Quick answer
Each firefly is worth 10 points. Clearing a round adds 100. You have three lives, and a run ends when the third Alert fill takes the last one. Your best score is stored in this browser only.
What earns points
There are exactly two sources of score, and they reward different behaviour. Fireflies pay for greed; clear bonuses pay for patience.
- Firefly — 10 points. Collected by dragging over it. Optional. The round does not require them.
- Round clear — 100 points. Awarded when the seek timer runs out with at least one life left. This is the reliable income.
A cleared round is worth ten fireflies. Once you internalise that, the maths of a run changes: surviving is roughly as valuable as collecting everything, and it carries far less risk.
How a round actually ends
Not when the field is empty. The seek phase runs on a timer, and when it expires the round closes and the next one begins. Fireflies you did not collect simply disappear with it.
This is the single most useful fact about scoring. There is no “collect them all” pressure, and no penalty for leaving a firefly behind. A round spent standing still on a safe tile is a hundred points.
The difficulty curve
Four things scale with the round number. The firefly count stops growing at round six; the Seeker count keeps climbing until round seven; the timer keeps stretching slightly longer, which sounds generous until you notice how much more of it you spend exposed.
| Round | Seekers | Fireflies | Seek time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round 1 | 1 | 4 | ≈13 s |
| Round 2 | 1 | 5 | ≈15 s |
| Round 3 | 2 | 6 | ≈17 s |
| Round 4 | 2 | 7 | ≈19 s |
| Round 5 | 3 | 8 | ≈21 s |
| Round 6 | 3 | 9 | ≈23 s |
| Round 7 | 4 | 9 | ≈25 s |
| Round 8+ | 4 | 9 | ≈26 s |
Approximate values read from the published build. The shape matters more than the exact seconds.
Three lives, one Alert bar
Lives are not a second chance in the generous sense. You do not respawn with a clean field: the round closes, one life disappears, and the next round starts harder than the one that beat you.
That makes the first life the most valuable one in the run. Losing it in round one means you will face round five — three Seekers, eight fireflies, twenty-one seconds — with almost no margin. Most runs are decided long before the last heart goes.
Score maths: one example run
Suppose you clear three rounds and collect three, three and two fireflies. That is three hundred in clear bonuses plus eighty for the fireflies, for a total of 380.
Now suppose you clear the same three rounds but collect nothing. You finish on 300, and you took almost no risk to get there. The difference between a careful run and a greedy one over three rounds is smaller than most players expect — which is why the greedy one rarely pays.
A very strong early run — six clears with a good collection rate — lands around a thousand. Beyond that you are into territory where a single late mistake costs more than the extra fireflies were worth.
Why the result screen says “Rounds”
The end-of-run panel reports score, best and rounds. That plural number is the round you reached, not the number you completed, so a run showing three ended during the third. It is the most honest measure of progress the game offers: score can be inflated by one lucky sweep of fireflies, but rounds cannot.
Where your best score lives
In your browser’s local storage, under the game’s own key. It does not travel to another device, another browser or a private window, and clearing site data resets it. There is no account and no global leaderboard — any page claiming a worldwide Mottle ranking is selling something that does not exist.
If you want a durable record, write your best down. That sounds primitive, but it is the only method the game supports.
What a strong run looks like
Not a spectacular one. A strong run is four or five clean rounds with two or three fireflies per round, no lost lives before round three, and no firefly collected with Alert above half. It is unremarkable to watch and very hard to do.
For the behaviour behind those numbers, read the Seeker detection guide and the strategy notes.