Dig Strategy: Tunnelling, Pumping and Surviving Faster Waves

Updated October 2026

Dig drops you onto a small underground map with a handful of creatures sealed in their burrows. You open the way to them, pump them up until they burst, and do it again on a faster wave. The game is short on rules but full of timing details: how your miner moves, when a pump counts, how long a creature stays harmless, and how quickly each wave speeds up. This guide covers all of them, plus a scoring plan that gets the most out of every wave.

How the miner moves

The field is 9 columns by 13 rows. The top row is open sky and everything underneath starts as solid dirt, except a single open cell just below the surface where your miner begins. You steer with swipes of at least 16 pixels; a shorter touch counts as a tap instead.

The key thing to understand is that the miner does not stop by himself. A swipe sets a direction and he keeps travelling that way, digging through anything in front of him, until he reaches the edge of the field or a creature is in the very next cell. If you swipe a new direction while he is between cells, the turn waits until he reaches the next cell centre, except for a full reversal, which takes effect at once. At the start of a wave and after losing a life he stands still until your first swipe.

That has a big consequence: there is no button for stopping in open ground. To stand still you need a wall of the field behind your direction of travel, a creature directly ahead, or a pump landing on a creature beside you. Plan your positions with that in mind. The miner travels at 4.5 cells per second, which is fast, so a careless swipe can carry you several cells into trouble.

The creatures and their burrows

Creatures can only walk through open cells: tunnels, the sky and whatever you have dug. They never dig. On every wave the dirt is restored and the same burrows reappear, which means you can learn the map:

• Wave 1 has three burrows, at rows 4, 7 and 10 (counting the sky as row 0), each four cells long.
• Wave 2 adds a short two-cell burrow at row 3 on the right side.
• Wave 3 and later add a fourth long burrow at row 11. From here on there are always five creatures.

While a burrow is sealed, its creature paces back and forth inside it and cannot reach you. Once you cut into it, the creature heads for you. At every junction it chooses the direction that brings it closest to you in straight-line grid steps, with a one-in-four chance of taking the second-best option instead, and it does not turn back unless it reaches a dead end. This makes creatures predictable: they come at you along the shortest available tunnel, most of the time.

Creature speed starts at 2.8 cells per second and rises by 6 percent of that base on every wave: about 3.5 at wave 5, 4.3 at wave 10 and 4.65 at wave 12. Your own speed never changes, so from wave 12 onward the creatures are quicker than you and running away stops working.

Pumping, step by step

To attack, tap a creature directly next to the miner: left, right, above or below, never diagonal. He does not have to be standing still. His position counts as the cell he is nearest to, so you can pump a creature beside you even while running past it, and a pump that lands stops him at the centre of that cell. Each tap adds one level of inflation, and the fourth level makes it pop.

Inflation is a much stronger defence than it looks. The moment a creature has even one level of air, it freezes in place and cannot hurt you. Each level drains away after 0.55 seconds, and every new pump restarts that 0.55-second countdown. So as long as your taps are less than about half a second apart, the creature never shrinks, and four calm taps are enough. You do not need to hammer the screen.

Taps are matched to where the creature is drawn, not to a hidden grid cell: tap its body and the pump counts, even when it is halfway between two cells or frozen mid-step by an earlier pump, as long as it is beside you.

The safest way to get kills

Because the miner stops when a creature is in the next cell, the cleanest kill is a head-on meeting. Let a creature walk towards you along a straight tunnel. When it reaches the adjacent cell, you stop automatically, and from that moment it needs to cover only a little under half a cell more to touch you. At wave 1 that is roughly a seventh of a second, so have your thumb ready and start pumping as soon as it arrives.

Standing at the edge of the field is the other way to hold still. Dig a straight shaft down through a burrow and keep going to the bottom row; you will stop at the edge, and any creature coming down your shaft arrives in a straight line. Approaching a burrow from directly above or below also works well, because the creature inside will move towards the cell under you, giving you a predictable meeting point.

• Open one burrow at a time. Two creatures arriving from different sides cannot both be pumped quickly.
• Leave thick dirt between yourself and sealed burrows until you are ready for them.
• After a pop, take a breath. The next creature is still trapped unless your tunnels already reach it.

How the points add up

There are three sources of score. Every dirt cell you dig open is worth 5 points. Popping a creature pays 100 plus 20 for each row of depth where it bursts, so a pop on row 4 is 180, row 10 is 300 and the bottom row is 340. Clearing every creature on a wave adds a 1,000-point bonus.

The wave bonus dominates. A full wave of five creatures is worth roughly 1,200 in pops and 1,000 for the clear, while even digging out every cell on the map only adds a few hundred. Depth matters too: a creature that pops on row 11 is worth twice one that pops on row 3. If a creature is already deep, go down to meet it instead of drawing it up.

Lives and recovering from a hit

You have three lives. Touching a creature that has no air in it costs one. After a short death animation the miner returns to his starting cell and every surviving creature returns to its own burrow with its air emptied, but your tunnels remain open. That reset can actually help: the creatures go back to known positions, and you already know the routes they will take to reach you. Use the restart to pick your next target deliberately rather than diving straight back in.

A plan for long runs

1. On waves 1 to 3, practise the head-on pump until it is automatic, and collect every wave bonus.
2. Learn the five burrow positions. The layout never changes, so a fixed opening route saves time and risk.
3. From about wave 8 the creatures are almost as fast as you. Stop relying on outrunning them and only fight in straight tunnels where you know they will meet you.
4. Past wave 11, every encounter must be a planned one. They can catch you from behind now.

Your best score is saved on your device and can be sent to the Hall of Fame from the game-over card.