Space Rocks Tips: Steering With Momentum and Clearing Waves Safely

Updated October 2026

Space Rocks puts a small ship in a field of drifting boulders and gives you one control: hold a finger on the screen. The ship turns toward your finger, pushes toward it and fires as long as you hold. That single gesture makes the game easy to pick up and surprisingly hard to master, because steering, speed and shooting are all tied together. This guide explains the flight model, how rocks split and speed up, what each wave is worth, and the habits that keep a ship alive into the later waves.

One gesture does three jobs

Touch and hold anywhere in the play area. Three things happen together. The ship rotates toward your finger at up to 7 radians per second, which means a full about-turn takes a little under half a second. It accelerates in the direction it is pointing at 240 pixels per second squared whenever your finger is more than 10 pixels from the ship. And it fires, with the first shot leaving the moment you touch and further shots every quarter of a second while you hold. Tapping repeatedly does not fire faster: whatever the input, shots are never less than a quarter of a second apart.

The important consequence is that aiming and thrusting are the same act. In practice you cannot point the ship at a rock without also accelerating toward it. Every time you aim, you are also deciding where the ship will drift next, so plan your shots with your path in mind.

Let go and the ship coasts. Nothing slows it down: there is no friction and no brake, only a top speed of 320 pixels per second. To stop you have to turn around and push the other way. From full speed that is roughly half a second to turn and another 1.3 seconds of thrust before you come to rest, which is a long time when rocks are close. On a keyboard, the arrow keys or W, A, S and D set a target point a short way out from the ship in that direction while held.

The wrapping arena

Ship, rocks and bullets all wrap around. Leave the right edge and you reappear on the left; leave the bottom and you come in at the top. The edges are not safety. A rock just past the left edge is, for collision purposes, right next to a ship on the right edge, and you will not see it coming until it reappears.

Bullets wrap too, and they travel far. Each shot moves at 380 pixels per second plus the ship's own velocity and lasts 1.4 seconds, so a shot fired from a standing ship covers more than 500 pixels, enough to cross most phone screens and come back in from the opposite side. Shots fired while you are moving forward travel faster and farther; shots fired while you are drifting backward are slower and shorter.

Rocks, fragments and points

Rocks come in three sizes. A large rock is worth 20 points and breaks into two mediums. A medium is worth 50 and breaks into two smalls. A small rock is worth 100 and is destroyed. Clearing everything that comes from one large rock therefore takes seven hits and pays 520 points, most of it from the four smalls at the end.

Fragments inherit their parent's movement. Each piece keeps its parent's speed plus five percent, and the two pieces fly off at different angles to either side of the parent's heading. Two levels of splitting make a small rock about ten percent faster than the large rock it came from, and the pieces start exactly where the parent was. Shooting a large rock that is heading toward you at close range is how most runs end: two mediums appear at that spot, still heading your way.

Collision sizes are generous to the rocks. A large rock has a radius of 36 pixels and destroys the ship if their centres come within about 44 pixels. For a medium the danger distance is about 30 pixels, and for a small one about 20. Your bullets, on the other hand, must reach the rock's own radius, so small rocks are by far the hardest targets.

Waves and the difficulty curve

The first wave has three large rocks. Every new wave adds one more large rock and raises their base speed by 6 pixels per second, from 50 in the first wave, plus a random extra of up to 30. Nothing caps either increase, so later waves are both more crowded and faster. Since each large rock is worth 520 points when fully cleared, wave one is worth 1,560 points, wave five 3,640, and a player who has cleared the first five waves has 13,000 points.

The next wave appears as soon as the last fragment is destroyed. The new rocks enter on a screen edge, and the game keeps every one of them at least 140 pixels from the ship, measured through the wrap, so a rock never appears on the opposite edge right beside you. If no edge spot is far enough away, it places the rock at the point of the screen farthest from you instead.

Even so, 140 pixels is not much against a fast rock. Before you shoot the last small rock of a wave, move toward the middle of the screen, where the new arrivals start as far from you as the screen allows.

Flying habits that keep you alive

• Hold briefly, then coast. Short presses give you small, controllable nudges. A long hold builds up speed you will spend seconds removing.
• Aim behind you to slow down. Touching on the far side of the ship turns you around and brakes in one move, and your shots cover the space you just left.
• Break large rocks from a distance. With fragments starting at the parent's position, every split creates two new threats on that spot. Make it a spot you are not about to fly through.
• Clear smalls as they appear. Small rocks are the fastest and the hardest to hit. Leaving a growing swarm of them is more dangerous than leaving one large rock drifting slowly at the far side.
• Watch the far edge. When you approach an edge, look at the opposite side of the screen too, because that is where you are about to appear.

Getting started

Before your first touch the rocks drift harmlessly and nothing can hit you, so take a moment to see where they are. The run starts when you first touch the screen, and there is no time limit at any point, only the rocks. A practical opening is to stay near the centre and use short presses toward the nearest large rock, so the ship turns and fires while gaining very little speed. Let the rock split while it is still far away, then pick off the pieces as they cross your line of fire.

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