Reference

Rules

Every rule the game actually runs, with the numbers it runs them on. This is the reference; the guide is the readable version of the same thing.

The object

You hold a wooden frame with a ball loose inside it. Drag the frame; the ball is never dragged. Keep the ball in, catch what the forest drops through it, and last as long as you can. The frame is falling apart the whole time, so “keep the ball in” gets harder without anything being added.

Two numbers are kept: how long you lasted, and how many bounces you scored. Both are ranked separately, locally and globally.

The frame and the ball

The frame is 0.66 of the screen’s width, and its walls are 0.06 of that again. The ball is 24 pixels in radius — the same size as the chain, the splitter, the magnet and the boxit, which is deliberate: anything that crosses the field is exactly as big a thing to steer around as the ball is to steer.

The ball holds a constant speed. It has no gravity, no damping and perfectly elastic bounces, because the design is a ball that keeps going rather than one that settles. Dragging the frame cannot fling it: a wall that sweeps into the ball pushes it only as far as it takes to stop overlapping, and never transfers the drag’s speed.

A bounce off wood scores nothing. It keeps the ball in play so there is time to catch things, and that is all it is for — points come from collidables and from nothing else. Every 25 points the game says so out loud.

The three kinds of collidable

What an item looks like is decoration. What group it is in decides how it moves, how long it lives and what it pays. Every scene has its own art for all three — see the scenes.

Group	Pays	How it behaves
Falling	1	Drops from above the screen, tumbling. Reaching the floor uncaught bursts it — a miss you are shown. One arrives every 1.8–3.4 seconds.
Windblown	2	Crosses sideways on a slow, swaying wind. Arrives as a gust of 4–10, all of one kind, all at one speed, every 5–9.5 seconds. Leaves quietly past the far edge — a leaf blowing away is not a miss.
Growing	1–5	Sprouts at the bottom and swells in place without moving, over 14 seconds. Worth the minimum as a sprout and the maximum full-grown, so leaving one to ripen is a real decision against the risk of chasing it later. A batch every 6–10 seconds, at most 6 alive.

The four things that cross

These are not collidables. Each drifts in a straight line at a constant speed, turning slowly, and each is the ball’s own size. None of them is scored on contact; what each one does is change the run.

Golden orb

The only thing that repairs the frame. Taking one gives back 4% of the wood the decay has eaten. Worth no bounces at all — it buys time instead. One every 4–14 seconds, depending on how good the game thinks you are.

The chain

Locks the frame where it stands for 2 seconds, counting down on screen. Everything else keeps going — the ball, the clock, the decay — so being locked is being made to watch. Every 14–24 seconds early on, down to 6–11 by level 10.

The splitter

A cracked stone that opens into a second ball. Your ball bounces off it, the stone becomes a ball of its own, and from then on the run ends only when every ball is gone. Capped at 2 balls, so no stone appears while you already have your fill. Every 18–30 seconds, down to 9–15 by level 10.

The magnet

The rarest thing on the field and the only one that clears it. Everything on screen is dragged to the ball that took it and popped as it arrives, each one paying what it was worth. The near items land first and the far ones trail in behind. Every 45–75 seconds.

The boxit

The chain again, with a golden glow around it, and it does the chain’s opposite. Touch it and every hole in the frame — and every corner — is chained shut for 2 seconds. The frame still answers your finger and the wood goes on rotting underneath; what changes is that for those two seconds nothing can get out. A small countdown says how long is left. Every 45–75 seconds.

Two balls in play bounce off each other. Like a bounce off wood, that knock pays nothing: only what gets caught moves the number.

The charm, and the streak

One item in every wind gust glows gold and leaves a short golden wake behind it. It is an ordinary item in every other respect — it blows the same way and is worth the same on its own. Catch it and every other item of its own kind pops in turn, one every 0.09 seconds, each paying what it was worth. A ten-strong gust taken at the charm is ten items at once.

The charm rides the gust rather than a clock because a gust is the only thing in the playfield that arrives as a crowd. Every other group delivers ones and twos, so a charm anywhere else would be a promise the field could not keep.

Hitting the same kind twice in a row doubles what it pays, and again for every one after that. The factor is written over the hit in gold, and a doubling hit sounds the golden orb’s chime rather than the ordinary pop. Anything of a different kind starts again at one.

The streak doubles, and stops doubling at 32.

Four of a kind in a row pay 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 = 15 times one of them, and a chain up to six long pays exactly what it always did. Past that the multiplier holds at 32: a sixteen-strong chain pays 383 rather than 65,535. A wind gust is all of one kind by design, so a long chain is still the single biggest thing you can do to a score — a highlight to chase rather than a number that makes the rest of the game pointless.

Only your own hits build it. The run of pops a charm sets off is one hit, and the magnet dragging a mixed field in is not a streak at all.

Decay, difficulty and rating

The frame’s openings widen for the whole run. Left alone, with no orb taken, the frame is gone in 180 seconds at the gentlest setting and 90 at the harshest. That is the hard promise of the game: it ends, and the only thing that pushes the end back is the golden orb.

Which of those two you get is your rating, and difficulty is locked when a run starts — a target that moved mid-run would punish you for playing well. The harshest setting puts the best players at about 90 seconds, so par is roughly “survive until the frame runs out”. A Rookie and an Elite therefore last about the same time, which is the point: difficulty is what keeps the game the same shape at every level of skill.

Wood never grows back over the ball. A side that would have to materialise on top of it holds where it is until the ball moves clear — and with two balls in play, either of them counts.

Levels and XP

XP comes from survival time, not from what you caught, plus 10 for finishing a run at all so the bar always visibly moves. Each level costs 100 more than the one before it: level 2 costs 100, level 3 costs 300 in total, level 5 costs 1000.

Levels are time invested; rating is skill. They are kept apart on purpose — XP only ever climbs, rating can fall, and the two answer different questions. Levels unlock scenes; rating sets difficulty and the band you are ranked in.

The chain and the splitter arrive more often the higher your level, reaching their fastest at level 10. That is level rather than rating on purpose: serving a better player more chains would be punishing them for being good, whereas a higher level just means the forest has got busier around you.

How a run ends

A run ends when the last ball has fully cleared the frame — touching an opening is not enough, and with a splitter taken it takes both. What you scored is then measured against your own best in your band, your rating is updated, XP is awarded, and any trophies the run earned are counted.

Trophies are checked twice a second while you play, not only at the end, so one earned at ninety seconds arrives at ninety seconds. There are 118 of them — all of them are listed here.