Moon Landing Guide: Fuel-Saving Burns and Soft Touchdowns

Updated October 2026

Moon Landing gives you three buttons, one tank of fuel and a lander that is already drifting sideways when it appears. Every round ends in one of two ways: a clean touchdown that adds points and lets you continue, or a crash that ends the run. This guide spells out the exact limits the game checks at the moment of contact, how much fuel a descent really needs, how each part of the score is worked out, and a step-by-step approach that turns landings from lucky into routine.

The physics you are working with

The moon pulls the lander down at 60 pixels per second squared. The main engine pushes along the lander's nose at 130 pixels per second squared, so when the lander is perfectly upright the engine beats gravity by 70, and you slow down roughly as fast as you would speed up in free fall. There is no throttle: the engine is either off or at full power while you hold ▲.

Rotation is the other control. Holding ◀ or ▶ turns the lander at 1.7 radians per second, which is close to a quarter turn per second. Turning costs no fuel at all, only firing the engine does. The tank holds 100 units and the engine burns 14 units per second, so a full tank buys a little over seven seconds of thrust for the entire round (from round 8 the tank starts smaller; see below). The fuel gauge at the top of the screen changes from green to yellow below 40 percent and to red below 15 percent.

Two details are easy to miss. First, the screen wraps horizontally: drift off the left edge and you reappear on the right, so there are no side walls to hit. Second, the lander never starts still. It appears in the middle of the screen, a tenth of the way down from the top, already moving sideways at between 18 and 32 pixels per second in a random direction and falling slowly.

What counts as a landing

The moment any part of the lander reaches the ground, the game makes one decision. A landing succeeds only if all five of these are true at that instant:

• Both feet are over the same pad. The green lines on the terrain are the pads; one foot on the pad and one on rough ground is a crash.
• A foot touches first. If the nose or the hip of the lander meets the ground before either foot, it is a crash, even at low speed.
• Vertical speed is 28 or less. The Vy readout turns green when you are inside this limit and red when you are not.
• Horizontal speed is 18 or less. The Vx readout turns orange when you are outside it.
• The lander is within 0.2 radians of upright, about 11 degrees either way.

Notice what this means for the opening. Because the lander always starts with at least 18 of sideways speed, and usually more, you have to deal with horizontal drift in nearly every round before you land. A descent that only manages vertical speed will often meet the pad at a perfect Vy and still crash on Vx.

The ALT number measures the height of the lander's centre above the ground directly below it, not the height of its feet. The feet sit 16 pixels below the centre when upright, so on a flat pad contact happens when ALT reads about 16, not zero. Plan your final slowdown with that offset in mind.

How much fuel a descent really needs

On a 390-pixel-wide phone the playfield is roughly 700 pixels tall (our measurement), and the lander's feet start roughly 430 pixels above the average ground level, although the terrain rises and falls around that figure. Falling all that way with the engine off would bring you in at well over 200 pixels per second. You need to burn off nearly all of that speed, and the cheapest way to do it is to let the lander fall and then brake hard.

In our simulation of a straight drop from the starting height, a single continuous full-power burn started when the feet were about 200 pixels above the pad brought the lander down at under 10 pixels per second and used only about 30 of the 100 fuel units. Starting the same burn much earlier, or pulsing the engine all the way down to keep the lander slow, works too but spends more fuel, because every second you spend hovering is a second the engine is only cancelling gravity rather than reducing speed.

The catch is that a late, single burn leaves no room for error. A practical compromise for most players:

1. Fall freely for the first third of the drop while you fix the sideways drift (below).
2. Start braking earlier than the ideal point, around the middle of the screen, in short bursts that keep Vy somewhere between 20 and 40.
3. From about 60 pixels of altitude, use short taps to bring Vy into the green and hold it there until the feet touch.

This spends more than the ideal single burn but far less than braking all the way down, and it leaves you room to correct a misjudged descent.

Cancelling sideways drift

To change horizontal speed you have to tip the lander, fire, and straighten up again. At a tilt of about 17 degrees (0.3 radians), the engine supplies around 38 pixels per second squared sideways while still pushing upward more strongly than gravity pulls down, so the lander's fall keeps slowing during the correction. That tilt removes 28 pixels per second of drift in roughly three quarters of a second, costing around 10 fuel units, by our arithmetic from the game's constants.

• Tilt against the drift. If the Vx number is negative you are moving left, so tilt right (▶) and fire; if it is positive, tilt left (◀).
• Do it high. Correcting drift near the top of the screen costs the same fuel as doing it near the bottom, but up high you have time to straighten out afterwards and you are not mixing two problems at once.
• Aim for the pad with your drift, not against it. Because the screen wraps, a lander drifting away from a pad can sometimes reach it sooner by continuing across the edge. You only need Vx under 18 at touchdown, so you can keep a small, useful drift until the last moment and use it to steer over the pad.
• Always finish upright. Rotating back takes time: from 0.3 radians it takes under a fifth of a second, from a steep tilt much longer. Leave yourself that time before the feet reach the pad.

How each landing is scored

A successful landing adds the sum of seven parts:

• a base of 100 points;
• 4 points for every unit of vertical speed below the 28 limit;
• 3 points for every unit of horizontal speed below the 18 limit;
• up to 40 points for being close to upright (200 points per radian inside the 0.2 limit);
• 1.5 points for each unit of fuel left in the tank;
• a pad bonus of twice the difference between 180 and the pad's width;
• 40 points multiplied by the round number.

For example, a first-round touchdown at Vy 10 and Vx 5, tilted only 0.05 radians, with 60 fuel left on a 152-pixel pad, works out to 100 + 72 + 39 + 30 + 90 + 56 + 40, which is 427 points. Fuel is the biggest single lever you control: every second of thrust you save is worth 21 points.

All the pads in a round share the same width, so there is no "narrow pad" to choose between within a round. The width falls by 18 pixels per round, from 152 in round 1 down to 62 in round 6 and a floor of 50 from round 7 onwards. The number on each pad shows its width. The game also plans fewer pads as rounds go on, but on a narrow phone screen there is usually room for only one pad anyway. In our simulation of the pad placement on a 358-pixel-wide playfield, rounds 1 and 2 and every round from 5 onwards always had a single pad, and rounds 3 and 4 had two pads only some of the time.

Continuing, stopping and crashing

After each landing you choose between the next round and ending the run. A crash also ends the run, but your accumulated score is kept either way, and the game-over card offers to save it. Since a crash costs you nothing you already banked, ending a run voluntarily never earns more than attempting the next round; the only thing you give up by continuing is your time.

Each new round starts with new terrain and a refilled tank, so you never carry a shortage forward, but from round 8 the tank starts 4 units emptier every round: 96, 92, 88 and so on, down to 0 in round 32. The round bonus keeps growing, so later rounds are worth more, but they also leave less room for wasted thrust. On a 390-pixel-wide phone, even a perfect pilot runs out of braking fuel around round 28, and in round 32 no landing is possible on any screen, so every run ends.

A practice routine

1. Play several rounds aiming only to land, ignoring fuel. Keep the lander upright and use long, early burns.
2. Add the drift fix: in the first second of each round, tilt against Vx, fire briefly and straighten up. Check that Vx is near zero before you think about descending.
3. Start delaying your main braking. Each attempt, begin a little lower, until you are landing with more than half the tank remaining.
4. Finally, polish the last 50 pixels: Vy close to zero, Vx near zero and a perfectly level lander are worth up to about 200 points of bonuses on top of the fuel.

If you need to step away, finish the round first. When the page loses focus, any held buttons are released, but the lander keeps its momentum the moment you return, which is rarely what you want halfway down.