the guide
Systems
skating is the universal traversal mechanic, so it had better be good on its own. this is how it works — the riding model, the trick table, the combo maths, what a bail costs, and the three currencies that pay for three different things.
the first pillar
the riding model
if the movement is boring, nothing else matters — and the movement is the reason the world is shaped the way it is. the fox does not walk on the ground, it is aligned to it: the body rotates so its up matches the surface normal, the ground rays fire along that axis, and grounded velocity lives in the surface plane.
that one decision is what makes a quarter-pipe rideable up and over instead of a wall you slide down. it is also what makes the whole hub a trick park: every banked drive, villa roof, pool lip and ramp is a surface, and a surface is something you can ride.
vert is a real category
a face whose normal tips past a threshold counts as vert. you can ride it, and below a minimum speed you detach from it and fall away rather than sticking to it like glue. sticking is the thing that makes physics look fake.
stick force, not magnetism
a small velocity is pressed into the surface so a transition holds through its curve. it is a push, not an attachment — arrive too slowly and the transition lets you go.
coyote time, and only at speed
0.12 s of grounded grace across the seam between two ramp slabs, and it only applies above 6 units of speed. slow, deliberate movement does not get free airtime.
the step assist stops at 0.22 m
high enough to ride over every decorative lip in the hub — the thickest common one is 0.14. low enough to stay under the 0.28 m curbs the level design uses on purpose, and 7.7% of what an ollie clears, so it never takes anything away from jumping. it restores a climb the collider already wanted; it does not invent one.
the moveset
a skateboard on the ground, a platformer in the air. the two are the same controller and the transitions between them are the game.
| input | what it does |
|---|---|
| W A S D | push, steer, brake. slopes accelerate and decelerate you on their own, projected into the surface plane. |
| Space | ollie. a plain one clears 2.87 m. held again inside the window it chains — first hop, second hop, third hop, each one higher. |
| Ctrl | crouch on the ground, dive in the air. |
| Ctrl + Space | the long jump: crouched, at speed, and most of the force goes forward instead of up. |
| land a dive | roll out of it and keep the speed. the roll is its own state, 0.45 s long, and it scores. |
| hold Shift | manual. above 4 units of speed it holds a combo open across flat ground at 120 points a second. |
| ride a rail | grind. it needs 9 units of speed to start and pays 250 a second, which is the highest sustained rate in the game. |
| left mouse | spend the held power-up. you carry one, and only one. |
| Tab · P | cycle foxes, or open the crew menu. how the seven differ → |
the pot
tricks and grinds
six flip tricks on six keys, spin scoring on top of them, five grind variants that pick themselves, and a manual that keeps the whole thing open. each entry in a combo is listed live on the HUD as it happens.
| trick | key | base | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kickflip | J | 150 | the one everything else is measured against. |
| Melon Grab | L | 175 | a grab, so it reads differently in the air and in a photo. |
| Pop Shove-It | K | 200 | |
| Impossible | U | 300 | |
| Superman | I | 350 | |
| Nosebone Flip | O | 450 | the expensive one. it needs the airtime and it knows it. |
| spins | turn in the air | 100 / half | banked on landing, at 100 a half turn. a 360 and a 540 are the same move for variety purposes — spinning harder is worth more points but it is not worth a new multiplier step. |
| grinds | a rail | 250 / sec | the variant names itself from how you came in: 50-50, boardslide, 5-0, nosegrind, crooked. |
| manual | hold Shift | 120 / sec | the link. it exists so flat ground between two features is not a dead combo. |
| airtime | be off the ground | 120 / sec | hang time scores on its own past 0.45 s, capped at 6 s, and registers as one entry. short hops are not an entry. |
| the board's own trick | H | 500-650 | two of the eight boards carry an exclusive: the Marble Board's Orbit Flip, and the Founders Deck's First Descent. |
all of it is multiplied by the fox (Paolo x1.25), then by the equipped board, before it reaches the pot.
the rule that changed
the combo pays for variety
the first version counted moves. more moves, bigger multiplier — which means the optimal line is one trick, spammed, forever. that is not a combo system, it is a typing test.
so the multiplier is a curve over distinct tricks instead of a count. every move adds its weight to the pot, and each new distinct trick past the first bends the curve upward. a trick you have already used this combo is worth 40% the second time and 20% from the third on.
multiplier = weight + 0.25 x distinct x (distinct − 1) ÷ 2
where weight is the sum of every move's discounted contribution and distinct is how many different tricks are in the line. the second term is what a line is actually worth: at three distinct tricks it adds 0.75, at six it adds 3.75, at ten it adds 11.25.
what a line is worth
the pot is a running total of every entry — tricks, spins, grind ticks, manual ticks, airtime — and it banks on landing, multiplied. an ordinary three-move line banks two to three thousand. a good one clears ten. the highest sustained rate in the game is a grind at 250 a second, which is why the hub has rails on everything and why the rails go somewhere.
and every banked combo anywhere feeds the same bank. not just in Trick Park — the hub, the race courses, the national park, the top of the mountain, the surf break. wherever the controller runs, the combo counts.
the cost
what a bail costs, and what counts as one
a wipeout is a real state, not a flinch. the fox tumbles on the deck, the board goes skittering off on its own, control is locked for about a second and a bit, and then they get up and carry on. bailing, not dying. there is no death anywhere on this island.
the sting is 250 points flat plus a fifth of whatever the combo was about to be worth, clamped between 100 and 2,500 — so bailing a nothing line is cheap and bailing a monster hurts. the real cost is the pot itself: a dropped combo never banks, so it never becomes style either. Boulder Fox pays half of it; with the Iron Guard up, the hit does not land at all.
a run score is allowed to go negative. it is a score for a run, not a wallet, and a run that was all bails should read as one. nothing persisted ever goes below zero.
the fall rule got it wrong twice, for the same reason
the obvious rule — wipe out above some impact speed — cannot work here, and the numbers say so. a full-send quarter-pipe air in Trick Park with an ollie off the lip lands at 33.7 m/s. falling off a wrap of the mountain's drop line onto the wrap below lands at 33.8. one is the best line in the park and the other is the mistake the feature exists to punish, and they are a tenth of a metre per second apart.
first it was net descent, which is nonsense on the one piece of geometry built specifically to be descended. on the drop line the ground falls away for four hundred metres, so an ollie held for two seconds descends fifteen metres with nothing going wrong at all — the mountain went down and the fox went with it. Spring Fox with a Super Jump, one plain ollie, both gates open: a wipeout for landing a trick, on the run whose own sign reads "one way down. it is the fun one", performed by the fox whose whole identity is the mega ollie, using the power-up named after him.
then it was descent measured against the launch surface, which fixed that case and quietly did nothing where it was needed. the hole is arithmetic: when the launch surface is flat, the reference is world up and the rule collapses back into net descent. and both mountain routes are deliberately flat exactly where a player launches — every leg's first and last metres are levelled and every reversal gets a levelled deck. swept across the real moveset it fired on 129 landings that came down on the lane the fox left.
the launch is the wrong end of the jump. what separates a mistake from a trick is not where the fox left, it is where it arrives. a trick ends on ground the fox could ride out of — a ribbon, a bank, a transition, shaped ground that goes somewhere — however far it flew to get there. a mistake ends on ground that goes nowhere: a level floor far below, or a face too steep to be a floor at all.
so the rule asks the landing. two gates, and both have to open:
ride drop over the airborne stretch ≥ 14 m
and speed into the landing surface ≥ 20 m/s
ride drop is bounded from both ends and the fox is given whichever is kinder — the surface it left, extended down its own fall line, or the surface it landed on read as shaped ground. level ground is not a ribbon and earns nothing. past the tilt limit it is not a ribbon either: it is a wall.
the whole rule was re-derived against a sweep of both mountain routes, rebuilt from the generator's own slabs, ridden with the controller's real integration at the real timestep, for four foxes x two power-ups x four jump types x five headings, in both directions, off every lane vertex.
three jobs
three currencies that never cross
coins, gems and style points. three things you earn in three different ways, spent on three things that do not overlap — because a single currency turns every activity into the same activity.
coins
earned: everywhere. minigames, board games, selling a bucket of fish, the venues.
spent on: furniture for the den, rods, tackle and bait, and ranger-station items in the park.
gems
earned: found. they sit around the island and in the venues, and the staff will tell you they regrow overnight in the same spots, like fruit.
spent on: boards and hats. eight boards, six hats, nothing else.
style points
earned: every combo you bank, anywhere in the world. the only currency you earn by skating well rather than by picking things up.
spent on: the house. three tiers of it and nothing else.
the house, and what it costs
the Fox Den starts as one room and becomes a two-storey burrow with a ramp between the floors. the costs are derived from the combo maths rather than picked. the first pass had them at 5,000 / 20,000 / 60,000, and at 5,000 the raised ceiling lands inside the first two minutes of skating — the sink is over before it starts. these three read as: a few solid sessions, a committed week, a long-term goal.
| tier | costs | what it adds |
|---|---|---|
| the burrow | free | one room, one fireplace, one bed, and a rail — because it is a fox house. it is enough. mostly. |
| raised ceiling | 12,000 | the hill lifts. proper headroom, clerestory light, a loft ledge with a ladder and rails to grind off it, and the west bay opens — seventy square metres to fill. a few solid sessions. |
| the guest wing | 50,000 | a passage north out of the hall, two guest rooms with a bed and a porthole each, and more floor to build on. a committed week. |
| the upper burrow | 150,000 | a second level up through the hill, a round window over the resort, and a ramp down to the door. ride out of bed. a long-term goal. |
the style exchange, and its three refusals
an unattended counter on the plaza's west deck turns style into coins at a flat 100 style for 10 coins. the rate is honest about what it is doing: a first house tier's worth of style converts to 1,200 coins, which is most of everything coins can buy. so the counter is never free money — it is a room, traded for a shopping spree.
- one way. coins never come back the other way. coins fall out of half the venues; if they could be laundered into style, the house tiers would stop being a skating reward and start being a grind.
- flat. the big lots buy at exactly the rate the small one does. a bulk discount rewards hoarding style you were never going to spend on rooms; a bulk penalty taxes convenience. neither is a decision worth making anyone think about.
- lots of a hundred. no dribbling out seven points at a time. the minimum trade is one honest combo.
eight boards
a board is not a skin. every one carries real numbers that layer on top of the fox after a switch, in that order, so a loadout never gets stranded on the fox you left.
wide table — scroll it sideways for what each one changes
| board | gems | what it changes | the shop's line on it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classic Teal | free | nothing. it is the baseline. | the one that started it. allegedly. |
| Banana Cruiser | 25 | +1.5 top speed | fast. slippery reputation undeserved. |
| Springloaf | 30 | x1.2 ollie | bakes extra air into every ollie. |
| Railbird | 35 | x1.4 grind score | lives on rails. so will you. |
| Prism Deck | 40 | x1.15 trick points | refracts style into points. |
| Nightrider | 45 | +0.8 speed, x1.08 tricks | tuned for neon hours. |
| Marble Board | 60 | +0.5 speed, and the Orbit Flip on H at 500 | cut from the mountain. it remembers. |
| Founders Deck | 100 | +1 speed, x1.1 on ollie, grind and tricks, and the First Descent on H at 650 | a replica. probably a replica. |
and six hats, from a party cone at ten gems to a tiny cloud at fifty that floats, rains occasionally, and is worth it.
not a blue box
every body of water is real
six kinds of water — ocean, lagoon, pool, river, cave pool and a cloud pool in the sky — and all of them are a wave mesh over a real bed with a collider, on a depth-reading shader. depth is geometry, not a colour someone chose.
so you fall in, and then you swim: buoyancy, a paddle, a dive with a 16-second breath meter, and a climb out at any bank within 1.15 m of the surface. running out of breath is an automatic surface, not a failure state.
the surf break
the south beach has a real one — a swell that shoals as the bottom comes up and breaks toward the shore. catch the front face of an unbroken wave moving with it and the water picks you up. from there it is gravity down the face, a rail term that stops the board sliding sideways, and your heading.
the board is the skateboard. this is a resort of skating foxes and nobody here owns a second one.
Drop In 150, Cutback 300, Snap 400, Floater 350, Kick Out 200 — scored on the same variety curve as a skate line, banking into the same style bank. a kick out hands you back to the skate controller airborne, so the spin off the lip scores as skating.
the tide is a real tide
the ocean runs a mixed semidiurnal tide: a 12 h 25 m principal and a daily component on top, springs at full and new moon, about ±0.18 m at springs and ±0.10 at neaps. over an island day it walks the waterline ten metres up and down the beach.
a board at the end of the pier reads it out. the fish care about it. so does whether you can get to some things.
the record
141 achievements, 15 categories
a toast when one lands and a full-screen viewer on V. no exclamation point appears in any achievement name or description, which was checked by grep rather than by vibes.
| category | count | the sort of thing in it |
|---|---|---|
| the national park | 23 | the dex at fifty, a hundred and a hundred and fifty; badges, caves, ranger stations, a hidden ability, the pens. |
| the resort | 19 | the gondola, the ridge trail, the drop line, the overlook, a night, a bonfire, talking to all thirty-four. |
| summit trials | 14 | ten, fifty and all hundred levels; twenty-five golds, every gold, ten pearls, a level with no checkpoint. |
| skating | 12 | a hundred thousand in one combo, ten distinct tricks in one line, four seconds of hang time, fifteen unbroken seconds of grind. |
| the story | 8 | one per chapter that has a name worth saying out loud. |
| curiosity | 8 | the seven doors in a day, a full moon, the ocean buoys, falling off something ten times. |
| grand prix | 7 | a podium, a win, every course won, and leading at every checkpoint of a race. |
| creature skies | 7 | all six residents, every island landed on, a glide that ends somewhere it did not start. |
| the party boards | 7 | all seven boards, twenty minigames, all forty, and winning one while broke. |
| fishing | 7 | all fifty-five, a legendary, and three particular fish by name. |
| trick park | 6 | twenty, sixty and a hundred and fifty thousand in one run, and the top of the volcano. |
| the rumble ring | 6 | the whole bill, every stage, and a win without losing a stock. |
| the fox den | 6 | the whole furniture catalogue, all three tiers, and riding the ramp between the floors. |
| the shops | 6 | every board, every hat, a rod, and one trade at the style exchange. |
| the classic | 5 | all thirty-two levels, fifty coins in one, and clearing one without touching a checkpoint. |
the thing underneath
the island's clock, and why it persists
a full island day is twenty real minutes. it was twelve, and twelve was wrong: a whole afternoon-and-evening cycle went by inside one trick line, and the resort never got to feel like anywhere you spent time.
raising it made everything keyed to a day 67% longer in real time — crop growth, present gates, find respawns, the rest drain, the scheduled events — and the crop table had been tuned against twelve, so a five-day pumpkin went from an hour to an hour and forty. that is the sort of thing a single constant does, and it is why the number is written down with its consequences next to it.
the day, the hour, the weather and the weather's remaining dwell all persist. so does the moon's phase. that is deliberate: the moon is the actual light source at night, the tide is driven by the real sun and moon positions, and three creatures only appear inside a declared window of hour, weather and moon phase. if the clock reset on load, all of that would be a slot machine you could pull by quitting.
the whole save is one JSON file: unlocks, the selected fox, high scores, creatures, coins, gems, style, wins, badges, friendships, house tier, furniture. the activity board by the plaza is that file, read out loud.
the list
tell me when it ships
one email, when there is something to play. no newsletter, no schedule, nothing else, ever.