Playing a Run

Language: English · Português (Brasil)

Playing a Run

A run is one flight: from the first flap to the crash, through gates, coins, drafts and a boss. Everything you earn in it — coins, XP, unlocks, records — is written to your profile the moment it ends. This page walks through a run from READY to the summary and explains what each number along the way is worth.

What START RUN plays

The home hub's plaque shows the world and difficulty the gold START RUN will play; the bird, palette, active ability, passive abilities, tier and mode (Standard, Seeded, Daily) are chosen on the Birds screen, and challenges are started from the Goals screen. See Home Hub, Birds and Abilities, Worlds and Bosses and Game Modes and Difficulty. A fresh profile starts with Forgewing, Double Flap, Green Fields and the Normal tier.

The shape of a run

READY → FLYING ↔ {BREATHER → CHOOSING_MODIFIER → RESUME_HOLD} ↔ {BOSS_WARNING → BOSS} → DYING → FINISHED

Phase	What happens
READY	The bird floats at its start position; nothing scrolls or spawns. Your first flap starts the run and counts on that same tick.
FLYING	The world scrolls, gates and hazards spawn, coins drift by. Pass gates, collect coins, keep a clean-gate streak.
Breather → draft → resume hold	At gates 10, 25, 45, 70, 100 and 140 (once drafts are unlocked) the next obstacle is pushed out, the air ahead empties and the run freezes with three cards on screen. Take one or skip; the bird stays frozen through a 3-2-1 countdown, and the resume grants 30 invulnerability ticks so the first tick back never kills.
Boss warning → boss	Each world has a boss at a fixed gate. A banner counts down ("Boss in Ns") while spawning stops, then the boss streams its patterns until its survive timer runs out. Dying during the fight clears nothing; a clear already granted is kept even if you crash later. No draft opens during a boss — one that falls inside it waits until after the clear.
Dying → finished	The crash, then the game-over strip.

Every run is fully deterministic for its seed: obstacles, coins, offers and patterns all draw from named random streams, so a seeded replay puts the same pipes in the same places.

Gates, points, coins and streaks

• Gates. Every pipe gate has a score line; crossing it counts one gate and awards points equal to your score multiplier — one point at base, more with a score modifier, a bird bonus or a tier. The HUD counts gates; the summary shows both.
• Coins. Coin pickups spawn along the way and are collected on touch; a magnet radius (the Coin Magnet passive, the Magnet Burst modifier) pulls them in from further away. Coins you pick up are added to the run's payout on top of the reward formula below.
• Clean-gate streak. A gate is clean when its column was never grazed, resolved once the column has left the bird's hitbox — so a graze after the score line still costs the gate it happened on. Every five consecutive clean gates is one streak step and pays 5 coins; the HUD shows "Streak N", the summary counts the steps, and Best streak is a lifetime statistic. The Streak Bounty modifier adds +10 coins per step.

The difficulty ramps

Two curves apply per gate passed. Green Fields uses the classic curve: only the moving-gate ramp, a 5 % chance of a moving gate at the start, +5 % per gate, capped at 100 %. Every other world uses standard: the same moving ramp plus scroll speed ×(1 + 0.004 per gate) up to ×1.5 and gap size ×(1 − 0.002 per gate) down to ×0.8. The tier sits on top:

Tier	Scroll	Gap	Extra rules	Reward multiplier
Normal	—	—	—	×1.0
Hard	×1.10	×0.92	—	×1.5
Nightmare	×1.20	×0.85	every obstacle moves, the ceiling kills	×2.5

Hazards, worlds and how each boss behaves are on Worlds and Bosses.

Pausing

Esc pauses. The pause panel has Resume and Menu; Esc, a click or a tap outside the buttons resumes. Nothing moves while paused, and the run resumes exactly where it stopped.

The game-over strip

The strip appears over the frozen playfield when the bird dies. It pays the coins and XP of the run immediately, announces a new best ("That's your best run yet: N points"), a level reached or a challenge completed, and offers three buttons:

Button	Key	Does
Retry	Space / left click / a tap outside the buttons	starts a new run at once with a fresh seed
Summary	Enter	opens the run summary
Menu	Esc	returns to the home hub

Because rewards are banked the moment the run ends, a retry never loses them. A daily's retry keeps its seed and only counts the attempt.

The run summary

The run summary: every term of the reward on its own row, the level bar the XP moved, and the build.

The summary reads the profile the run has already been written into; it changes nothing. Its sections:

Section	Shows
Setup	the seed with its mode, the world, tier and bird
This run	gates, points, streak steps, the boss
Coins	every term of the reward formula on its own row, and the total
Experience	the XP earned, the level bar, "N / M XP" or "Max level"
Build	every modifier taken with its stacks (×N) and any synergy that fired — or "No drafts: Run Modifiers is still locked in the shop"
Achievements	achievements unlocked by this run, and a first challenge completion

Retry and Menu sit at the bottom, with the same keys as the strip.

Coins: the reward formula

participation 20 · first-run bonus 25 · 2 per gate · 1 per point
· 5 coins per 5-gate clean streak
+ 150 per world boss cleared + challenge first-clear reward + 100 challenge bonus
× coin multiplier × tier reward multiplier × daily ×1.25   (+ the coins you picked up)

Run 1 pays about 50 coins even at 0 gates: 20 for participating, the 25 first-run bonus and whatever you picked up. The coin multiplier comes from the bird (Jackdaw +30 %, Ironbeak −20 %), modifiers such as Heavy Wallet or Gold Rush, the Coin Engine synergy and +5 % per prestige. A world boss also pays its own reward (200 to 800 coins) and opens the next world.

XP, levels and milestones

XP is never spent. A run earns 15 XP for participating plus 10 per gate, and 200 per boss cleared. The level curve starts at 100 XP for level 2 and each level-up costs 10 % more than the one before — level 3 at 210, level 4 at 331 — up to the maximum, level 50. Six levels pay a coin reward on the spot:

Level	Milestone reward
2	50 coins
5	150 coins
10	500 coins
15	800 coins
20	1200 coins
25	2000 coins

Levels also open content: Seeded Runs and the daily at level 5, the three legendary modifier cards at level 8, the Nightmare tier at level 20 and Prestige at level 25 — see Shop and Upgrades and Challenges and Goals.

Tip: the strip has already paid you before you read it. Retry with Space as often as you like; nothing is at stake but the next attempt.