How to play: controls, speed and scoring

Controls

There are three ways to steer, picked in Settings · Controls.

There is also a left-handed layout, and control hints on your first runs. A tap shorter than one simulation step still counts: input is held for 5 steps (about 40 ms).

Flat is fast, banking brakes

Banking the plane buys sideways speed and pays for it in falling speed. It is the whole game:

• Reaching full bank takes 0.24 s, and straightening up 0.17 s.
• Crossing the whole shaft (640 px) at full bank takes about 1.3 s and about 530 px of height. Every obstacle is designed around that number.
• The shaft is 640 px wide, and 100 px is 1 metre on the depth counter.

Speed rises with depth

Falling speed is multiplied by 1 + 0.055 for every 10 metres fallen, up to a cap of ×1.88 at 160 m (around 70 points). From there nearly the whole run is played at top speed: 1,222 px/s, 12.2 m/s flat.

• In the Foundry the ramp runs twice as fast and the cap comes at 80 m. The cap itself is the same.
• As you speed up the camera pulls back (to a zoom of 0.83) so you always see at least 0.9 s of shaft ahead. Every obstacle warns you at least that early at top speed.

How points are scored

Coins give no points, and metres are counted separately. At top speed you score about 3–4 points a second.

Walls and scuffs

The shaft’s walls never kill: they scuff you. What ends a run is the girders and every other obstacle.

• A scuff makes you dive at 1.55× falling speed for 0.40 s and locks your steering for 0.22 s.
• It resets your clean streak, which the “no scuffs” quests use.
• Hugging a wall dives faster: the “wall dive”, which has quests of its own.
• Bank away from a wall to leave it without a scrape.

The hitbox

The plane collides as a capsule of three 9-px circles along the fuselage, 20 px apart. The drawing is 15% larger than the hitbox on purpose: if it looks like you scraped past, you did. At full bank it is about 55 px wide. Every plane has exactly the same hitbox.

Thermals

Rings of warm air turn up from 150 points. Fly through one and:

• for 1.2 s every point counts double (a stamp is worth 10) and the hitbox is 30% smaller;
• for 8 s you are invincible: a gold rim on the plane and a gold frame on the screen, which blink for the last 3 s.

Difficulty: the shaft’s 10 tiers

The shaft is built in chunks. Which one comes depends on your score, and each tier brings new obstacle types. One chunk in four is drawn a tier easier (one in ten in the Foundry). Every 5–7 chunks there is a breather (7–9 in the Foundry), and always after the hardest kind of chunk.

In the Foundry 300 points are added before the table is read: its first chunk is already tier 5. Every obstacle, one by one, in obstacles.

Revives

• In Endless and the Daily Drift you can revive twice per run. At a crash, “KEEP FLYING?” comes up: one rewarded video, or a tap if you have Remove Ads.
• You pick up where you crashed with a 3-2-1 and an 8-second shield. Score, records, XP, quests and unlocks all count as normal.
• Time Attack has no revives (the clock is running), and in Race you respawn on your own.

The game’s own tips

The ones an Endless or Daily Drift run can open with during your first 10 runs: