Harvest
A race against the clock: eat 12 food as fast as you can, and your finishing time is the score.
- Goal
- Eat the target number of items as fast as you can (12)
- Run length
- 120 seconds
- Speed
- 4.5 → 8 moves a second
- Ranked by
- time to the target
Harvest turns Snake into a time trial. The run ends the moment you eat your twelfth food, and your score is how long that took. Lower is better. There is a cap of two minutes, and the snake keeps speeding up over that time.
Finishing comes first
Anyone who reaches 12 ranks ahead of anyone who doesn't. A run that stops at 9 out of 12 shows as "9/12 food" and sits below every finisher, however slow they were. So the first job is to get all twelve, and only then to get them quickly.
That changes how risky you can be. A crash at the tenth food is a disaster; a slightly longer route that keeps you safe costs only a second or two.
Routing
Twelve food means your snake never gets very long, so your tail is rarely the danger. The arena's walls and the shape are. Every second counts, so the shortest path between bites is everything. Use the warm-up to learn where the food appears and in what order, then picture the whole route: the food after next often decides which way you should leave the current bite.
Avoid approaching food in a way that leaves you facing a wall afterwards. The turn you lose to get back out is time on the clock.
Scoring
Your time to 12 is the score, shown to a tenth of a second. If you don't finish, you are ranked by how many you ate.
Faster and fewer food rounds
A faster round moves everything 12% quicker. Here that genuinely helps your time, since you cover the board sooner, but it also gives you less time to react. With fewer food there is one item less on the board at a time, so routes get longer and the board offers fewer shortcuts. Expect slower times in those rounds; so will everyone else.
A mistake to avoid
Chasing a perfect line at the end. With one or two food left, take the safe approach. A clean finish at 30 seconds beats a crash at 11 out of 12.