Your bug has a brain of its own. Every fight it survives — and every fight you drive it through — leaves a mark. The learned behaviors panel in the lobby is that mark made legible: a list of the tactics your bug actually reaches for, and how good it has got at each one.
This page explains all thirty-six of them: what each one is, when your bug will try it, and what you can do to make it try it more often.
A bug is not a difficulty setting. It carries a private set of weights — one row per behavior — scored against what it can see right now: how far away you are, who is hurt, whose legs are missing, who is winding up, who is on the glass, how long the fight has run, and what species it is looking at. When a situation comes up, every behavior gets a vote weighted by how well that choice has worked in situations that felt like this one before.
There are two ways the weights move.
Whenever your bug is under AI control — practice bots, or your own bug fighting while you watch — it picks its moves through those weights, and the jar answers. Choices that were followed by something good get reinforced. Choices followed by something bad get pushed down.
When you drive, the bug is still taking notes. Your button stream is read against the same list of behaviors, several times a second: back away while they bleed and that is venom kiting; swing at a spider still recovering from a miss and that is punish the whiff. Those get filed exactly like the bug's own choices — only they count 1.5×, because a demonstration is worth more than a guess. Habits rub off on their own; results are what make them stick.
Credit lands on whatever your bug was doing in the last couple of seconds, and it fades with age — full credit under 0.6s, half under 1.2s, a quarter under 2.5s, nothing after that. So the reward attaches to the choice that actually set the moment up.
| what happened | credit | to whom |
|---|---|---|
| your strike lands | +2 per damage | you gain it, they lose the same |
| you sever a leg | +40 | a leg is a lesson |
| your silk connects | +24 | the caster |
| your venom is ticking | up to +24 | kiting choices only |
| you heal while clear | up to +24 | wound-licking and wall-climbing only |
| you brace and it blocks | +2 per damage stopped | bracing only |
| their attack hits nothing | +12 | dodging and cone discipline only |
| you wrench out of a pincer | +14 | the escape |
| your pincer closes on a leg | +10 | the grab |
Several rewards are deliberately narrow: healing only pays the choices that bought the clearance, and a whiffed strike only pays a dodge. Otherwise every bug would learn that standing still is great, because good things sometimes happen while you stand still.
| what you see | what it means |
|---|---|
| 7/10 | Proficiency. How practised this behavior is, 0 to 10. It rises on successful uses, not attempts. |
| 214x | Uses. How many times the bug has committed to it. Holding a behavior across several moments — a long retreat, a held spacing — counts once, not fifty times. |
| +1 | Growth. Proficiency gained in the fight that just ended. The event feed calls out the top three. |
| — | Never used. The behavior exists; this bug has not reached for it yet. |
Hover a row in-game for the full line: what the behavior is, how many times it has been used, and the share of those uses that paid off.
Proficiency climbs steeply and then hardens. A signature behavior — one your bug leans on every fight — reaches 4/10 around 50 matches, 8/10 around 200, and mastery at 10/10 somewhere near 275. Behaviors it rarely picks idle at 0–3 forever, which is the point: the shape of the list is your bug's personality, and no two veterans look alike.
REFLEX imperative survival — it always happens, it is not a choice, but it is still counted. TEACHABLE your driving demonstrates it. OWN FIGHTS only discovered by fighting under AI control. PINCER needs claws and a sting — scorpions only.
Down to two legs, a bug cannot walk — it drags its belly along the ground and keeps going. This one is never gambled on: if it is crawling, it is crawling. It still appears in the panel, because how much of its life a bug has spent as a crawler says something about it.
Turning tail outright. Cheap in pride, expensive to get wrong — a bug that runs from a foe who is also running turns the fight into a stalemate, and running from a healthy hunter just gives them your back.
Breaking off deliberately to let the blood stop. A bug only heals when it is genuinely clear — well out of reach, out of combat for a few seconds, and not poisoned — and each round grants a finite pool, so this buys a comeback, not immortality.
The wall version of licking wounds: go up where a ground-bound pursuer has to commit to the climb, and bleed the clock while healing. Cheeky, and genuinely hard to punish.
Pinned against the glass, a bug can panic straight into it. This is the alternative: run the curve of the jar instead of the wall itself and come out with the floor back.
A scorpion's claw holds a leg for over three seconds — long enough to sting you at leisure. Tearing loose costs a chunk of that leg but cuts the hold to about a second. Any species learns this one; you only need to be the one getting grabbed.
The whole body rears before a strike, and a web takes a moment to gather at the spinnerets. Both are visible. Stepping off the line during that moment is the cheapest defence in the game — it costs nothing but position.
Crouch and take it. You lose the exchange on paper and win it in practice, because a braced hit does a fraction of its damage and leaves them recovering right in front of you.
A pounce is a straight line, and it only exists while their stamina and cooldown allow it. Standing in that line with their gun loaded is how bugs die. This is the habit of noticing, and stepping out of it.
A threat display weakens your bites for a few seconds. Giving ground until it lapses is the honest answer — and against a bug that actually has the health to back the display up, the correct one.
Every missed strike ends in a recovery the attacker cannot cancel. That window is the single most reliable free damage in the jar, and good bugs live in it.
Subtler than punishing a whiff: their pounce is on cooldown or their stamina is gone, so for a few seconds they simply cannot answer a committed attack. Walking in during that gap is safe in a way it never is otherwise.
They are winding up; instead of dodging or bracing, you swing too. Both land. Whether that is brave or stupid depends entirely on who has the health to spend — and a bold bug finds out either way.
A bug held by silk, or reduced to crawling, cannot get away from you. This is the instinct to drop everything and cash that in before it wears off.
A displaying bug is rooted. If you read the display as fear rather than dominance, charging it is free damage on a target that cannot move — and it cancels the display outright.
Damage pools per leg, and a leg that has taken enough comes off for good. Rather than spreading damage around, this returns to the leg already hanging — and unlike health, a lost leg does not come back inside the fight. Each one costs them about 7% of their pace; at three legs they can no longer sprint at all and move at half speed; at two they are down to a crawl.
The default state of a competent bug: sit at the edge of reach, threaten nothing, commit to nothing, and wait for them to make the first mistake. It is the most-used behavior on most veterans' panels.
You are ahead on health. Every second that passes is a second you win, so there is no reason on earth to walk into their range — make them solve the problem.
You need to close, but walking up the middle of a loaded pounce is suicide. So approach on a diagonal — arriving from outside the line they are aiming down.
Give ground to invite a committed chase, then turn and meet it. Rare, and devastating when it reads correctly — the whole plan lives or dies on whether they actually take the bait.
Stay just close enough to seem worth attacking, just far enough that every attack misses. An exhausted bug cannot pounce, cannot bite well, and cannot escape — so the fight is decided before you have thrown a punch.
No cleverness at all: sprint at them and arrive. Against a trapper still gathering silk, or anyone who wanted more room than you are giving them, blunt works.
The committed version, on its own cooldown: a genuine run-up that ends in a body slam. It knocks bugs around rather than cutting them — a ram is blunt and never takes a leg off — but it moves them where you want them.
Something is beside you, and turning to face it takes time you do not have. So hit it with the legs already pointing that way. Less damage than a proper bite, available instantly.
Rear up on your back legs and make yourself enormous. A foe caught inside the cone hits noticeably softer for the next few seconds. The catch: displaying roots you in place, so a bug that calls it walks in free. Bugs display to press an advantage, to bluff when hurt, and to buy back stamina.
Lead with silk. A connected web pins several legs at once — the bug is not frozen, but it is slowed badly and every step costs it. Everything you want to do afterwards gets easier.
Silk is far better spent on a bug that has nowhere to go. Waiting for them to put their own back to the glass, and only then casting, is the difference between a web and a trap.
Once venom is in them it does not need your help. Disengaging and staying disengaged means the poison collects its damage for free — and a poisoned bug cannot heal, so every second you refuse the fight is a second they cannot afford.
Venom kiting taken vertical: land the poison, then take the glass, where following you is expensive and the venom keeps working regardless.
Climb, stop, and wait. A bug on the wall above you is genuinely awkward to deal with — and it is choosing the moment the fight restarts.
The payoff of the perch. Launch off the wall onto a bug beneath you and the fall itself is added to the blow — roughly a tenth more damage per unit of height dropped, up to a considerable bonus from the rim. The most spectacular thing a bug can learn.
The answer to everything above. Hit a bug that is holding the glass and its grip fails — it slips, falls, and arrives at the bottom having lost the entire plan it climbed up for.
A scorpion fights with equipment a spider does not have, so it has tactics a spider will never show. These slots simply never fire for a spider — the same way a scorpion never casts silk. The one exception is wrench free, above: any bug can learn that, because any bug can get caught.
The claw closes on a leg and keeps it for over three seconds. This is the scorpion's web: no silk involved, same result — a bug that is not going anywhere while you decide what to do about it.
What the claw is for. A held bug cannot dodge, and the tail comes over the top at leisure. The whole body rears for a moment before the whip, though, which is the one warning the victim gets.
Less dramatic than the sting and often better: chew on the leg you are already holding. Slightly weaker than a clean bite, but it renews the grip as it goes — and it is aimed squarely at a limb you are trying to take off.
Rather than one committed strike, a burst of quick jabs. Chosen at the moment the sting resolves — you do not aim it, your scorpion decides whether this is a flurry sort of moment.
Drive it yourself to set the style. Your demonstrations count for half again as much as its own choices, and the habit rubs off even before the results come in. Ten fights driven by you will visibly bend a young bug.
Let it fight alone to fill the gaps. Thirteen behaviors — the perch, the drop, the baits, the corner traps — can only be found by a bug making its own decisions. A bug you only ever drive will have a lopsided panel.
Be consistent early. A young bug learns fast and a veteran barely moves: learning rate falls with every use of a behavior, so the first fifty matches write most of the personality. Nothing is ever fully locked — unused habits fade on their own — but late changes come slowly.
Do not expect all ten across the board. A bug good at everything would be a bug with no character. High marks in five or six behaviors and near-nothing in the rest is exactly what a strong veteran looks like.
It learns who it is fighting. Your bug can see whether it faces a spider or a scorpion, and every behavior can hold a different opinion for each. A bug raised against one species may need time to work out the other.