A world, not a board
Classic snake lives on a flat rectangle hemmed in by four walls. Planet Snake lives on the outside of a sphere. The whole surface is paved with tiles — around 6,250 of them at the current resolution — and you crawl across them like an ant walking around an apple.
Almost every tile is a hexagon, but you will spot a handful with only five sides. That is not a glitch, it is geometry: you cannot tile a sphere with hexagons alone — any such pattern needs exactly twelve pentagons to close the shape (it is the same reason a classic football has twelve panels). Those twelve pentagons are the rarest tiles on the planet, and Planet Snake puts them to work as free teleport portals, which we will come back to.
The other consequence of a sphere is that there are no edges and no walls. Set off in any direction and you can keep going forever, loop the entire world, and arrive back where you started. There is nothing to crash into out there but other snakes — and yourself.
How a single step works
Planet Snake does not slide your snake along smoothly, pixel by pixel. Under the hood it moves in discrete steps: your head hops from one tile to the next, one tile at a time. The animation you see glides between those hops, but the true position is always tile-by-tile.
The game's server keeps a steady heartbeat — a tick roughly every 150 milliseconds — and your snake takes a step once every few heartbeats:
- Normal pace — one tile every three heartbeats, a step a touch under half a second.
- Sped up (dash or the Speed power-up) — one tile every two heartbeats.
- Slowed down (brake or the Slowness effect) — one tile every six heartbeats.
You can never fully stop — a snake is always moving forward. What you actually control is which neighbouring tile you turn into next and how fast the steps come. Everything below is just those two levers.
Turning: gentle and sharp
You have two strengths of turn, and reaching for the right one matters:
- Gentle turns (Q / E, or the ← / → arrows) nudge your heading by a single step — for tracing smooth arcs and fine adjustments.
- Sharp turns (A / D) swing you around harder, for when you need to commit to a new direction right now.
Because the camera rides just behind your head, turning is also how you look around. There is no separate "look" control — to scout what is over the curve, you steer toward it. That feeds straight into the sphere's biggest trap: hold a long, straight line near other players and a snake you never saw can rise over the horizon directly in your path. Keep drifting in gentle arcs and you are constantly revealing a little more of what lies ahead. The complete strategy guide goes deeper on reading that curve.
Speeding up and slowing down
Three things change your pace, and confusing them is the classic beginner error.
- Dash (W / ↑) — hold it for an instant burst of speed. The catch: it drains your weight for every moment you hold it. Dash is for escaping a trap or closing the last gap on a kill, not for getting around. Cruise on it and you shrink away to nothing.
- Brake (S / ↓) — hold it to slow right down. Braking buys tighter, more precise turns, and it baits aggressive players into overshooting the spot where they expected you to be.
- The Speed power-up — raises your normal pace with no weight cost for its duration. This is the free, sustainable kind of speed: grab it whenever you see it. Stack a few (and add a dash on top) and you can hit the fastest the game allows, one step per heartbeat. Its opposite, Slowness, drags you down and cancels Speed out.
Teleporting: portals vs. the panic button
There are two ways to jump across the planet, and they could not differ more in price.
Manual teleport (Space / T) instantly drops you somewhere else on the map — but it costs 10% of your weight every time. Treat it as a panic button: paying a tenth of your size to break out of a closing trap is worth it; spending it for convenience is not.
The cheap way is built into the map. Remember those twelve pentagons? Each one is a free portal — crawl onto it and you are whisked elsewhere at no cost at all. Learning to pick the pentagons out from the sea of hexagons turns them into free mobility you can route through on purpose, and a free escape hatch when you are boxed in.
One detail that rewards planning: your active power-ups survive a teleport, portal or manual. Pop an Invincibility, jump into a crowd, and you arrive still untouchable.
No walls: using the wrap-around
On a planet there is nowhere you cannot go. You can circle the whole world and never hit a boundary — which is both a gift and a threat.
- As the attacker: against a smaller snake, looping all the way around them closes off every escape at once — there is no wall for them to hug for safety.
- As prey: never assume distance means safety. A hunter can come around the far side of the planet and meet you head-on.
- Against yourself: the one thing you can always crash into is your own tail. Leave yourself an exit lane; do not coil so tightly that you run out of room.
Every control at a glance
Keyboard
- Q / E or ← / → — gentle left / right turn
- A / D — sharp left / right turn
- W / ↑ — dash (hold)
- S / ↓ — brake (hold)
- Space / T — teleport
- F — fullscreen · Esc — quit to menu
The number pad mirrors these if you prefer it: 7 / 9 gentle turn, 4 / 6 sharp turn, 8 dash, 5 brake, 0 teleport.
Touch
On a phone or tablet, an on-screen hex pad appears the moment you tap the screen. Its seven buttons mirror the keyboard exactly, each labelled with its keyboard letter: dash on top (W), brake on the bottom (S), gentle turns up the sides (Q / E), sharp turns down the sides (A / D), and the teleport button in the centre (T). Hold the dash or brake buttons just like the keys; tap a turn button to steer.
That is the whole control scheme. Jump into a world to get a feel for the rhythm, then learn how to turn that movement into growth in the complete strategy guide.