BalanceMaster Complete Guide — Triangle Controls, Lever Math, 32 Animals, Combos, Weather and Items

This is the complete BalanceMaster guide. It walks through everything in the game, in order: the rules of a round and the screen layout, exactly what your finger does, the lever principle, the thirty-two animals and their hidden weights, scoring and combos, levels and difficulty, mid-round events like jumps and surprise drops, weather and special modes, the four items, the bonus game every 5 levels, and unlocks, missions and continuing. Every number was checked against the actual game code, and every photo is a screenshot from the real game. If you’re brand new, you can jump straight to six things for first-time players at the bottom.

How a round opens

1. “LEVEL N” — the text slides in from both sides over 0.5 seconds and lingers. Expect about a 1.5-second wait here.
2. 3 → 2 → 1 — one second per number. Under each number, a line reading ○ players are challenging this level now pulses bigger and smaller. That player count isn’t a real headcount; it’s an estimate the game calculates from the level.
3. The plank, triangle and both animals appear only after the countdown. There’s nothing to do before that.
4. The timer at top center counts down as SS:CC (seconds:hundredths). For the last 3 seconds it turns red and pulses every second.
5. When 75% of the timer has passed, the balance gauge drops down from the top (see the screen layout chapter).
6. 0 seconds — if the plank is level you clear immediately; otherwise the final alignment window opens. A clear brings fireworks and the result screen.

The balance gauge — it drops in at 75% of the timer

Besides the elements above, a few things appear during play only when needed: the combo popup (combo chapter), the NICE SAVE! text (combo chapter), and the icon of your equipped item (items chapter). The bottom tabs return only when the round is over.

This game has no left/right buttons, no tilt buttons, and no phone-tilting controls. Your finger does exactly one thing — grab the triangle and drag it left or right.

• Only one finger counts (the first active touch). A second finger is ignored.
• The fulcrum can travel from −1 to +1 along the plank (left end to right end). If your finger goes further, it stops at the end.
• Even when the plank is tilted, the fulcrum moves along a line that tilts with the plank. Just follow the triangle where you see it.
• If you leave it alone, you lose. Starting 0.5 seconds into a round, the plank gets an irregular wobble that builds up over 2 seconds (see the lever chapter). Even with your finger parked on the perfect spot, the plank drifts slowly, so you have to keep making small corrections.
• The Android back button closes any open panel first; if none is open, it pauses the game and shows a quit confirmation.

BalanceMaster uses the same moment (force × distance) you learned in school. The left and right animals sit at −0.93 / +0.93 of the plank’s half-width, and the sum of each animal’s mass × distance to the fulcrum is what turns the plank one way or the other. So the answer is simple.

You can estimate the tilt speed as 10 × (sum of both masses) × (how far the fulcrum is off the balance point) degrees per second. A cat and a puppy (sum 0.9) are forgiving even with the fulcrum in the wrong place, but two big animals (sum 7–8) tilt 10° per second for the same mistake. The heavier the pair, the more the same mistake costs you — that’s the backbone of this game’s difficulty curve. The plank follows at 110° per second, which is fast enough that the computed tilt shows up almost exactly as calculated.

The invisible enemy — automatic wobble

0.5 seconds after a round starts, an irregular torque begins acting on the plank and builds up to its maximum (a drift of about ±3°/s) over 2 seconds. A code comment says this only applies “when you’re not touching,” but with the fulcrum controls the touch time is never updated, so it keeps running even while your finger is down. That’s why the plank slowly wanders even if you hold your finger on the theoretically perfect spot.

• The wobble is the same strength whether the animals are heavy or light. But countering the same ±3°/s requires moving the fulcrum by 0.3 ÷ (mass sum), so the lighter the pair, the bigger the push you need.
• There’s only one fix — don’t freeze your hand completely; keep nudging the fulcrum against the direction the plank is tipping. If the plank starts dropping to the right (clockwise), send the fulcrum a little further right (toward the heavy side).

In short, it’s two steps. ① As the round starts, jump to the balance point in one move (if you don’t know which side is heavier, watch which way the plank tips in the first 0.3 seconds — the side going down is the heavy one). ② After that, only make small corrections.

The animals that sit on the plank are thirty-two creatures, all named “Baby ○○”. They’re all drawn at almost the same size (the sprite scales are matched, so the hippo doesn’t look bigger than the cat). You start with only Baby Cat and Baby Puppy, and more unlock one by one as you level up. The first pair on Level 1 is almost always the cat and the puppy.

※ Unlocks are based on the highest level you’ve reached, and balance masses are the values in the game data. On-screen weights under 1 kg show as “N g”; anything heavier shows as “X.X kg”.

How fast animals unlock

• Level 1: 2 animals → 3: 5 → 5: 8 → 10: 14 → 20: 20 → 30: 24 → 50: 32. Reach Level 50 and everything up to the hippo is in play.
• Unlocking is about arriving, not clearing. Your highest level is recorded the moment a round on that level ends, whether you clear or fail — so even if you keep losing on Level 10, the 14 animals up to the rhino are unlocked. Start a new game from Level 1 and the unlocked animals still show up.
• The heaviest animals are Baby Elephant and Baby Hippo (4.0); the lightest is Baby Sparrow (0.15). When the sparrow meets the hippo you get the most extreme round: balance point 0.86 on the hippo’s side and a mass sum of 4.15.

The UNLOCK grid in the bottom ACHIEVE tab is your guide to all thirty-two. They’re laid out four per row in unlock order; locked animals are gray with Lv.N on a translucent band at the bottom. Tap an animal and its name pops up in a speech bubble in your current language.

How the two animals are picked

• The unlocked animals are put in a bag and shuffled, then drawn for left and right in turn. Once the bag is empty, it’s reshuffled.
• The same animal twice, or a pair with equal mass, isn’t allowed. To prevent a round that starts already level, the right animal is swapped for an unlocked animal with a different mass. (Three animals share a mass of 1.0 — koala, monkey and bear — so this swap happens a lot.)
• 3% wildcard — occasionally one side is replaced by the heaviest (50%) or the lightest (50%) unlocked animal. Around Level 5 the heaviest is 2.5 (lion); after Level 15 the cap is 4.0 (elephant). The lightest is 0.15 (sparrow).

Scoring in BalanceMaster comes down to one simple formula: the round’s base score × your combo count. And combos only build while the plank is level.

How combos build and drain

• +1 — every 0.8 seconds while the plank stays within ±4°.
• Leave the 4° zone and only the 0.8-second timer resets; your combo stays as is.
• If you’re still not back to level after a 1.0-second grace period, you lose −1 every 0.6 seconds. Get level again and it resumes building with no further loss.
• Each combo +1 comes with a short vibration (22 ms), and each loss with an even shorter one (15 ms). While draining, a red ring pulses next to the combo popup and a red -1 flashes and fades.
• Points from a failed round don’t count. On a fail only the base score is added, but pressing RETRY rolls your score back to what it was at the start of that round. The only way to keep points is to clear.

The combo popup appears at 58% of the screen height as COMBO x{n}, and from 3 up it’s followed by PERFECT underneath. The color changes at combo 3 · 5 · 8 · 12. The color trail the triangle leaves behind also changes through the same four tiers starting at combo 3. Stay level from start to finish in a 15-second round and your combo climbs to around 18, so reaching the top tier at 12+ proves you found the balance right away and held it a long time.

NICE SAVE! — coming back from the brink

Time, grace period, plank width, weather and special modes are set per level band, and each band gets a little tighter. The table below copies the bands straight from the code (half-widths are calculated for a 9:16 screen).

※ Plank width is relative to screen width (90% → 50%); time and grace are the game-code values at the time of writing. Weather reads “chance · number of simultaneous weather types · strength”. The 70% special-mode rate drops by 15% / 30% after a losing streak and rises by 15% after 8 wins in a row.

What really makes it harder

1. The grace period shrinks — 3.0 s → 1.5 s. If you’re off at 0, you get half the time to recover.
2. The plank narrows — as width drops from 90% to 50%, the same finger movement moves the fulcrum further. One unit of finger travel moves the fulcrum about 0.43 at Level 1 and around 0.8 after 500, so the same hand motion becomes nearly twice as sensitive.
3. Heavier pairs show up — as more animals unlock, pairs with large mass sums and extreme pairs appear, and the same mistake turns into tilt faster.
4. Mid-round events kick in — jumps from Level 5, surprise drops from Level 10 (next chapter).
5. Weather arrives — from Level 11, rain (the fulcrum slips) and snow (the fulcrum gets faster) have real effects. Wind barely matters.
6. Special modes arrive — from Level 11, one of twenty may switch on. Eleven of them change something you can see, and most of those obscure your view (twenty-modes chapter).

There’s no level cap; from 501 on, time is fixed at 8.0 s and grace at 1.5 s. Only the plank width varies randomly between 50% and 65% each round.

Just when you think you’ve got it balanced, two events can shake the plank again. Neither one comes with a warning message. The only signals are the plank suddenly lurching (jump) or an animal falling from the sky (surprise drop).

Animal jump — the better you do, the more they jump (Level 5+)

• It’s called a “jump,” but for the reasons below it’s more accurate to think of it as “one animal’s weight vanishing for 0.8 seconds.”
• The game rolls once per round. Levels 5–10 20% · up to 20 25% · up to 50 30% · up to 100 35% · up to 200 40% · 201+ 25–50% (random).
• It triggers the moment your combo reaches 2 in that round (after 1.6+ seconds of level time). In other words, the better you balance, the sooner the jump comes.
• Who jumps — 25% of the time both at once; otherwise a random one jumps first, then the other jumps after a 0.3–0.7 second pause.
• In the code, the animal leaps 1.3 units in a 0.8-second arc, and while it’s airborne its mass drops to 0.01, so the plank lurches hard toward the other side. A mass-1 animal jumping causes about 7°, a mass-3 animal about 18°. When it lands, the mass returns.
• On the actual screen, though, you don’t see the animal leap. The code that keeps animals glued to the plank resets their position every frame. As the animation in this article shows, the visible signal isn’t the animal — it’s the plank suddenly swinging the other way.

How to handle it: during the jump (0.8 s), the plank behaves “as if the jumping animal weren’t there.” Since that animal’s mass has effectively vanished, moving the fulcrum right under the animal that isn’t jumping (±0.93) reduces the tilt. When it lands, go back to the original balance point. If it’s hard to get there in advance, following the tilt as it happens is the more realistic approach.

Surprise drop — from the sky at the halfway mark (Level 10+)

The last 3 seconds and final alignment

• The last 3 seconds — the timer turns red and pulses every second. The background music also rises in pitch to build tension.
• If the plank isn’t level at 0, the final alignment window (3.0 → 1.5 s) opens. What wins it is getting within ±4° even once during that window. The instant you’re in, it’s a clear.
• So if the plank is mid-tilt just before 0, one option is to move the fulcrum to the balance point in one big move and let the plank swing through level (passing through is enough).

Danger signals — red edges and a heartbeat

• From 10° a heartbeat sound and vibration start, getting fastest at 20°. A dark red glow spreads across the screen edges (a yellow-orange glow on the day theme).
• Above roughly 19° the screen desaturates and the background music fades (it recovers once you drop below about 17.5°).
• The triangle’s color is another clue — green when level, fully red at 18°. On the day theme it’s orange.

Weather starts at Level 11 (levels 1–10 have none). Rain and snow begin 0–1 seconds into the round, wind 2.5 seconds after that, ramping from zero to full strength over 2 seconds. 0.6 seconds before the wind arrives, a direction arrow pulses at the screen edge it will blow from. Weather vanishes the moment you clear or get a game over. How often and how strongly it comes follows the difficulty table above (levels 11–30: 30–50% at strength 1–3; after level 160: 100% at strength 8–10).

• When it rains, the fulcrum occasionally kicks out of place even when it’s on the balance point. Keep your finger pressed close and drag it back by however much it slipped. The higher the strength, the more often it slips, so you’ll need a habit of small, frequent corrections.
• When it snows, the fulcrum follows more nimbly than usual. Dragging with your normal hand feel will overshoot, so move your finger only a little.
• The wind arrow just means “wind is coming” — the plank isn’t noticeably pushed. Focus on rain and snow instead.
• The Clean item wipes out all of this weather for one round (items chapter).

From Level 11, when a round starts there’s a chance (levels 11–50 20% · 51–100 30% · 101–200 40% · 201+ 70%) that one of twenty special modes is drawn — perfectly evenly — and switched on. The game never tells you in text which mode it is. You only see the effect. After level 201, the 70% rate drops by 15% / 30% after a losing streak and rises by 15% after 8 wins in a row. The mode ends as soon as you clear or fail.

The other nine make no visible difference in this game.

• Six of them — InvertControl · GravityShift · GravityPulse · GravityReverse · Tumble · WindGust — are modes that apply gravity or impulses to the animals in the code, but in this game the animals are glued to the plank and balance is decided purely by the moment formula above, so they have nothing to act on.
• Two — DisappearPlatform · GhostPlatform — try to make the plank transparent, but this game draws the plank as a line (LineRenderer), not a sprite, so in actual captures the plank stays perfectly sharp.
• MirrorFlip (left-right mirror) flips the camera’s X scale to −1, but on the screen we actually ran, the plank and animals kept their left-right order (based on a Windows build).

That’s nine out of twenty (45%), so if a special mode is on but the screen looks exactly the same as usual, it’s one of these. And even among the eleven that change the screen, most only block your view — the plank’s physics stay the same.

You pick items in the bottom ITEM tab. At the top is the Game Item Slot ×1 card, below it the Game Items list (FREEZE · PREVIEW · 5Booster · Clean), and at the very bottom the two Record Items.

How to use them

1. Tap an item icon and a description popup appears, ending with Would you like to equip it? Underneath it adds (Tapping YES will show an ad before equipping the item).
2. Tap YES to watch a rewarded ad, after which the item goes into the slot. NO closes the popup.
3. There’s only one slot. If one is already equipped and you tap another, you get Only one item can be equipped in the slot.
4. The equipped item shows as an icon in the HUD at the bottom of the game screen and is used up when that round ends (clear, fail or retry). Restarting the app clears all equipped items, so if you equip one and quit without using it, it’s gone.

Here’s the original popup text for two of the items. PREVIEW: “The Preview item shows a glowing band near the center of mass on the platform. Move the arrow into the highlighted area to achieve perfect balance.” · Clean: “While equipped, any weather this round — rain, snow, wind, or lightning — is completely prevented, so you can play the whole round at normal difficulty. If the weather is already clear, the item disappears immediately.”

The two record items

• NEWGAME — You will restart from Level 1. Would you like to use this item? It resets your saved progress (level and score) to 0 and takes you to the home screen after a rewarded ad. Your best record and unlocks stay.
• RETRYLEVEL — Resume from your best level, Level {N}. It raises your saved progress to your best level and best score (N is your best level + 1). Use it when failures have pushed your progress far back and you want to pick up from your best.
• Both can be used regardless of the slot, and independently of the item pass they always require an ad.

Getting items for free

• On your first visit of the day (after midnight), a free item — PREVIEW or 5Booster at random — goes into your slot. The popup says Welcome back! with Check Item / Later. If the slot is already full, auto-equip is skipped, and nothing is given on the day you first install.
• There’s also an event where opening the game from a push notification equips a designated item. The prompt asking you to allow notifications shows once, 3 seconds after first launch.

After clearing a level that’s a multiple of 5, tap NEXT (after an ad, if one plays) and a bonus game slips in before the next level. That’s levels 5, 10, 15, 20, and so on.

1. Intro — BONUS GAME / (Keep it balanced) shows for 2 seconds, then 3·2·1 counts down.
2. 10 seconds of play — the plank sits a bit lower than usual, and 3–5 rows of animals, two per row, are stacked on the left and right (6–10 animals per side, random left/right). You have to move the fulcrum toward the side with the larger total mass. The stacked columns are centered at ±0.55, so the balance point is 0.55 × (right − left)/(right + left).
3. While level (±4°), coins pour out left and right at 10 per second. Each side has an x{n} counter, and the maximum is 100 left + 100 right = 200 coins.
4. You can’t fail. For the last 4 seconds the timer turns red, the screen edges pulse red and you get a vibration every second. With 0 coins you hear the game over sound; with 1 or more, fireworks.
5. Done — BONUS GAME COMPLETE / {n} Coins x50 + a START button. Tap it and the next level starts right away, with no clear screen.

ACHIEVE tab — MY RANK

The top of the bottom ACHIEVE tab is MY RANK. It shows your current rank badge with +N, +M to go and the next rank badge (translucent), with the hint +1 step = every 10 levels. Below that come the RANK LIST (15 badges) and the UNLOCK animal grid we saw earlier.

• The 15 badges: Rookie · Amateur · Contender · Capable · Skilled · Expert · Veteran · Elite · Master · Grandmaster · Champion · Legend · Hero · Myth · Eternal
• Progress formula — +1 for every 10 of your highest level, and the next rank every 1000 levels (the last one is MAX). In normal play you’ll only ever see Rookie and +N. The moment you reach a new rank (level 1000, 2000…), a TITLE UNLOCKED popup shows for 5 seconds.
• Clear a milestone level (10, 25, 50, 100, 200, 300…) and fireworks go off twice, the camera pulls back slightly, and a Round {N} Special Clear! badge appears.

TODAY’s MISSION — nine of them, reset every midnight

• Despite their names, the two “STAGES CLEAR” badges count rounds played, clears and fails combined.
• Missions give no rewards (there’s no code that hands out coins or items). Days on which you complete all nine are recorded in the HISTORY below the mission tab (year/month accordions with date numbers). While the app is open, it checks the date every minute and resets at midnight.

SETUP tab

• Clear — big text LEVEL N Clear! + Final Score : X and the NEXT · BRAG IT! buttons. (If the ranking server is connected, You’re in the top {N}% and {score} pts to reach top {p}% are added.) Interstitial ads show only after wins: from Level 10 up, once every 8 total wins (levels 10–29), 7 (30–39), 6 (40–99) or 5 (100+).
• Game over — a big gradient GAME OVER and a single RETRY button. At the moment of failure your phone vibrates, the screen shakes for 0.15 seconds, and the result panel appears 0.2 seconds later. There are no ads on a fail; RETRY starts the same level with new animals and your score goes back to where it was when the round began.
• Continuing — reopen the app and the home screen shows LEVEL {last cleared level + 1}, SCORE : {total} and START. New players see LEVEL 1 / SCORE : 0. The bottom HOME tab, when tapped mid-game, pauses and shows RETRY / BACK (BACK = resume, RETRY = start over after a rewarded ad).
• BRAG IT! — the share card title is “Level {N} Cleared! Can you beat my record?” and the body reads “See where your balance ranks globally. Challenge BALANCE MASTER now!”
• Your best record (level and score) isn’t erased by a new game or the record items, and it’s protected by a tamper check (checksum).

Pro tips

• Big pairs put the balance point near the end. Sparrow vs hippo is +0.86 — you have to send the triangle almost all the way to the hippo’s end. Animals of similar mass, on the other hand, keep it near the middle.
• A combo of 2 is the jump signal. If the plank suddenly lurches to one side after 1.6 seconds of level time, that’s a jump. You can’t see which animal jumped, so send the fulcrum in one move under the animal on the side that’s going down (the one that didn’t jump), then return to the original balance point 0.8 seconds later.
• Look at the sky at the halfway mark. From Level 10, a drop can come at half time. The new mass-weighted average shifts the balance point all at once.
• FREEZE is insurance for the first 3 seconds, 5Booster is for chasing points, PREVIEW is the answer key, and Clean is your rain-and-snow fix for Level 11+. Turn on the 5-minute pass with a single ad and you can use several in a row (still one slot at a time).
• New animals unlock just by getting there. Even if you fail on a level you’re stuck on, the animals up to that level are unlocked, so you don’t have to force a clear to fill out the collection.

BalanceMaster supports 10 languages: English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish. Like the other games in the Master series, it’s made to be played one-handed in short bursts.