Rabbithole Beamer

A 🎲 dice enemy spawns rarely while you're blasting your timeline. It floats slowly down the screen with a fat hitbox you almost can't miss. Kill it before it escapes the bottom and you trigger one of two outcomes:

• 80% of the time — the die rolls 42 and the Rabbithole Beamer activates. Your screen goes warpspeed for two seconds and you land on a completely random feed. Could be a stranger's last 10 posts. Could be the latest arxiv paper. Could be a viral post from the last 48 hours.
• 20% of the time — the die rolls 1–6 with a small instant reward. Coins, fire-rate boost, an extra life — quick perks that don't break your flow.

It's the curiosity engine inside Timeline Blastar. Most sessions stay on whatever timeline you launched. This one chance event throws you somewhere you didn't ask to go.

How to spot the dice

Starting at wave 5, every wave roll has a 33% chance of bringing in one 🎲 dice enemy. Maximum one onscreen at a time, so you won't get swarmed. Look for:

• A big white-haloed dice glyph drifting slowly downward, swaying gently.
• An HP bar reading HP 42 / 42 that appears once you land your first hit.
• A "RABBITHOLE BEAMER INCOMING" toast popping in the upper-right when it spawns.

If you've played for six minutes and haven't seen one, the game force-spawns one anyway. Every session is guaranteed at least one rabbithole opportunity.

Killing it

The dice has 42 HP, but the damage scaling means it actually only takes about 25 hits to kill:

• Hits 1 to 10 do single damage. The dice looks pristine.
• Hits 11 to 22 do double damage. Visible cracks appear across the face.
• Hits 23 to 34 do triple damage. The dice glows red.
• Hits 35 onward do triple damage and the dice pulses, imminent.

Most weapons work — bullets, megaphone, meme-blaster, the study guns all chip in. The hitbox is generous (about 70 pixels of forgiving collision radius), so even sloppy aim connects. The challenge isn't accuracy — it's time. The dice drifts down at about 0.6 px per frame, so you've got roughly 12–15 seconds before it leaves the bottom of the screen.

If it escapes, no damage to your ship — but a small ghostly (N) graffiti is left at the screen edge. That N is the number it would have rolled if you'd killed it. A tiny session-long regret marker for what you missed.

What the warpspeed does

When the die lands on 42:

1. The screen freezes mid-action and a fullscreen overlay drops in. 2. A 3D star tunnel zooms outward toward you for about two seconds. 3. The overlay crossfades and you're now playing a different feed.

The new feed picks from one of five sources, weighted:

• 50% — the last ten posts from a random handle in our active corpus. You don't know who it is until you start blasting.
• 15% — the highest-engagement post from X in the last 48 hours.
• 12.5% — a fresh arxiv cs.AI paper.
• 12.5% — a fresh PubMed paper.
• 10% — a hand-curated HALL OF MEMES entry. Operator picks. Not always the same five.

There's a no-repeat-within-three filter, so if you trigger three rabbitholes in a session you'll see at least three different kinds. No infinite arxiv loop.

The 1–6 small rewards

When the die lands on a regular face, a quick reward applies and the game resumes immediately:

These are designed to feel like a fair consolation prize rather than a real win — the warpspeed is the actual prize. But the reward is always meaningful enough that a non-42 roll never feels like a waste.

Bragging rights

Three lifetime stats track your rabbithole career:

• Rabbitholes triggered — total times you landed on 42 and got warped.
• Dice killed — total dice you took out (every kill counts, even a 1).
• Distinct rabbithole feeds — how many of the five picker kinds you've seen at least once.

These show up on your public profile at /p/<your-handle> as: "this player has been to N rabbitholes." It's a different kind of high score — not raw points, but how often you've been willing to go somewhere unexpected.

Why the design is what it is

Timeline Blastar is a curiosity-exploration engine disguised as a shooter. Most sessions you choose your feed up front: my timeline, the daily mix, a Shooting Star. The Rabbithole Beamer is the one mechanic that takes the choice away from you. You don't pick where you go; the dice does.

That's the point. The whole project's premise is that following your curiosity is more interesting when something else picks the next direction once in a while. The dice is rare so it stays special. It can't be triggered on demand, only earned by killing what shows up. And the 80/20 split means most kills genuinely deliver the warp — it's not a teaser for a feature you rarely see.

In multiplayer Blast Battle the dice is disabled — yanking both players into a random feed mid-round would break the format.

The 42 reference is non-negotiable. You know why.