How the pull, the curve, and the blast actually work — and how to use them
Most players pick up Magnet Blast in about ten seconds: hold to pull metal balls into orbit, release to fire them at somebody. What takes longer is understanding why some shots land and some sail past a target you were aiming directly at. This guide covers the actual mechanics underneath the game — the ones that decide whether you win a fight — rather than just repeating the controls.
Every player is a magnet. The arena is scattered with loose metal balls. Holding the pull input drags nearby balls toward you; once captured, they settle into a rotating ring around your body. Releasing fires every ball in that ring toward wherever you're aiming. Balls that hit an opponent deal damage. You start each match with 100 health, which regenerates at 3 points per second once you've been out of combat briefly — so surviving a bad exchange and disengaging is genuinely a recovery option, not just a delay.
That's the whole loop. The depth comes from the fact that your cluster is simultaneously your ammunition, your damage output, and a liability.
Your orbiting balls don't sit at a fixed distance. The ring's radius grows with how many balls you're holding — roughly 68 pixels of base radius plus another 8 for every ball in orbit. Eight balls puts your ring at about 132 pixels across; a single ball orbits tightly at around 76.
This matters more than it sounds, because the ring's radius directly determines your shot spread. When you fire, each ball launches from wherever it happened to be sitting on the ring, carrying that sideways offset with it. A big cluster fires as a wide fan. A small cluster fires as a tight group. There is no separate "accuracy" stat in this game — your spread is a direct, visible consequence of how many balls you're carrying.
This is the single most important mechanic in the game, and it's the one that isn't obvious from playing.
Your shots do not travel in straight parallel lines. Every ball in a volley fires in the same direction, but each keeps its sideways offset from the ring — and that offset shrinks to zero over distance, then grows back out again on the other side. The volley traces an hourglass: it starts wide, converges to a single tight line at a specific distance, then fans back out beyond it.
For a full eight-ball cluster, that convergence point — the waist — sits at roughly 400 pixels from where you fired. That's the range where your entire volley is stacked into one narrow lane. A target standing there eats the whole cluster. A target standing at point-blank range, by contrast, sits inside the wide part of the fan, where most of your balls sail past them on either side.
The waist distance isn't fixed — it scales inversely with how many balls you're holding. Eight balls converge at ~400px, but four balls converge at ~800px, two balls at ~1600px, and a single ball effectively never converges within its own lifetime (it just flies more or less straight).
| Balls in cluster | Approx. convergence range | What it means in a fight |
|---|---|---|
| 8+ | ~400 px | Devastating at medium range, weak up close |
| 4 | ~800 px | Reliable at longer range, smaller total damage |
| 2 | ~1600 px | Nearly straight; effectively a poke |
| 1 | Never converges | Straight-line shot, no spread to manage |
The consequence is a real tactical choice rather than "always hoard the maximum." A half-cluster fired from a long way off can be more reliable than a full cluster fired badly, because its convergence point is further out and easier to line up with a distant target.
Fired balls travel at roughly 1150 units per second, and each additional ball in the cluster adds a small amount of speed on top (with a floor of about 650 so a shot is never uselessly slow). Projectiles live for about 1.6 seconds before going inert and dropping back to the arena as loose balls again — so nothing is ever permanently consumed. Balls you fire and miss with become ammunition for whoever's standing nearby, which is a real consideration when you spray into a crowded area.
Shots also bounce off walls and obstacles, and a bounced shot keeps its damage. On tighter maps this makes bank shots a genuine tactic rather than a novelty — you can hit somebody who has no line of sight to you at all.
Any two players within about 110 units of each other get pushed apart continuously, with the force ramping up the closer you get. You cannot simply body-block or sit on top of an opponent — the game physically prevents it.
This has two consequences worth planning around. First, it reinforces everything above about range: even if you want to fight point-blank, the game is actively shoving you out of that range. Second, you can use it deliberately — closing distance on someone near a hazard or a map edge means the mutual repulsion is doing part of the work of pushing them somewhere they don't want to be.
Several arenas have directional boost pads. Hitting one doesn't add a little speed — it sets your velocity to roughly 3.4× your normal top speed in the pad's direction, and holds that raised speed cap open for about half a second so the launch actually lands instead of being immediately eaten by friction.
For scale: normal movement tops out around 400, the Speed Zap power-up raises that to about 960, and a boost pad launches you at roughly 1360. Pads are the fastest movement in the game, faster than any power-up. Learning where they are on each map is one of the cheapest ways to improve, both for escaping a losing fight and for closing on someone who thinks they're safe.
New players tend to hold their cluster too long, waiting for a perfect shot. Two things punish this:
Firing a partial cluster at a good angle is almost always better than dying with a full one. Balls are abundant and constantly recycling; opportunities aren't.
Continue to the arena guide for map-by-map layouts and hazards, or the power-up guide for what each pickup actually does.
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