Docs · how it works

Outlaws, marks & the Sheriff's chest

Pons creator fees fill the Sheriff's chest. Every three minutes, outlaws fight in a 3D arena, and the ones still standing split it. Nobody ever pays to play; holding is the only way in.

1Entry & the holding rule

SWARDBOW is a free-to-enter, skill-based archery arena on Robinhood Chain. There is no entry fee, no ticket to buy and nothing to deposit. The only door is this: a wallet that holds at least 100,000 units of at the latest block may spawn as an outlaw. One wallet, one outlaw per round.

  1. Type an outlaw name on the arena page. Watching needs no wallet at all.
  2. Connect a wallet on Robinhood Chain (chain id 4663) and sign a short message: SWARDBOW outlaw <name> nonce <nonce>. Signing is free; it proves you control the wallet and never moves anything.
  3. The server checks your balance at the latest block (cached 30 s). If it is at or above the minimum, you can take the field in the current round when a human slot is free.

Before launch (while the contract address is still 0x000…000) the site runs in preview: demo rounds with bots and any visitor who types a name, demo pots, nothing on-chain.

2The chest

The founder launches the token on Pons V2 with the SheriffChest contract as the creator-fee recipient (or forwards fees to it by plain transfer; both work). Anyone can call harvest(): it sweeps whatever Pons holds for the chest and splits every new ETH 90% into the chest pool, 10% to infra (server + keeper gas). That is the whole funding model. If no fees arrive, the chest stays empty and rounds are played for the leaderboard only.

  • A round carries a pot only if the free pool holds at least 0.0005000 ETH and a human is on the field when it opens.
  • The pot is min(pool free, 0.5000 ETH); the rest waits for the next round.
  • Pots are reserved on-chain at settle and can only leave through claim / pull. Unclaimed amounts stay reserved forever; there is no sweep-back.
  • The owner can only move the free pool, and only through a 48 h timelock that is public on-chain. No upgrades, no delegatecall.

3Round rules

  • Every 180 s a round opens, 24/7, even with no humans (then bots only, no pot). Between rounds there is a 20 s intermission with the results.
  • Before a round opens the keeper commits a secret seed on-chain: keccak256(n, seed). The seed drives bot behaviour and spawn points; it is revealed at settle, so nobody can steer a round after it opened.
  • The arena is a 44 × 32 m meadow with walls and 10–14 obstacles (hay bales, trees, fences) placed from the seed. Max 8 outlaws: humans first, bots fill the empty slots.
  • You move at 6 m/s and shoot arrows (22 m/s, 28 m range, one every 0.7 s). One hit eliminates. The server runs the whole simulation at 20 Hz; the client only sends input.
  • An eliminated outlaw may respawn with one fresh mark until 45 s before the end. The marks they held already went to the archer.
  • When time is up, standing = human outlaws alive at that moment. Eliminated outlaws who did not respawn are not standing.

4Marks & the Sheriff's bounty

Every outlaw spawns with 1 mark. When your arrow eliminates someone, all of their marks move to you. The archer with the most marks is the leader and visibly carries the Sheriff's bounty (a red ring in the arena). Whoever fells the leader gets their marks plus 1 bonus mark. Marks are what you split the pot with, so the leader is worth hunting and worth protecting.

5Bots

Bots fill empty slots so there is always something to shoot at and something to watch. They are always labelled "bot": in the arena, in the scoreboard, in every replay and on the ledger. Bot marks are void: a bot standing at the end gets nothing, and its marks do not count in the split. If only bots are standing, the round has no payees and the pot rolls into the next round.

6Payout math

When the horn sounds, the server computes the split, reveals the seed and posts a Merkle root on-chain with settleRound. The derivation is byte-exact between the contract, the server and /shared/payout.js:

humans_standing = human outlaws alive at round end marks_i = integer marks held by standing human i (≥ 1); bot marks are void if Σmarks == 0 or potWei == 0 → root = 0x0, potWei = 0 (the pot rolls over) amount_i = potWei × marks_i / Σmarks (integer division) remainder → the standing human with the most marks; ties → lowest address leaf_i = keccak256(bytes.concat(keccak256(abi.encode(uint64 n, address wallet, uint256 amount_i)))) tree = OpenZeppelin StandardMerkleTree layout (leaves sorted by hash, sorted-pair hashing) payees = count(amount_i > 0) seedHash = keccak256(abi.encodePacked(uint64 n, bytes32 seed))

Example: pot 0.0030 ETH, three humans standing with 5, 2 and 1 marks → 8 marks → 0.001875 / 0.00075 / 0.000375 ETH. The contract stores the root, the pot and the number of payees; the full list with every proof is published as /api/round/n/payouts.json and kept forever.

7How to verify a round

  1. Open the round page (/round/?n=…) and press Verify this round in your browser. It re-derives every amount from the standing marks, rebuilds the Merkle root from payouts.json, checks every proof and compares the root with rounds(n).root on-chain through the public RPC. No wallet needed.
  2. Check the seed: keccak256(n, seed) must equal the commitment posted before the round opened. The page does this for you; the commit transaction is linked.
  3. Watch the replay: every round has a public JSON replay (4 keyframes per second plus every event). The server recorded it; the arena page plays it in 3D, the round page in 2D.
  4. Do it yourself: fetch payouts.json, import /shared/payout.js or /shared/abi.js (splitPot, buildPayoutTree, verifyProof) in any browser console or Node, and compare.

8Claiming

Payouts are pull: nothing is sent automatically. Open your outlaw page, connect the same wallet, and press Claim for one round or Claim all for several (claimMany, one transaction). You pay the gas on Robinhood Chain (a few thousandths of a cent); the chest pushes the ETH to your wallet. If the push fails (a contract wallet that rejects ETH), the amount is kept as owed and pull() hands it over any time. Each (round, wallet) can be claimed once; there is no deadline.

9Risks

  • Prizes can be zero. The chest is funded only by Pons creator fees that actually arrive. No fees, no pot. Never expect a number.
  • Unaudited contracts. SheriffChest is small and tested on a mainnet fork, but it has not been audited. Do not hold more than you can lose.
  • The server runs the game. Hits, marks and the standing list are computed by the server; the seed commit, the on-chain root, the public replay and this verification page are how you check it. The keeper can void a round it could not finish (nothing is reserved then), and anyone can void a round that stays open for over an hour.
  • Latency. Arrows are server-authoritative at 20 Hz; a slow connection is a disadvantage, not a bug.
  • The token trades on Pons; its price is not part of this game and nothing here is advice about it.
  • Jurisdiction. Make sure skill games with prizes are allowed where you are. SWARDBOW is not affiliated with Robinhood Markets, Inc. or Pons.

10Addresses

Robinhood Chain (chain id 4663). Only trust the addresses on this page, our X and Telegram.

WhatAddress
Check a wallet
Eligibility to spawn, rounds played and what is claimable.

11Disclosures

The chest is funded only by Pons creator fees that actually arrive. Entry is free; tickets come from holding the token. Prizes can be zero. This is a skill game; bots are always labelled.

Not financial advice. Unaudited contracts. Every round's seed is committed on-chain before it starts. Not affiliated with Robinhood Markets, Inc. or Pons.

12FAQ

Do I have to buy anything to play?
No. Nobody ever pays to play. Holding the token is the only way in; there is no entry fee and no deposit.
What if nobody is standing at the end?
The round is recorded with root 0x0 and no pot; the ETH stays in the pool and the next round carries it.
Can the keeper cheat?
The seed is committed before the round opens and revealed at settle; the root, pot and payee count are on-chain; the replay and the payout list are public; the round page recomputes all of it in your browser. The owner cannot touch reserved pots at all and can only move the free pool through a public 48 h timelock.
Why is the ticker not shown?
Until launch the ticker is kept secret so copies cannot take it. The contract address and the ticker appear here, on X and on Telegram at launch, together.
I was eliminated. Is my round over?
You can respawn with one fresh mark until 45 s before the end. After that you watch from the stands; only outlaws alive at the horn are standing.