Maze Bots Strategy: Clearing Rooms Without Touching the Walls

Updated October 2026

Maze Bots is a race against a shared clock. Every room you clear adds time and points, every life you lose sets you back, and the walls that shape each room are as dangerous as the robots inside it. This guide covers how the robots think, why their shots miss a moving target, how the room sequence repeats, and how to budget the clock so that a good run keeps going rather than running out of seconds halfway through.

The rules that matter most

You begin with three lives and 90 seconds. The clock is real time, so it keeps running if you switch apps or lock the phone. Destroying a robot scores 50 points. When the last robot in a room is gone, the border turns green, arrows appear at the middle of the left and right edges, and you can walk out through either gap to the next room. Leaving a room scores 200 points and carries your remaining time forward with a time bonus added: 20 seconds for entering room 2, then 0.4 seconds less for every room after that (16.8 seconds for room 10, 8.8 for room 30, nothing from room 52 on). Added together, no run can last more than ten minutes.

You lose a life in four ways: a robot's bullet touches you, a robot touches you, you walk into one of the glowing interior walls, or you push against the outer edge of the room anywhere other than the door gaps. The run ends when lives or time reach zero. After a hit there is a 0.7-second pause, then you reappear at the bottom centre of the room with one and a half seconds of protection, during which you flash and nothing can hurt you. You get the same protection at the start of every room.

One detail changes how you move around walls. Standing next to a wall is perfectly safe; you are only hurt when a movement would carry you into it. While you are protected, walls simply stop you instead of hurting you.

Controls and aiming

The four buttons at the bottom left walk you up, down, left or right at a steady 110 pixels per second. Holding two neighbouring buttons with two fingers gives a diagonal. The large button at the bottom right fires one shot in the direction you last walked; at the start of a room you face down. You can fire about two and a half shots per second, since each shot is followed by a 0.38-second cooldown, and your bullets travel at 240 pixels per second until they hit a wall, a robot or the edge of the room.

Because the gun follows your last movement, aiming is a matter of walking. To shoot a robot above you, give the up button the briefest tap, then fire. A short tap moves you only a little, so it is a cheap way to turn around. Diagonal shots are possible too, which is useful when a robot is in the corner of a room and lining up on its row or column would take you past a wall.

Your shots have a hit box about 24 pixels wide around each robot, which is forgiving. The harder part is that a bullet stops at the first wall in its path, so the shot has to have a clear line from your gun to the robot.

How the robots think

Each robot takes one small step toward you every 0.22 seconds (more often from room 14, see below). It always tries to close the larger of the two distances first: if you are further away sideways than vertically, it steps sideways; otherwise it steps up or down. If that step would put it inside a wall or on top of another robot, it tries the other direction instead, and if that is blocked too it stays where it is. On the first room the step is 6 pixels, a walking pace of roughly 27 pixels per second, and it grows by half a pixel per room. From room 14 the step stays at 12 pixels and the robots step more often instead, so their speed keeps rising by about 2.3 pixels per second per room with no limit: they stay slower than you for a long time, but from room 38 they walk faster than your 110 pixels per second.

That simple chase rule makes robots predictable:

• They pile up against walls. A robot directly on the other side of a long wall will keep pressing into it rather than walking around. You can leave it there until you are ready.
• They come at you in straight lines. A robot that is far to your side walks horizontally toward you without changing height, and one that is far above or below walks vertically. Step onto its row or column, face it and fire, and it walks straight into your shots.
• They only shoot with a clear view. A robot fires only when no wall lies between it and you. Its first chance comes 1 to 2.5 seconds into the room; with no clear line it checks again 0.8 to 1.4 seconds later. After firing it waits between 2.2 and 3.6 seconds in the first room, a wait that shortens by a tenth of a second per room until room 11 and keeps shrinking after that, by about 5 percent per room, to roughly 0.6 to 1.3 seconds by room 30.

Dodging robot fire

Robot bullets are slower than yours, at 72 percent of your bullet speed, about 173 pixels per second. More importantly, each one is aimed at the spot where you were standing when it was fired. Robots do not lead their shots. If you are moving sideways relative to the robot, the bullet passes behind you; your body plus the bullet's radius means you need only about 12 pixels of sideways movement, around a tenth of a second of walking, to make an aimed shot miss.

The practical rule is that standing still in the open is the riskiest thing you can do, and walking across a robot's line is the safest. When you stop to shoot, do it from behind cover, from an angle where only one robot can see you, or straight after a robot has just fired at you, while it waits to fire again.

The room sequence

Rooms follow a fixed cycle of six layouts, repeating from room 7 onwards. Only robot positions change between visits.

1. The cross. One long horizontal bar across the middle and a tall vertical bar through the centre, splitting the room into four quarters.
2. Two offset bars. A bar from the left side in the upper part of the room and another from the right side lower down.
3. Pillars. Four square blocks near the corners and a larger block in the middle; lots of cover and lots of angles.
4. The zigzag. Two bars that touch the outer walls, one from the left high up and one from the right lower down. Their ends meet the edge, so you cannot slip around them on that side.
5. The open box. A three-sided box in the upper middle, open at the bottom. Robots that spawn inside it are protected from the sides.
6. The T. A long bar across the upper middle with a stem running down toward your starting position.

Robots appear somewhere in roughly the upper half of the room, at least 140 pixels from the point where you enter and spread apart from each other. Rooms 1 and 2 hold three robots, rooms 3 and 4 hold four, rooms 5 and 6 hold five, and every room from 7 onwards holds six. When you walk through a door, you enter the next room at the middle of the opposite edge, and that entry point is what the spacing rule measures from, so no robot starts right beside the door. Use your protection window to look before you commit anyway.

The cross deserves a special warning. Its horizontal bar runs across the middle at exactly the height of the doors, and it starts only a short way in from each edge. If you enter a cross room and keep walking straight, you reach the bar within a fraction of a second. Your entry protection will stop you there harmlessly, but the same move after it wears off costs a life, so get into the habit of stepping up or down off the centre line first.

Managing the clock

Time is the resource that ends most good runs. The time bonus starts at 20 seconds and drops by 0.4 seconds every room, so a room grows your reserve only if you clear it faster than its bonus. Three robots in the early rooms are easy to clear well within that budget; six faster, quicker-firing robots in the later rooms, with a bonus under 10 seconds from room 28, are not.

• Bank time early. The first few rooms are the cheapest place to build a cushion. Clearing them briskly gives you spare seconds for the six-robot rooms later.
• Take the nearest door. Both doors lead to the same next room, so leave through whichever gap is closer once the border turns green.
• Do not trade lives for seconds. A lost life costs 0.7 seconds of downtime plus the walk back from the bottom of the room, and you only have three. Slow, safe clearing almost always beats a rushed one.

Score follows naturally from progress: a six-robot room is worth 300 points for the robots plus 200 for leaving it. Your best score is saved on your device, and the game-over card lets you send any score to the Hall of Fame.