Reading the control zone
A 2 km square on a 16 km map, a Hot Zone that drifts inside it, and the HUD readouts that tell you when to move.
Three scales
Each map is 16 by 16 km, 256 km². The Handbook lists Bakurani at 12 by 12, and the Hub notes the in-game coordinate readout spans only about 11 km a side, so the two may be measuring different things. The Control Zone is 2 by 2 km, a sixty-fourth of the map, placed at random each match; Wardogs Zone says Bakurani has three placements. Inside it is the Hot Zone: smaller, shifting, size unpublished. Around each faction base is a safe zone about 480 m across. There is no respawn timer. Bulkhead's devlog says the trip back from the safe zone is the punishment for dying, which is why the outer 252 km² is a transport problem.
What the Hot Zone does
Bulkhead has confirmed the rule: a player in the Hot Zone counts as two toward the zone count, which is why ten inside outscore nineteen outside. Cash is less settled. The Handbook prices it at $320 a tick against $160; the loading screen quoted by the Hub says it "counts you as 2 players and rewards bonus cash for every teamplay action"; Wardogs Zone adds $50 per consecutive tick up to $500. The HUD carries a persistent distance-to-Hot-Zone readout, so you always know how far away the doubled ground is.
Does the zone move?
The sources disagree, so plan for the worst case. Wardogs Zone says the Control Zone is fixed for the whole match and only the Hot Zone drifts; the Handbook says the zone "moves around the map" and its rotation pattern is unconfirmed; the Hub says it is randomised each match and that the Hot Zone moves rather than jumps, so the other factions get warning. What can be steered are the towers. Each has a terminal on an upper floor; capture it and your faction gets one digit of a code. With the full set, entered at a tower your side holds, the Hot Zone pulls toward it. Wardogs Zone puts that at 180 seconds of Hot Zone, a 900 second recharge, $2,500 for firing it, and $250 for a capture or $750 off a hostile holder, and says every tower is needed; the Handbook adds a start-of-match cooldown. None of it is official.
Rotating before it moves
Turtling never wins, the Handbook says, even with a FOB inside the zone; move with the Hot Zone. Wardogs HQ: watch for the shift and be the first squad to reposition. Wardogs Zone: if you are losing the tick, push in, not wider, because a downed player counts zero and a revive puts a body back. When the magnet fires the enemy sees it too, so fortify the tower before the last digit goes in. Dead, you return to HQ, or to the faction APC once your side has 20 points and it is parked inside the zone, with ten minutes between uses; the FOB never spawns you.
The map and the score
M opens the tactical map, X recentres it, the square brackets zoom the minimap and middle mouse pings. The minimap shows a FOB's build radius once one is placed, and map coordinates run in 100 m units, so 0.01 is a metre; the Mark Coordinates line pastes straight into an artillery board. The three faction scores climb toward 100: one point a tick to the side with the most presence, every 10 to 15 seconds by the Handbook, 22 by Wardogs Zone. When two factions are level the tick fills and holds, then pays the instant the deadlock breaks; that fill is the bar beside the scores. The two cash figures are Account, everything you own, and This Life, which resets when you die. The rest of the scoring is in how a match works.