Quick answer
A Seeker only raises your Alert when its light cone covers you and you are visible. Visibility comes from movement: the longer you have been still, the closer your body colour gets to the ground, and the less the cone can do. Break line of sight and Alert drains again — but at roughly half the speed it filled.
Four behaviours, one purpose
Each Seeker runs a short state machine. Recognising which state you are looking at is most of the tactical skill in the game, because two of the four are safe to move during and two are not.
Patrol
The Seeker drifts toward a waypoint, cone forward, half-interested.
This is the safest phase to travel. The light is committed to a direction.
Scan
It stops and sweeps the cone side to side through a much wider arc.
Do not start a journey now. A scan covers ground the patrol never touches.
Chase
It fixes on your last position and closes distance, keeping the cone on you.
Release immediately. A chase is a reaction to visibility, so becoming invisible ends it.
Give up
Roughly a second after losing sight, it abandons the chase and resumes patrol.
Do not move yet. Wait out the turn, then travel once the cone has clearly left.
The light cone
Cones are wide. That matters more than their length, because it means a Seeker does not need to aim at you to catch you — it only needs to be walking in your general direction. A cone sweeping across your tile at a shallow angle is still dangerous if you are bright.
Alert is the real health bar
The three hearts are bookkeeping; Alert is what kills you. It behaves like a short, punishing stamina bar — fast to fill, slow to clear, and indifferent to where you are as long as you are out of sight.
Camo
82%Built by standing still. High Camo means a sweeping cone is much less likely to notice you.
Alert
38%Built by being visible inside a light cone. Fill it completely and you lose a life.
Camo versus visibility: the one-second trade
The game computes a visibility value as the inverse of your camouflage, then mixes your body colour toward the tile colour by that same amount. In other words, the visual is not decoration: a blended player literally becomes the ground, and the detection maths uses the same number.
That is why the fix is always the same. Releasing the pointer starts the transition; about a second later the cone can no longer build Alert on you. One second is short enough to feel fair and long enough to punish a late release.
It also explains a small mercy: the threshold for being seen is low. You do not need perfect camouflage for a cone to stop hurting you. A partial blend is often enough to survive a sweep.
Reading a patrol pattern
Early rounds are quiet enough to study behaviour instead of reacting to it. Three things are worth watching:
- Turn direction. Seekers favour a side. Once you know which way one turns, the far side of the field becomes a safe lane.
- Scan frequency. Scans are the dangerous phase and they are not constant. A Seeker that has just scanned is a Seeker that is about to travel.
- Lingering. Some waypoints hold a Seeker longer than others. Fireflies near those spots cost more than fireflies in the open.
Round one is the only free lesson: a single Seeker, a short timer and plenty of stillness to observe from. Use it.
Four situations and what to do
A cone sweeps over you while blended
- On screen
- The light crosses your tile, the screen brightens, Alert barely flinches.
- Response
- Nothing. This is the game working as intended. Moving now would be the only mistake.
A cone sweeps over you while visible
- On screen
- You are still coral, the Alert bar jumps immediately.
- Response
- Release. Do not try to outrun the cone; standing still is faster than running out of it.
A Seeker turns toward you
- On screen
- The cone narrows onto your position and Alert starts climbing steadily.
- Response
- Move perpendicular, short, then stop. Getting out of the centre line matters more than distance.
Two cones overlap your tile
- On screen
- Alert climbs far faster than a single cone can explain.
- Response
- Leave the overlap even if it means crossing a boundary. Stacked exposure is the fastest way to lose a life.
The numbers behind the behaviour
These are approximate values read from the published build of the game. They are useful for building intuition and should not be treated as a permanent specification — a re-tuned build can change any of them.
- Cone width
- Roughly 58 degrees, so it covers a broad wedge rather than a narrow beam.
- Cone reach
- About a third of the field, widening slightly as rounds progress.
- Alert maximum
- 100. Reaching it is the only way to be caught.
- Fill rate
- A fully visible player inside one cone fills Alert in under two seconds. Extra cones add a large fraction on top.
- Drain rate
- Once unseen, Alert falls about half as fast as it filled.
- Visibility threshold
- Only a small amount of camouflage is needed before a cone stops adding Alert.
- Seeker count
- One in round one, and an extra Seeker every second round, up to four.
Practise this next run
Spend one whole round never collecting anything. Move only when both the patrol direction and the scan timing say it is safe, and release after every short hop. You will finish with a low score and a much better picture of the field than a round spent chasing points.
Then read the strategy notes for how to turn that picture into routes, or the scoring guide for how many Seekers you can expect in each round.