

The floor means everyone gets at least one night as a chick, including someone who buys heavily on their first day. The ceiling means nobody can sit in the nursery forever beating up newcomers.

If fewer than four birds have graduated, there is no main event worth staging and the whole field shares one card.

Who wins

The highest Fight Power in the division. Always. No roll, no seeding luck, no hidden modifier — a sealed-bid auction over standings everyone could read before the bell, settled by arithmetic.

Ties

A tie breaks to whoever reached that number first. Every road to Fight Power stamps that clock — a purchase, and the free daily scratch alike — so claiming your scratch early in the day is worth something on a dead-level night. If two birds are still exactly level, the tie goes to the bird whose id sorts first — a coin toss fixed at hatching, the same every time it is replayed.

What you are told afterwards

Win or lose, after every bell you see your Fight Power, the winner's Fight Power, the gap between you, and what that gap would have cost in feed — quoted to the cent at the current rate.

A dead-level tie is priced too. It costs one cent to break.

The winner's spend is published

Winning a division — the Steel Division or the Chick League — publishes what you fed to win it — in dollars, flat at the published rate ($1 = 100 feed) — on the front page until the next bell, and in the archive for good. Nobody else's is ever shown. The card does publish every bird's fight power, and fight power is conditioning plus feed — so after the bell, what any bird fed can be worked out from the card. Sealed means sealed until the bell, never after.

What carries over

The day’s work

Four free earners a day, each worth at least a dollar of credits. They are uniform — every bird is offered exactly the same four, on the same clock — and the whole day’s work can never exceed $12. Every bird is also created with $1.00 of Conditioning free.

• The morning scratch — $1 of permanent Conditioning, once per cycle, any time. Scratch on consecutive days and the streak pays more: $2 on the second day, $3 from the third day on. Miss a day and the ladder resets to $1.
• Roadwork — the sparring run, up to $5 of Conditioning. Up to five runs per cycle, open from the bell that starts the cycle until the weigh-in; your best distance banks the ladder: $1 at 150m, $2 at 300m, $3 at 500m, $4 at 700m, $5 at 900m. One tap hops, a second tap mid-air is the fly jump. The course is generated from the cycle’s own date — the same course for every bird all day, nothing rolled — and the server scores a run by replaying your taps through the same deterministic physics, so distance is skill, verified, never reported.
• The weigh-in check-in — $2 of tonight’s Prep, claimable only in the 15 minutes before the weigh-in. Attendance is the labor: be there or it is gone.
• The cornerman’s claim — $2 of Conditioning, claimable only in the 30 minutes after the bell. It lands in the next cycle: you tend tonight’s bird for tomorrow’s fight.

Playing entirely free is a real ladder — full attendance with honest roadwork banks over $300 of Conditioning a month. It will not, by itself, win you the main event: at equal work, someone who feeds their bird beats someone who does not, every time.

Free birds and paid birds

Every bird fights every bell, appears on the card, and stands in the roost or the yard carrying its owner's mark. The line between free and paid falls in exactly one place: the logo.

The first dollar of anything unlocks all of it — feed, conditioning or a cosmetic, it makes no difference. There is no separate charge for branding.

Where your mark comes from

You give us one link. Nothing is uploaded, ever — your mark is taken from that link, and falls back to a letter when there is no icon to take.

• Your own site flies its icon.
• A page on a platform — an app listing, a profile — flies a letter, never that platform’s logo. Those links are also kept separate from each other, so two apps on the same store are two listings rather than one.
• Chat and invite links are not allowed — Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Messenger, Signal and the like. The roost is for products and profiles, not group chats.
• Tracking and affiliate parameters are removed from every link before it goes live.

Point at the same place again and you are updating the bird you already have, not starting a second one.

The roost

The front page holds twenty birds, ranked by Conditioning, large enough that every mark in it is readable. Everyone else stands in the yard, which is unlimited and where your own bird always renders at its true rank.

The roost re-ranks after every bell, by permanent Conditioning rather than tonight's feed; the birds on it — names, logos, links — are live all day.

Credits and money

• Credits have no monetary value and are not a currency, a deposit, or an investment.
• There is no cash out, ever. Credits flow one direction only. Nothing you buy here can ever be converted back into money.
• No trading, gifting, or resale of feed, birds, titles or placements.
• The exchange rate is always shown before you pay, on the same screen as the button. You will never be charged and then told what you received.
• Promotions apply to everyone at the same rate. A sale is a sale for the whole field for the whole cycle. There are no personal rates, no mystery bonuses, and no bonus that is revealed after payment.
• Sales start at a bell, never in the middle of a training window.
• Every purchase returns something. Losing a fight still returns your placement on the card, in the roost or yard, and in the permanent archive. No purchase results in nothing received.
• If something goes wrong, talk to us first. By completing a purchase you confirm you have reviewed what you are buying and authorise the payment. If there is a problem with it, contact us before starting a payment dispute or chargeback — we would rather fix it. Nothing here limits any right that cannot legally be excluded.

Check our arithmetic

The program that decides each bell is a pure function: the same inputs produce the same result, forever, with no clock reads and nothing random anywhere inside it. It does not even depend on the order the bids come back from the database.

Every night's result is written to a permanent file recording the outputs and a digest of the inputs. If you think a bell was decided wrongly, we re-run that night from the bid log in front of you and the digests must match. House nights — exhibition cards the operator files by hand to fill an empty field — are marked as such in the file and are not settled bells.

Whose bird it is

When a bird is created you are given a secret, once. It is what proves the bird is yours. Nothing else does — not the name, not the link, not the bird’s address on this site, all of which are public.

Anything that changes a bird needs that secret: feeding it, claiming its morning scratch, changing how it looks, repointing its link, graduating it. We never see the secret itself, only a one-way hash of it, so it cannot be read out of our records by anyone including us.

What everyone can see

A bird is on the front page, so its name, its mark, how it looks, its record and its rank are all public. Its feed balance is not, and neither is anything about what it has been fed tonight — that is the sealed half of the sealed bid, and showing it would hand every rival the ceiling on what you can spend.

If you lose it

• A bird that has never paid is gone. It costs nothing to make another, and there is nothing attached to it worth recovering.
• A bird that has paid can be recovered through the email address on the payment. That address is never shown to anyone else.

Treat the secret like a key, because that is what it is. Anyone who has it has the bird, its feed balance and everything it has won.

Changes to these rules

The version at the top of this page is the version of the mechanics — the formulas, thresholds and multipliers that decide a fight — and it is the same number stamped into every night's results file, so any past result can be checked against the rules that actually decided it. Wording changes and new explanations do not move it; numbers do. When one does:

• It is announced before the bell it takes effect at, never during a training window.
• It is never applied retroactively. A graduation you already earned, a division you already reached, and feed you already spent are settled under the rules in force at the time.
• The previous version stays published, so any past result can still be checked against the rules that decided it.