ziep.io
An arena shooter about growing, upgrading and picking your fights. This is everything the game does not have room to tell you.
The first two minutes
You spawn as a Basic tank with nothing. Shoot shapes, gain levels, spend points, pick a class at 15. Here is the short version of what actually matters while you do that.
1 · Ram the squares
A square has 12 HP. Your opening shot does 7 — two hits. But your body does 20 on contact, which kills it instantly and costs no reload. Drive through them.
2 · Keep moving
Farming one spot heats it up and shapes stop respawning there. A cleared patch takes about a minute to recover, so drift instead of camping.
3 · Look at the middle
Pentagons are worth 165 XP against a square's 15, and they only spawn in the contested centre. That is the whole risk/reward of the map.
The one thing to internalise: dying does not wipe you. You keep 60% of your level by default, with your stat spread re-applied in the same proportions. Trading a death for a kill on a big target is very often the correct play.
Controls
Mouse aims, keyboard moves, and one key does the interesting thing.
| W A S D | Move (arrow keys work too) |
| Mouse | Aim |
| Left click / Space | Shoot |
| Shift / right click | Class ability |
| E | Toggle auto-fire |
| C | Toggle auto-spin |
| 1 – 8 | Spend an upgrade point |
| Click a card | Choose a class (levels 15, 30, 45) |
| Enter | Chat · Esc closes it |
| W A S D when dead | Move the spectator camera |
| Touch | Left thumb moves, right thumb aims and fires |
| Volume | Slider, bottom-left of the HUD |
Levels, stats and perks
45 levels. A point at every level to 28, then one every third level. Eight stats, seven points each — and the seventh point is not just more numbers.
The eight stats
Do not spread evenly. Every stat's seventh point unlocks a qualitative perk that changes how you play. Seven in one stat is almost always worth more than four-and-three across two.
What levelling actually gives you
Health
+2 max HP per level, plus 20 per point of Max Health.
Size
You grow ~0.8% per level. Bigger is easier to hit.
Speed
You get slightly slower as you grow. Movement Speed claws it back.
Bounty
Your head gets more valuable. Everyone can see it.
Classes
39 of them across four tiers, unlocking at levels 15, 30 and 45. Every diagram below is drawn from the game's own barrel data — what you see is exactly where the shots come out.
Abilities
Every class from level 15 has one, on Shift or right click. This is the layer that turns aim-and-move into a game with timing.
Abilities are the main counterplay in the game. Every one has a visible cost — Overheat ends in a three-second jam, Focus roots you, Overcharge leaves you unarmed while it charges. Baiting an ability out and punishing the window is how good players win even fights.
Game modes
Set by the host when the lobby is created, changeable mid-match.
Win conditions
Any mode can run endlessly or as rounds with a real finish.
The arena
Three systems shape where fights happen, and none of them are decoration.
Contested centre
Pentagons and Alpha Pentagons spawn only inside the dashed ring in the middle. The best XP in the game sits in the most dangerous place on the map.
Farming decay
The arena tracks where shapes are being harvested on a 10×10 grid. Over-farm a cell and it stops restocking; leave it alone and it recovers in about a minute.
Terrain
Walls block bullets and bodies. They create cover, chokepoints and ambushes — and they are what make the cloaking classes genuinely strong.
Terrain layouts
Shapes
Mutators
Stackable rule changes. The host can switch them on, and after every round players vote on which one to add next from three random choices — so a lobby drifts somewhere strange on its own.
Lobbies & hosting
Three ways in, and 25 settings once you are the host.
Quick play
Drops you into the busiest public arena, creating one if none exists.
Browse
Every public lobby, updating live as people join and leave.
Invite link
Creating a lobby gives you a five-character code and a link like /?lobby=AB12C. Anyone who opens it joins straight in.
Settings worth knowing
| Setting | What it does | Try |
|---|---|---|
| Death penalty | Fraction of your level lost on death. | 0 for a relaxed lobby, 1 for classic diep rules |
| Win condition | Endless, kills, score, timed, or last-standing. | First to 25 kills for a tight 10-minute match |
| Terrain | Open, scattered cover, pillars or maze. | Maze plus Ricochet is chaos |
| Start level | Everyone spawns at this level. | 30 for instant tier-2 duels |
| Force class | Locks everyone to one class. | All-Smasher lobby. Try it. |
| XP multiplier | 0.25× to 50×. | 20× for a silly evening |
| Bots | Up to 30, easy/normal/hard. | Hard bots lead their shots and use abilities |
Changing the mode, map size, terrain or shape density restarts the round. Everything else applies instantly. If the host leaves, the next player in the lobby inherits it.
Tips & tricks
Things the game will not tell you, roughly in the order they will start mattering.
Economy
One pentagon is eleven squares
165 XP against 15. Once you can survive a pentagon's 18 body damage and chew 130 HP, the centre is worth more than anything in the outer ring — and Alpha Pentagons are worth 3,400.
Body damage is free damage
Ramming costs no reload and no bullets. Early on it clears squares faster than shooting them, and a Body Damage build stays viable the whole game.
Kills beat farming, later
A bounty scales with level, score and kill streak. Killing the player at the top of the leaderboard pays out more than several minutes of shapes. Check the board before you commit.
Watch your own bounty
At a three-kill streak you get a ★ next to your name and turn gold on everyone's minimap. That is the game telling the lobby to come and kill you. Play more carefully, or cash out into a fight you pick.
Builds
Max Health 7 is the best single point in the game
It gives you Last Stand — one otherwise-lethal hit per life leaves you at 1 HP with half a second of invulnerability. It effectively undoes one death.
Reload 7 banks a shot
After any pause you fire twice back to back. On a Destroyer or Annihilator that is a burst nobody survives — hold fire for a moment before you engage.
Movement Speed 7 answers bullet spam
Knockback immunity while moving. Machine Gun and Gunner builds win by shoving you around; this deletes that plan entirely.
Bullet Damage 7 crits every fifth shot
Double damage, and the shell visibly glows gold. On slow high-damage classes you can count your shots and time the crit onto a target.
Abilities
Overheat closes fights, it does not open them
Three seconds of doubled fire rate, then a three-second jam where you cannot shoot at all. Use it to finish someone already losing, never as an opener.
Focus is also a scouting tool
It roots you, so only use it behind cover or at range — but it also widens your view by 50%. Pop it from safety to see who is coming.
Lay traps under people, then detonate
Detonate hits for 2.2× a trap's damage in a radius with heavy knockback. Trapping someone's escape route and blowing it as they run through is the Trapper line's best play.
Afterburner pushes through walls of bullets
It ignores knockback entirely while active. Where you would normally be shoved back out of range, you arrive instead.
Recoil is a movement system
Destroyer and Annihilator shells shove you hard. Fire backwards to escape a fight you are losing, or to cross the map. The Tri-Angle line is built entirely around this.
Drones idle until you shoot
They orbit you when you are not firing and swarm your cursor when you are. Recall makes them 50% faster and slams them at the cursor as one mass — that is your burst.
Positioning
Walls beat snipers
Terrain stops bullets dead. Against a Ranger or Assassin, fight around corners and never cross open ground in a straight line.
Cloak is real invisibility
Stalker and Landmine vanish when you hold still and stop firing — and the server does not send your position to enemies at all while you are hidden. Nobody can cheat their way into seeing you. Sit in a corridor and wait.
The wall pushes back
Leaving the arena shoves you inwards, hard, and tints the screen red. It is a soft boundary, not a kill zone — but you cannot escape a fight that way.
Spawn protection breaks when you shoot
You get three seconds of invulnerability, shown as a white ring. It ends the instant you fire. Use it to reposition, not to open.
Class-specific
Necromancer needs corpses
It has no barrels at all and cannot build drones — it raises them from shapes it kills, up to 22. Play the centre, kill constantly, and you become an army. Starve it of shapes and it is helpless.
Overlord dies with its swarm
Fourteen drones is the whole class, and every one of them dies the moment you do. Stay at the back. Your drones have the range, not you.
Smashers want you to dodge
Charge does triple body damage. A good Smasher walks at you until you commit to a dodge, then charges where you are going.
Sprayer and Mega Smasher are terminal
Several tier-2 classes never upgrade further. They are tuned to hold their own against tier-3 — picking one is a commitment, not a mistake.
Team play
In Domination, points beat kills
Held capture points generate score every second. Two points held quietly will out-earn a team chasing kills across the map.
Read the capture ring
A contested point draws a progress ring in the attacking team's colour. You can see exactly how long you have before it flips.
Traps hold objectives
Trapper classes are mediocre at chasing and excellent at making a circle of ground expensive to enter. Put them on the point.
Friendly fire is a setting
It is off by default, which means your bullets pass through teammates. If the host turns it on, stop firing through your own team.