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Best
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A claw on a rope swings at the top of the screen. Tap to drop it on gold, diamonds, or rocks below. Heavy hauls take longer to reel back. Beat the timer.
The rope hangs from the top center and swings back and forth at a steady angle. Tap anywhere on the screen to release the claw — the rope extends along the current angle in a straight line until it touches an item or hits the floor.
Gold nuggets are worth 50, small gold nuggets are worth 100, diamonds are worth 250, and rocks are worth only 5 — but they're large and slow to reel up, so a wrong grab eats real time. Once the rope retracts (with or without something on it) the claw resumes swinging.
You have ninety seconds. The pendulum sweeps faster every eighteen seconds, so timing windows shrink as the run progresses. Each item respawns at a new random position about 1.3 seconds after you collect it. Maximize total value before time runs out.
The expected value of any single drop is governed by what you'd take, weighted by how long that take blocks you from doing anything else. A diamond at the bottom of the screen scores 250 and reels back in roughly a second. A rock at the bottom scores 5 and reels back over more like two and a half seconds — twenty drops worth of opportunity cost for a fraction of a diamond's payout. The math is unforgiving: skip every rock unless you genuinely have nothing else in reach.
Misses cost the same time as a no-grab rock dive. The rope extends to the floor, retracts empty fast (1.6× speed), and you're back swinging in about 1.5 seconds. That's not free, but compared to grabbing a rock it's a discount. Treat the rope as cheap to throw and expensive to fill with the wrong thing.
The pendulum is sinusoidal — slowest at the ends, fastest at the bottom of the arc. That means the easiest targets to hit are the ones directly below the anchor (when the rope is near vertical you have the most time per degree of angle). The diamonds tucked into the corners are the hardest, and they're often the most valuable. Practice the timing on small gold at center-screen first to learn the feel, then push for diamonds when the swing is at its widest extension and slowest movement.
Later in the run when the pendulum sweeps faster, your window for a precise drop shrinks. The cheapest way to keep scoring is to commit early to a target's column and pull the trigger half a swing before the rope is exactly on the target — the rope keeps the angle it was at when you tapped, so what matters is where the rope is at tap time, not where the rope will be when it reaches the target. With practice, you can tap right as the rope sweeps onto the column and still hit cleanly.