Every Iron Swarm arena is more than the tanks in it. Scattered around the map are pickups that boost you, dangers that can end a good run in one careless second, and stretches of ground and walls that decide where you can drive and shoot. This page is a lookup table for all of it: what each element looks like, what it does, and the one thing worth remembering about it. It is a reference, not a walkthrough — for the decisions of when to grab, when to bait, and when to hold back, read the Iron Swarm Strategy Guide. If you are brand new, the How to Play page covers the controls first. You can also play Iron Swarm free in your browser while you read.
How pickups appear
Two rules cover most of what you need to know about collecting things. In the Campaign, Survival, and Daily Challenge, power-ups appear as drops during combat and their effects carry through the rest of that run, so what you pick up early keeps paying off. In the eight story Missions the placement is different: pickups are hand-placed by the designers rather than dropped at random, which turns each mission into a fixed puzzle you can learn and repeat. The support drone is a special case that follows its own collection rule, covered in its own entry below.
One practical consequence of the "stacks over a run" rule is that timing matters as much as choice: a survival pickup grabbed just before a boss round is worth far more than the same pickup taken from near-full health during a quiet stretch. Keep that in mind as you read the entries below — the effect is only half the story, the moment you collect it is the other half.
Power-ups
Power-ups fall into three rough jobs — staying alive, hitting harder, and moving better. Here is what each one does.
Survival pickups
- Health pack — restores 50 HP. Your tank has a 340 HP pool (roughly ten clean cannon hits), so a health pack is worth about a seventh of a full bar. Grab it before a boss round rather than topping off from near-full.
- Shield bubble — blocks all incoming damage for a short window. It is a panic button and a push button in one: it can save you from a wave that is about to land, or let you drive into a spot you could not normally survive.
Offensive pickups
- Burst fire — changes your cannon to fire in bursts, raising your damage output for a stretch.
- Rapid fire — increases your rate of fire, so you put more rounds downrange in the same time.
- Freeze gun — a crowd-control pickup that lets you lock down enemies, buying space when several are closing at once.
Mobility pickups
- Speed boost — raises your movement speed. Because your barrel aims wherever you drive, more speed is more than just escape — it is faster re-aiming too. It is most useful collected at the start of a busy round rather than saved for a lull.
The support drone (collect-gated)
The drone is not a passive buff — it is a special you unlock one round at a time. At the start of every round it is locked; you enable it for that round only by driving over the round's drone pickup. Once collected, it hunts on its own and one-shots living enemy tanks, with a single drone in the air at any moment. Advancing to the next round re-locks it, so an uncollected or unused drone is simply lost. Because it clears whatever is currently alive, it does the most work when several enemies are on the field at once.
Hazards
Hazards are the map's own weapons. They do not care whose tank triggers them, which means a threat to you is also a tool you can turn on the enemy.
- Land mines — shown as a clearly visible disc on the ground and dealing about 150 HP on contact, nearly half your health bar in a single hit. Two boss types also lay their own mines during a fight (see the boss compendium). Because mines hit anything that drives over them, you can lead an enemy across one as readily as you can blunder onto it yourself. The disc is always visible, so a mine death is nearly always avoidable — the danger is forgetting one is there while you concentrate on a boss.
Terrain and walls
Terrain does not damage you, but it dictates the shape of a fight — where you are fast, where you are exposed, and where a shot can and cannot reach.
Ground types
- Water and mud — cut your movement speed in half. Crossing either leaves you slow and easy to hit, so treat these patches as open ground to skirt, not shortcuts to cut through under fire.
- Ice — keeps you sliding for about half a second after you release the movement input. Factor the drift into your turns; on ice you commit to a direction slightly before you stop asking for it.
Wall types
- Brick walls — take two hits and then crumble. Temporary cover you can also deliberately blow open to create a new firing lane.
- Steel walls — permanent and bullet-proof; they never break, so they are your most reliable line-of-sight blocker for rounding a corner safely.
- Rubble piles — low, indestructible cover. They cannot be destroyed and they break up sightlines without ever fully going away.
Reading it all together
The battlefield elements are most powerful in combination, and that is where the reference stops and judgement begins. Cover breaks the enemy's line of sight; hazards punish anything that crosses them; terrain decides who is quick and who is stuck; and pickups swing a stretch of the fight in your favour. Knowing what each one is — the job of this page — is the first half. Knowing when to use it is the second, and that lives in the Strategy Guide alongside per-mode advice on the Game Modes page. When you want to see it in motion, start a battle.
Related reading: the Iron Swarm boss compendium for every boss's phases and tells, and the full Strategy Guide for how to put the whole toolkit to work.