Rug Patrol

Overview

Rug Patrol is two things that share a premise. The first is a game: a top-down pixel town where somebody in the crowd is deploying tokens, pumping them and pulling the liquidity. You gather evidence, work out which passer-by he is, tackle him and file a report.

The second is the thing the game is a rehearsal for — a public, staked accusation registry for Robinhood Chain, where reporting a rug costs something and being wrong costs more. The token ties them together.

What is live right now

• The game — complete, playable, free, no wallet required.
• The site and these docs — including wallet connect for Robinhood Chain mainnet.
• $HUNT in-game — earned and staked inside a round, reset each round.

What is not live yet

• The $HUNT contract. Not deployed. There is no address to buy, and anything claiming otherwise is not ours.
• On-chain staking. The tiers below describe intended design, not a shipped contract.
• The report registry. Specified here, not written.

Connect to Robinhood Chain

The Connect button in the header opens a menu with three options: any EIP-1193 browser wallet (MetaMask, Rabby, Frame — listed by name through EIP-6963 discovery, so several wallets never race each other), WalletConnect for phone wallets, and Sign in with X. See Online, wallets & X for what each is for and how to enable the last two.

On connect it requests accounts, checks the chain, and if you are somewhere else it asks your wallet to switch. If your wallet has never heard of Robinhood Chain it offers to add it using the parameters below.

Mainnet

Testnet

The site targets mainnet. Testnet values are exported from RH.Chain.TESTNET if you want to point a fork at it. Official network documentation lives at docs.robinhood.com/chain.

Run it locally

There is no build step, no bundler and no Node.js requirement. The whole project is static files with classic <script> tags, which means it also runs by double-clicking index.html.

A local server is still the better way to work — some browsers restrict things over file://, and it matches how it will be hosted. A dependency-free server ships in the repo:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\serve.ps1

  root  ...\game robinhood
  url   http://127.0.0.1:8123/
  stop  Ctrl+C

Pass -Port 8080 to move it. It uses TcpListener rather than HttpListener so it needs no administrator URL reservation.

Deploying

The game is static files; only Sign in with X needs PHP. On Spaceship (or any cPanel host) run set-domain.ps1 yourdomain, then make-upload.ps1, and upload release/rug-patrol-upload.zip into public_html with File Manager → Extract. The step-by-step guide is DEPLOY.md in the project folder.

File map

Controls

Click the town once to take control. The game only captures the keyboard while it has focus, so arrow keys keep scrolling the page everywhere else. Click away and it pauses.

↑↓←→

Walk. WASD does the same.

Space

Talk, scan a contract, open a door, ride the subway, confirm a choice — and, when the named deployer is in reach, tackle.

C

Open the case file: the details Forensics has on him and how many people still match.

Esc / P

Pause menu — settings, controls, profile, daily board, online, account. Esc also backs out of a conversation.

T

Quick chat (online only): eight preset lines, picked with 1–8.

M

Mute.

Doors

Five landmarks open. Walk onto the mat by the EXIT sign inside to come back out.

Steps

The terrace wall is solid except at the step gaps — that is how you move between the shopfronts and the street.

Touch

A d-pad and ACT / ESC buttons appear on coarse pointers; force them on or off in Settings. The HUD has II, CASE and CHAT buttons.

Every key is rebindable under Pause → Controls, and the game pauses when it loses focus (switchable in Settings).

Reading the screen

• Top left — your $HUNT, three evidence pips, and the liquidity pool meter. The meter turns amber below 55% and pulses red below 25%.
• Top right — the district you are standing in, and the current objective.
• Red glow — an unscanned rug contract. It is bleeding the pool for as long as you ignore it.
• Edge arrows — small red ones point at contracts; a large one points at whoever you currently need.
• Minimap — one pixel per tile, so the whole town fits. White is you, the box is your current view, green and blue are allies, red is an unscanned contract, green squares are subway stations, cyan dots are other hunters. The crowd is never on it, and the deployer only appears once he has been named. Elon's intel draws a red ring, not a dot.

Anatomy of a round

A round is a race between two clocks. One is how fast you can find and scan contracts. The other is how fast the contracts you have not found are draining the pool. There is no timer — the pool is the timer.

The numbers

The cast

Four characters spawn every round. Three are systems you interact with; the fourth is the target.

All of the characters added with the Harbor are fictional and are not based on real people.

The town has thirteen named districts — Listings Row, The Shopfronts, Main Street, Exchange Square, The Cold Storage, Liquidity Alley, The Dead End, Forensics Row, Launch District, Container Yard, The Harbor and the L1 Bridge — and Elon's intel draws a ring around part of one.

Walking in

Each ally stands outside their own front door, and each door opens:

Nothing is locked behind going indoors. Every mechanic is reachable from the street as well, so exploring is rewarded rather than required — except the deploy rig, which is the one free piece of evidence in the game and the reason to visit the worst house in town.

Copycats, traders & Oracle

Three kinds of contract

The copycat mechanic is how vanity-address copies work on real chains: the attacker grinds an address that shares the prefix and suffix people glance at. In the inspector both addresses read identically until you press E to expand them — then the middle 32 characters are completely different.

The traders

Ansem, Cented, Decu and Cupsey stand at The Trenches — the fire barrel in Exchange Square — plus up to four victims you add yourself from the roster under the game. Each has a bag and a temper: how likely they are to follow a call. When one walks to a contract:

• Reach them first and tell them to stop: saved, +120. Warn someone off a real token and they just miss the gain.
• Delist the contract before they arrive: they turn back, and it counts as saved.
• They arrive while it is live: rekt. They lose 55–85% of the bag and the pool drops 6%.

Traders walk real paths across the terraces (A* over the tile grid), at 36 px/s against your 50, so there is always time if you move.

Oracle

A fictional KOL, @100xOracle, with a Telegram channel called Oracle Alpha Calls. Every 24–33 seconds during the hunt he posts a call: roughly half copycats, three in ten rugs, the rest real listings. It lands 220–560px from the fire barrel, appears in the feed as a post plus a Telegram mirror with the contract address, pumps the ticker on The Tape, and sends one or two traders walking. With two pieces of evidence you can confront him and show the payment trail — the calls stop and you take +500.

The lineup, the tackle & the bridge

Catching the deployer used to be a line of dialogue. Now it is two things you do with your own eyes and feet: pick him out of a crowd, then bring him down somewhere he cannot run.

Picking him out

The moment you take the contract he changes out of the hoodie. Every piece of evidence gives Chain Forensics one detail: his coat, his headwear or his hair, in an order that is fixed for the round. Walk up to anyone and press Space — the dialogue describes them and checks them against every detail on file.

The crowd is generated against the clue order, so every detail does real work. Accuse on fewer than three details and you are profiling: right pays +400 and closes the case file on the spot; wrong is a false accusation, −250, and that person is cleared. Dr. Vale will rush the next detail for 300 $HUNT, which does not count as evidence. Pip Hart's rumours are free and wrong three times in ten.

Bringing him down

• Lunge. Within reach, Space becomes TACKLE. Miss and you stumble for 0.4 s.
• In the open he twists free and loses a point of stamina (the red pips over his head). Hunter has 2, Marshal and Warden 3, Rookie and the tutorial 1. Let him get 220 px away for nine seconds and he gets a point back.
• Cornered — at most one clear direction that is not straight at you, two tiles deep — a single tackle ends it. Walls, the canal, dead-end alleys and the bridge deck all count.
• The cuffs — hit-stop, a closing ring, the click. The catch pays 700.

The L1 bridge

Named and running, after 24–50 seconds depending on difficulty he makes for the drawbridge at the east end of the Harbor. If the gate is open he crosses, the pool loses 15%, and he walks back into town somewhere far away in a completely new outfit — the case file refills with the new details at once, but you have to find him again. If Marta Kovac has locked the gate, the deck is a dead end: he is trapped, his stamina drops to one, and the next tackle takes him.

The Chain Line

The town is 168 × 84 tiles, so there is a subway. Six stations — Canal West, Exchange Square, Forensics Row, Liquidity Alley, The Dead End and The Harbor. Press Space at the stairs, pick a stop, and four seconds of game time pass while you ride. The escorted deployer comes with you.

Tutorial, daily cases & ranks

Choosing a case

Difficulty

Ranks, unlocks, achievements

A round pays 50 + 150 for a win + 20 per trader saved + 25 per rug or copycat + 100 for exposing Oracle − 30 per false report − 40 per wrong accusation, times the difficulty multiplier and heat, never less than 10. A daily's ranked attempt adds 50%. Seventeen achievements add their own XP once.

Ranks run Rookie → Patrol (300) → Detective (900) → Sergeant (2,000) → Inspector (3,800) → Chief (6,500) → Chain Warden (10,000). Each rank from Patrol up unlocks one cosmetic in the character creator: the fedora, a gold coat, a dispatch headset, a top hat, a chain-green coat and the Warden crown. Unlocks are cosmetic only. Everything lives in this browser's local storage and is re-validated on load.

Your rank and the case type are printed on the PnL card, and the share text says Daily Case #N so results from the same day can be compared.

Online, wallets & X

Other hunters

Turn on Online in the case picker or the pause menu and you share your hunter name, rank, look, position and quick-chat through a public MQTT relay. Other players appear walking the same streets with name tags, on the minimap, and in the feed when they catch their deployer. There is no free text — quick chat is eight fixed lines — so there is nothing to moderate.

• Rooms: the public town, today's daily case (everyone on the same seed), or a private room code.
• Rounds stay yours. Each player simulates their own case; what travels is presence.
• The daily board is one retained message per player per day, posted after your ranked attempt. It is self-reported and labelled unverified.
• Everything received is untrusted: names are reduced to a safe alphabet, numbers clamped, colours must be hex, senders are rate-limited, and nothing is written to the page as HTML.

Two tabs on the same machine also see each other through a BroadcastChannel, which is the quickest way to try it. For a real launch, point netBrokers in assets/js/config.js at a broker you run and restrict the topic prefix.

Connect menu

api/x-token.php runs on any PHP 7.4+ host, including Spaceship's cPanel hosting. Copy api/x-secrets.example.php to api/x-secrets.php on the server and fill in the client id, client secret and allowed_redirects (the exact callback URL, which must also be registered in the X portal). That file is never committed and .htaccess refuses to serve it. The endpoint exchanges the code, reads the handle, revokes the token and returns only { username, name, avatar } — no token reaches the browser.

The stats bar reads the live block height from the public RPC; nothing about your wallet is sent anywhere.

Feed, ODDS, agents & PnL

The page around the game

A live stats bar sits above the stage (phase, block, traders, calls, rekt, saved, rugs, copycats, clock), the feed sits beside it, and the roster sits under it with every trader's bag and state updating a few times a second. The layout borrows from living-world sites where the town talks in a feed and you can watch every resident's balance — because a copycat only matters once you watch a bag drop 70%.

The ODDS booth

Stakes of 50, 150 or 400. Shares pay 1 $HUNT each if right, locked at the price when bought. If you win a bet on a trader getting rekt, it is written into the case file and printed on your PnL card as BET ON A VICTIM. That is on purpose.

Agentic account

From Vlad or the staking terminal. Deploying stakes 600 $HUNT and commits a fee budget of 200, 400 or 800; each action costs 40. You set three guardrails:

• Scope — rugs only (never files a false report), or also rule on copycats (faster, but misreads one address in six, and a wrong call on a real token is slashed from your stake).
• Budget — how many actions before it stops.
• Range — how far from you it goes looking.

In rugs-only mode it still warns you when one ticker has two live contracts nearby, without saying which is fake.

The PnL card

Every round starts at 1,000 in-game $HUNT. At the end, open markets settle, then: position = balance + staked (×0.6 if the pool drained), and PnL = position − 1,000. The card is drawn in canvas — case ticker, the big number, PnL %, entry and position, traders saved and rekt, copycats and rugs, flags, your pixel character, and the X handle from the character creator — and can be downloaded, copied to the clipboard, or posted to X with a prefilled message.

The report bounty is no longer flat: 1,800 + 150 × saved − 100 × rekt, never below 600.

$HUNT

One token doing three jobs. Nothing about it is decorative.

Supply

1,000,000,000 $HUNT, fixed, no mint function.

Staking

Staking here is not a yield box. Every tier unlocks something you feel while playing, and unstaking takes it back the same block.

Rug report registry

The in-game report is a rehearsal. The real one is a public accusation log for Robinhood Chain that does not decide who is guilty — it decides who was willing to put money on being right.

Lifecycle

1. File. Submit token address, deployer wallet and the withdrawal transaction, with a stake attached.
2. Challenge. 72 hours in which anyone, including the accused, can stake against the report with counter-evidence.
3. Resolve. Weighted by staked $HUNT. Marshals and Wardens carry more weight because they have more at risk.
4. Settle. The winning side splits the losing side's stake. An accepted report also draws a bounty from the treasury.

The registry is intended to be readable by anything — a small read-only widget any Robinhood Chain project can embed to show whether a token has open reports against it. That widget is Phase 03.

Anti-abuse

Three separate problems, three separate answers.

Griefing the registry

Cost, challenge window and slashing, as above. There is no free write path, and no path where a losing accuser keeps their stake.

Farming the game for tokens

Practice rounds pay nothing on-chain — the $HUNT you earn in a round is round-local score and resets. Only ranked rounds, gated behind a stake, will ever touch the treasury, and the stake is what makes botting a losing trade.

Sybil identities

Vote weight in disputes is a function of staked balance, not wallet count. Splitting a stake across a hundred wallets gets you the same weight as holding it in one, minus a hundred lots of gas.

How the engine works

There is not a single image file in this project. Every pixel is generated by the page at load time, which is why the whole thing is a few hundred kilobytes of text.

Characters

A character is three ASCII templates plus a palette. BODY holds rows 0–11 — head and shoulders, one grid per facing. LIMBS holds rows 12–23 — arms and legs, three animation frames per facing. Left is the right-facing sprite mirrored. A new character costs about twelve lines of colour.

'....hssssssh....'   h hair   s skin
'....sseesees....'   e eye
'......wwww......'   w collar
'...cccccccccc...'   c coat   d coat shadow
'..ddaaaaaaaadd..'   a accent (hi-vis band / badge / logo)

Hats are separate overlays painted on rows 0–6, so any character can wear any of beanie, hardhat, cap, hood, cowboy or none. Chest emblems work the same way on rows 12–17.

The 1px outline is computed, not drawn: the sprite is rendered, its silhouette expanded by one pixel in the four-neighbourhood, and the expansion filled dark. That is why every character and every hat gets a consistent outline for free.

Coat shadow adapts to the palette. Subtracting brightness from a near-black coat gives you another near-black and the arms disappear into the torso, so below 0.3 luma the shadow brightens instead and reads as a rim light. Every template row is length-checked at boot — a miscounted row would otherwise silently shear the sprite.

Buildings

Buildings are not made of tiles. Each one is composed at load time into its own canvas out of architectural primitives — clapboard, brick, stoneCourse, cornice, gable, sashWindow, archWindow, doorway, awning, signPlate, snowLedge — and then placed in the world as one tall sprite with a solid footprint, a door, and its own light sources.

Shop signs are set in a 3×5 bitmap font written for the project (font.js), which auto-sizes to fit its plate. That is why the fronts read ROBINHOOD, PRECINCT 46 and CINEMA rather than carrying a blurry texture.

Adding a building is a function that draws it plus a returned { tw, th, door, interior, lights }. The three filler types are parametric, so a new shop is a palette and a sign string.

Interiors

Four landmarks open. A room is exactly one screen — 24×13 tiles, 384×208 — so there is no camera scroll indoors. Each is baked to a single canvas, and its collision grid is derived from the furniture rectangles as they are drawn, so nobody hand-authors a mask.

The town and every room expose the same interface — solid(tx,ty), open, pxW, pxH — so movement, collision and the camera never branch on which one you are standing in. Only rendering does.

The town

120×84 tiles at 16px — 1920×1344 pixels — laid out in bands the way a real street section is: a row of buildings on a raised pavement, a retaining wall with step gaps, the lower street, the frozen canal, then the next terrace. That vertical layering is what stops a top-down town reading as a flat carpet.

The whole ground layer is baked once into an offscreen canvas, so the per-frame ground pass is a single drawImage instead of thousands of tile blits. Props, buildings and characters are depth-sorted by their feet and culled to the viewport before drawing.

Making a bounded map feel bounded

The first version of this town reused seven building types across thirty-two plots, and the streets ran off the last tile into nothing. It was bounded, but it read as an endlessly repeating street. Three things fix that:

• 26 distinct fronts. Filler is drawn from a shuffled bag and only reshuffled once the bag is empty, so two identical shopfronts are never in view together.
• A treeline. Four tiles of impassable spruce wrap all four edges, so walking outward ends at a wall of forest instead of trailing off.
• A minimap. One pixel per tile puts the entire 120×84 town, its boundary and your position in it into the corner of the HUD.

Lighting

A night pass fills a scratch canvas with cold blue, punches holes at every lamp with destination-out radial gradients, and composites it over the scene. Warm glow is then added back additively, and unscanned contracts throb red so they read from across a block.

Performance

The game renders at 384×216 internally and is scaled up by CSS with image-rendering: pixelated, so it costs the same on a 4K monitor as on a laptop. It pauses via IntersectionObserver when scrolled out of view, and the cast portraits on the home page do the same.

Customising the game

Recolour a character

Edit RH.Sprites.CAST in assets/js/game/sprites.js and reload. Open dev/sprites.html to see every character, tile and prop rendered live at 3× and 6× — that page reads straight from the same file, so it is the fastest way to judge a palette.

Add a fifth character

1. Add an entry to CAST with a palette, a hat and an accentStyle.
2. Add a spawn in Game.prototype.newRound in game.js.
3. Add a script function under the same id in RH.Script in dialogue.js.

The script function receives the live game state and returns { lines, choices }. Choice actions are strings the engine switches on in Game.prototype.onChoice.

Retune the difficulty

Everything lives in one object — the this.G = { … } block in newRound. drainPerTerminal, scanRange, cost and reward are all there.

Change the city

world.js takes a seed. Change the number passed in buildWorld and you get a different town with the same road skeleton; edit the blocks array to change the skeleton itself.

Status & roadmap

Legal & risk

Last updated 6 September 2026 · Back to the game