The five you can only win

This lesson prepares you to: Explain who receives an earned power up, how the draw is weighted, and why none of them can be bought.

The earned shelf

Five power ups cannot be bought at any price. There is no bundle, no discount and no premium tier that unlocks them.

Power up	Runs for	What it does
Lightning	30s	Roughly one gift in three scores 5x
Shield	15s	Your side cannot be anchored, and it clears a Capture
Anchor, the long one	30s	The other side cannot start a new power up
Capture	30s	The other side gains no bonus, or half of one
Tap Out	20s	Opens a tap contest for both rooms

The reason they are unbuyable is a design decision worth naming. An earned item that can also be bought is not a different door, it is a discount, and the wallet wins again. A viewer with no money at all holds these, and nobody can buy past them.

How they are handed out

When a battle ends, up to four viewers on the winning side receive one each. In a squad it is the winning team, not one stream.

• The top three by battle points contributed to that side.
• One more, drawn from everyone else on that side who gave anything at all.

That fourth one is the important one. It means backing a winner is worth something even if you are not the biggest spender in the room, and it is the difference between a reward system and a leaderboard. It has a floor of 10 coins, which exists to stop a script entering every draw on the platform for a coin a battle and is low enough that one small gift clears it. The top three have no floor.

The draw is weighted, and not evenly

Which power up you get is decided by the same reproducible method used everywhere else in battles, derived from the battle and your own account rather than from chance. It is not a flat one in five.

Power up	Roughly how often
Shield	30%
Capture	25%
Anchor, the long one	20%
Tap Out	15%
Lightning	10%

Lightning is the rarest on purpose. It is 5x for thirty seconds, which is the biggest single thing a viewer can do to a scoreboard, and an item that strong arriving as often as a defensive Shield would make winning one feel like a coin flip rather than a result.

It is locked to the creator you won it from

This is the part people miss, and it changes everything about how you use one.

An earned power up is spendable only in a battle the creator you won it from is fighting in, and only while you are backing their side. Win a Capture supporting one creator and you cannot take it to somebody else's battle, and you cannot aim it at the creator who gave it to you.

That is the whole retention loop, and it is also what the five days really mean: that creator has to go live and get into a battle inside those five days, or it lapses. If you are a creator, that is a reason to run a battle in the week after you win one, and worth saying to your room.

Five days, then they are gone

An earned power up expires 5 days after it is won. That is deliberate. An item with no expiry gets hoarded for a moment that never comes, and a viewer who is holding six Lightnings is not using any of them. Five days is long enough to catch your next live and short enough that using it beats saving it.

Shield is the answer to Anchor

The rules for what can be used when are short, and there is one exception worth remembering.

• The same power up cannot be stacked on itself.
• An anchored side cannot start anything new, including something aimed at somebody else.
• Except a Shield. A Shield can always be raised, even while anchored.

That exception exists because a Shield is the answer to being anchored. Letting an anchor block it would make the Shield useless at exactly the moment it is needed, which is a rule that reads fine and plays terribly.

A Shield beats an Anchor outright. While a Shield is up, your side simply is not anchored, whatever anyone else just spent.

Capture stops you benefiting, Anchor stops you acting

These two get confused constantly and they are not the same job.

• An Anchor stops the other side starting anything new. Whatever is already running on them carries on untouched.
• A Capture leaves them free to do whatever they like and takes away the benefit. If nothing was running on them when it landed, no bonus can land for thirty seconds. If something was already running, every bonus that side gets for the next thirty seconds is halved instead, including ones they start after it.

A Capture also beats a Tap Out win outright. A room that wins the tap contest while under a blocking Capture scores its prize at 1x for the whole thirty seconds, and under a halving one a 5x pays 2.5x. That is the strongest thing Capture does and it is worth knowing before you spend one.

Which of those two jobs a Capture does is decided the moment it lands and never changes afterwards. That matters if you are timing one: a Capture thrown at a side that is already mid Surge halves it rather than stopping it, even if that Surge runs out a second later.

They do not block each other either. A side can be anchored and captured at the same time, and each one only refuses a second helping of itself.