Slopes Tips: When to Dive, When to Fly

Updated October 2026

Slopes gives you one button and sixty seconds. Your bird rolls forward over a landscape of hills, and pressing the screen makes it heavy. That is the whole control scheme, yet the gap between a casual run and a good one is enormous: in our simulation, a run with no presses at all covered about 700 distance units, while a well-timed run covered more than three times as much. This guide explains the physics the game uses, what the simulation tells us about the best timing, and how to practise it.

One button, two kinds of gravity

The bird always moves forward on its own. Gravity pulls it down at a fixed strength, and while your finger is on the screen that pull is tripled. Nothing else changes when you press: there is no thrust and no steering. Every bit of extra speed you gain comes from converting height into forward motion, and heavy gravity simply makes that conversion stronger.

That cuts both ways. On ground that falls away in front of you, heavy gravity pushes you along the slope and you accelerate quickly. On ground that rises in front of you, the same heavy gravity drags you backward along the slope and you lose speed quickly. The skill is putting the heavy phases on the falling ground and the light phases on the rising ground.

The bird sprite gives you feedback: while you are pressing it tucks into a compact dive pose, and when you let go it opens back up.

How landings really work

When the bird touches the ground, the game keeps only the part of its velocity that runs along the surface and discards the part that points into it. That is why the angle of arrival matters so much.

• Arrive parallel to the slope and almost nothing is discarded, so you keep nearly all of your speed.
• Arrive steeply onto flat ground or a rising face and a large share of your velocity points into the hill, so it vanishes on contact.

The ideal landing spot is therefore a downslope whose steepness matches your falling path. If you are dropping steeply, you want a steep downslope; if you are skimming low, a gentle one is fine. Arriving on the far side of a valley, on ground that is already climbing, is the worst case.

Two safety nets keep runs from stalling completely: forward speed never drops below a small minimum, so the bird cannot roll backward, and it can never exceed a fixed maximum, which matters for the score ceiling discussed below.

What our simulation found

We copied the game's physics step into a script and ran several simple pressing strategies over forty randomly generated landscapes, each for the full sixty seconds. The figures below are medians from that simulation, in the same distance units the game shows as your score.

• Never pressing: about 700.
• Pressing the whole time: about 1,030. Constant heavy gravity helps on the way down but brakes you just as hard on every climb.
• Pressing only while rolling on a downslope: about 1,890.
• Pressing whenever the ground directly under the bird slopes down, even while airborne: about 2,320, with the best landscapes reaching around 2,400. This was the strongest simple rule we tested.

The last result is the important one. Holding in the air above falling ground drops you onto that slope sooner and at a better angle, so you land on the part of the hill that is still useful instead of sailing over it and coming down on the next rise. With that rule the bird spent close to half the run airborne, so flying is not wasted time; it is how the fast runs work.

The spread between landscapes was noticeable too: the same rule ranged from about 1,900 to 2,400 depending on the hills that were generated. Some runs are simply friendlier than others.

Reading the hills

The terrain is built from three overlapping waves with random offsets, so each run has a new landscape. The main hills are roughly sixty distance units from one crest to the next, which is close to three screen widths, and on top of them sit a slow long swell and some short ripples. In practice that means you see big, readable hills with smaller bumps on their faces.

The bird sits about a third of the way across the screen from the left, so most of the view shows ground still ahead. Look at the next crest and the slope beyond it, not at the bird. Your decision is always about the ground you will be over a moment from now.

• Small ripples on a long descent do not need a release. Keep holding and let heavy gravity glue you to the face.
• A crest with a steep drop behind it is a launch ramp. Let go just before the top to fly, then press again once the ground beneath you starts falling away.
• A valley floor is where to lift your finger, so that you carry speed up the next face rather than fighting it.

Speed, the cap, and the best possible score

The bird starts at a forward speed of 12 units per second and can never go faster than 46. Since the run lasts exactly sixty seconds, no score can ever exceed 46 times 60, which is 2,760, even with a perfect landscape and perfect timing. Our best simulated runs got within about 13 percent of that ceiling and only spent a couple of seconds pinned at top speed, so there is still room above them for a human who reads individual hills better than a fixed rule does.

The practical lesson is that top speed is not where you will lose distance. You lose it on the climbs and on bad landings, so concentrate on those.

The timer

The countdown bar at the top starts the moment you tap Start and runs on real time. It turns red in the last ten seconds. Because the clock keeps going even if you switch apps or the screen locks, while the bird itself only moves when the game is on screen, leaving the game mid-run simply throws distance away. Play a run in one sitting.

A practice plan

1. Play one run pressing only on downslopes while the bird is on the ground. Focus on lifting your finger the instant the ground starts to rise.
2. Add launches: release just before a crest that has a steep drop behind it, and watch how far you fly.
3. Then add the air press: once airborne, press as soon as the ground below you is falling, and let go if you are over a valley or a rising face.
4. Compare scores across a handful of runs rather than one, because the landscape alone moves the result by a few hundred units.

Your best distance is stored on your device, and any score above zero can be saved to the Hall of Fame from the end-of-run card.