Bunny Breeder: how to play and how scoring works

How long a round lasts

Sixty seconds, and three ways to finish. You win the moment eight adults are alive at the same time. You lose immediately if the field ever drops below two rabbits, which is the point at which breeding is no longer possible. Otherwise the clock expires and the run ends where it stands. The round runs on a 12-tick-per-second loop inherited from the original Flash build, and every rule below is counted in those ticks rather than in frames.

Controls

Mouse or touch only. Drag a rabbit and drop it next to another one. There is no keyboard input and nothing to press.

A rabbit cannot be picked up while it is already mating, fighting, jumping or dying — the drag is simply refused. This is worth knowing because a failed grab costs you the second you spent on it, and seconds are the whole currency of the round.

Pairing is proximity-based, not a precise drop. Release one rabbit within 60 pixels horizontally and 45 pixels vertically of another and the pair triggers. The box is wider than it is tall, so approaching from the side is more forgiving than approaching from above or below.

You can drag either partner onto the other. Dropping the female onto a waiting male works exactly as well as the reverse, which matters when the male is the one awkwardly placed.

How scoring works

The figure the game draws on screen is not the figure that places you on the leaderboard, and the difference is deliberate. The on-screen score starts at 10,000 and falls by 2 every tick — 24 a second — so it measures only how little time has passed. A player who lost in two seconds would show a higher number than one who played well and won slowly. The leaderboard figure is therefore derived on the server from the outcome of the run.

Why breeding faster makes the field more dangerous

A meteor is considered on every tick where none is already falling, and the chance is one in 750 divided by the number of live rabbits. With two rabbits that is a one-in-375 roll twelve times a second. With seven it is one in 107. The hazard scales with the population you are building, so the closer you get to eight adults the more often the sky opens.

This is the whole tension of the game. There is no safe way to stall: doing nothing keeps the meteor rate low but the clock still runs out, and a timeout scores as a loss. Equally, breeding flat out raises the strike rate exactly when you have the most to lose.

A meteor kills everything in a zone 110 pixels wide and 60 tall. That is large relative to the pairing box, which means a tightly packed cluster of rabbits — the natural result of breeding efficiently — can be wiped out by a single hit. Spreading the field costs you drag time but caps the damage of any one strike.

Ages, and the two numbers that are not the same

Rabbits age by 0.1 per tick, which is 1.2 per second. A rabbit born at zero reaches adulthood at age 20, so it takes a little under 17 seconds to raise one from birth — more than a quarter of the entire round for a single rabbit.

There are two thresholds and they are easy to conflate. A rabbit can mate from age 18, but only counts toward your eight at age 20. The gap is about one and a half seconds. In practice this means a rabbit becomes useful for breeding before it becomes useful for winning, and the fastest runs put every rabbit to work the moment it crosses 18 rather than waiting for it to look grown.

Your first two rabbits start at age 19.5, not zero. They are adults within half an age unit — about four ticks — so you begin the round effectively two-thirds of a second away from having two adults on the board.

Males fight, and the loss is silent

Pairing only works between a male and a female. Drop a male next to another male and they fight instead, and one of them dies. The game does not warn you before the drop and the death is not announced — the rabbit is simply gone.

The starting pair alternates sex by position, so you always begin with one of each. Everything after that is down to what is born, and the game gives you no label on screen to tell them apart at a glance beyond the sprite itself.

This is the fastest way to lose a round outright. Two careless male-on-male drops from a field of three takes you under the two-rabbit floor, and the run ends instantly regardless of how much time is left.

What actually raises your score

• →Treat the clock, not the meteors, as the main threat early. The strike rate is at its lowest when you have fewest rabbits, so the opening seconds are the cheapest time to breed.
• →Start pairing at age 18, not 20. A rabbit is fertile a second and a half before it counts toward your eight, and that gap compounds across a round.
• →Spread the field once you pass four or five rabbits. A meteor's kill zone is wider than the pairing box, so a tight cluster can lose several rabbits to one strike.
• →Approach from the side when dropping. The pairing box is 60 wide against 45 tall, so a horizontal approach has more margin for error.
• →Never drop a male near a male. One of them dies without warning, and two bad drops from a small field ends the run on the spot.
• →If eight adults is clearly out of reach, keep every rabbit alive anyway. A losing run still scores 300 for each adult beyond the starting two, up to 1,500 — far better than a field wiped out chasing the win.
• →Ignore the number on screen. It only counts down, and the leaderboard does not use it; a fast win is worth 9,000 no matter what the display says.