PathMaster Complete Guide — Controls, Planks, Creatures, Hazards, Items and Gear

This is the complete PathMaster guide. Controls and placement grades, hearts and levels, the 10 creatures that live in the gaps and the hazards on the road, weather and wind, 16 items and 6 pieces of gear, and the black hole bonus stage — everything in the game, from start to finish, in the order you’ll meet it. Every number here was checked against the actual game code. It’s a long read, so take your time. If you’re brand new, you can jump straight to Six things for the first-time builder at the bottom.

Start with the video

Here’s the trailer — less than a minute long. It’s a staged promotional video made to capture the mood of the game, so it doesn’t look exactly like real gameplay. The real in-game screens are shown one by one in each chapter below.

• Raincoat #E5C028
• Boots #D82C3B
• Mittens #3261A8
• Leggings #364C75
• Hair #634D41

She’s animated with 23 frames. Normally she runs in an eight-beat cycle; in the air she switches to a rising pose and then a peak pose. When she falls fast, two frames of flailing arms and legs alternate every 0.11 seconds, and with wings she switches to a gliding pose. When she hits a hazard, she staggers for 0.5 seconds. That tiny girl on the screen has a different expression for every situation — keep an eye out for them.

The game is played in portrait. The top of the screen is your “status,” the middle is “the road,” and the bottom is “where your hand goes.”

The girl runs on her own. All you do is pick a plank from the drawer and drop it into a gap, and there are two ways to do it.

Tap and drag are told apart by how far your finger moves. Even if you hold your finger down for a long time, it counts as a tap as long as it moves less than 34 pixels, and the plank flies off the moment you let go.

You never have to choose a length. As long as the angle is right, the plank stretches or shrinks by itself to reach the other side (up to 5.0). So the question in this game always boils down to one thing: “Is the other side higher, lower, or level — or is there something in the gap?”

The drawer has exactly four slots. All four are wood-colored, so you can’t tell them apart by color — you tell them apart by shape. All four slots are open from the very start, so the fun of choosing begins on your first run.

Once you use a slot, it fills back up from the bottom, and when it’s full the slot grows slightly and sparkles. There are no numbers, so judge by how full it looks. Recharge times shift a little as you level up, but the game makes sure that a recharge never takes longer than the spacing between gaps. In other words, if your hands are quick enough, you can always make it across.

You can’t tap the same slot twice in a row — and that’s what quietly makes you think in this game. When several level gaps come back to back, the girl keeps running while your Flat slot is still recharging.

While you’re holding a plank, and the moment you place it, you get an instant grade shown by color.

What a mistake costs you

A red grade does not cost you a heart. Instead, the screen flashes red and shakes, and the slot you tapped gets a short penalty cooldown (about 0.4–0.5 seconds). Right in front of a gap, that half second feels long.

Here’s an interesting difference: a mistake made by drag and drop carries no penalty. The plank simply goes back to the drawer. When a gap looks confusing, dragging the plank to check the color before letting go is a perfectly good strategy.

When you see yellow

A yellow grade isn’t a mistake. It means the bridge is half built, and that slot rests for only 0.31 seconds before you can use it again. Just attach a second plank. These wide gaps start appearing at level 4.

Combos

Cross gaps back to back and a combo pops up, like 3 IN A ROW!. Every 5 in a row earns bonus H Coins. Falling or getting hit by a hazard resets the combo to 0.

A level ends by distance

A level ends once you’ve run a set distance — not a set number of gaps. When the distance bar fills up, LEVEL ○ BREACHED fills the screen and the girl runs straight into the next level without stopping. There’s no results screen to wait for.

Each level you clear pays out H Coins (12 at level 1, rising to 40 from level 15), and THIS RUN +○ shows what you earned this level. Every 10 levels you also get a ○ PATHS! celebration.

Speed — it builds up within each level

The girl is slowest at the start of a level and gradually speeds up as she runs, then drops back to her starting speed when the next level begins. Both the starting speed and the top speed rise with each level, but the game caps the top speed so you always have at least 1.25 seconds to react after a gap appears on screen. You’re also invincible for 1.6 seconds at the start of every level, so you’ll never fall the instant you set off.

If you fall — three hearts

The moment she falls, the game tries to save her in this order:

1. If you have the Rope (gear) — she catches herself and comes back to that spot. No heart is used.
2. If you have a SHIELD (item) — the shield takes the fall for her.
3. If you have neither — you lose one heart.

Losing your last heart — Continue

Lose your last heart and the run is over — but not right away. You can watch an ad or pay H Coins to continue. You’ll get all three hearts back and set off again from the same spot with BACK ON THE PATH!. The coin price of a continue goes up with your level.

• When do they appear? — On level 1, exactly once for practice (the fourth gap). From level 3 on, they appear at random. The higher the level, the more often they show up — from roughly one gap in five up to about one in three.
• Which gaps do they live in? — Only in gaps narrow enough for a single Spike Plank. You’ll never see a creature gap that needs two planks.
• Do creatures attack? — No. They just move around inside the gap and never touch the girl. The problem is that if you don’t fill the gap, she simply falls in.
• The hint — From level 1 to 10, a little spider floats above the Spike Plank slot to tell you “this one!”

From level 10, it’s not just the gaps — things start flying at you on the road, too. There are four of them, and every one gives you a warning first.

Get hit and you’ll see STUMBLE! — the girl staggers for 0.5 seconds and your combo breaks. It won’t kill her. You can’t dodge these, so they were made non-lethal. Still, a stagger right in front of a gap can wreck your rhythm, so be careful. While you’re invincible from GIANT or DASH she won’t stagger, but the combo still breaks and STUMBLE! still pops up (we confirmed this behavior in the code).

Which hazards show up depends on the landscape. Mountain Pass, Volcano and Glacier mostly throw rocks; Morning Forest and Sunset Ridge send birds; Night Trail and Deep Fog bring birds and bees. And when fog, rain or wind are already making the screen busy, the game sends fewer hazards.

Levels 1–5 are “learning levels,” so short ledges, ice and hazards never appear. The first four gaps of level 1 are laid out in the order Flat → Ramp Up → Ramp Down → creature so you try each of the four slots once, and in front of those four gaps only, the girl stops and waits for you. On level 2 she waits only until you place your first piece, and from level 3 on she never stops.

The landscape the girl runs through changes every two levels. The sky and ground colors blend slowly from one landscape into the next. To see all thirty, you’ll have to run 60 levels.

• Dawn Forest
• Morning Forest
• Riverside
• Flower Meadow
• Bamboo Grove
• Mountain Pass
• Rainfall
• Waterfall Gorge
• Still Lake
• Autumn Woods
• Sunset Ridge
• Dusk Marsh
• Night Trail
• Firefly Wood
• Deep Fog
• Snowfield
• Thunderstorm
• Glacier
• Desert Crossing
• Volcano
• Downtown
• Neon Street
• Villa Town
• Shanty Row
• Harbor
• Open Sea
• Factory Belt
• Rooftops
• Sea of Clouds
• Aurora

The order is reshuffled every time you launch the app. Yesterday you might have started at Riverside, and today you could be running through Villa Town. However, the five places shaded dark — Night Trail, Deep Fog, Thunderstorm, Neon Street and Aurora — are hard to see in, so they’re never your first landscape. The idea is that on the learning levels, you should never fall because you “couldn’t see” rather than because it was “hard.”

You can feel the weather

Wind — a push from behind, or a wall in front

Every landscape has its own wind. A tailwind speeds the girl up, a headwind slows her down, and her body leans into the wind. The strongest headwind is in Desert Crossing (about 6% slower), and Mountain Pass, Glacier and Harbor have headwinds too. The strongest tailwinds are in Thunderstorm and Open Sea (about 5% faster), and Rainfall, Sea of Clouds and Autumn Woods also have tailwinds. It’s set up so that tight stretches and breathing room take turns.

The ten you’ll be glad to see

The six you’d rather avoid

※ The icons are taken straight from the game’s artwork. To make them easier to tell apart, we colored the good ones blue and the bad ones red; in the game, each item glows in its own color.

The scariest one is HEAVY HANDS. With longer recharges, your second plank is guaranteed to be late when gaps come back to back. On the flip side, if HEAVY HANDS and RECHARGE overlap, they cancel each other out to almost normal speed (0.85×).

Before a run, you can buy gear with H Coins and equip it. You don’t press gear — it triggers by itself when its moment comes (Umbrella!). And only gear that actually triggers gets used up, one at a time. If it never rained during your run, your Umbrella is still there.

• Three places to buy — ① the ITEM page in the bottom menu ② the GEAR UP window that appears when you start a new game (if you don’t own something, you can buy and equip it right there) ③ the item button at the bottom left during a run (time stops while it’s open).
• Re-applied every level — gear effects switch off when the level changes and switch back on if you have any left. In effect, you use one for each level where it triggers.
• 24 hours — gear you buy resets 24 hours after purchase. Rather than stockpiling, the trick is to pick what you need for that day.
• Short on coins? — you can watch an ad to top up your H Coins (300 on the ITEM page and the start window, 400 from the item button during a run).

Buying all six costs 2,940 coins. My personal pick is the Sandbag. Slowing down sounds like a handicap, but you’re really “buying thinking time with coins” — and at higher levels, when your hands can’t keep up, you’ll feel the difference. If falling scares you, the Rope saves you a heart.

• Title → 3·2·1 countdown → catch coins for 10 seconds → results → she comes back out through a hole on the left.
• The sky is one of four — night city, sunset, outer space or snowscape — and the same sky never comes up twice in a row.
• You can drag anywhere on the screen. The girl moves exactly as far as your finger does.
• Each coin is worth 10 H Coins. Catch even one and you get SUCCESS; catch none and it’s FAILED.
• Failing costs you nothing. Your hearts and score are untouched. And when you come back, the gap right in front of you is already bridged.

Coins floating in rows above a gap can only be collected by building a bridge and running across it. With GOLD RUSH active, every coin source above is tripled.

PathMaster 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 with one hand, in short bursts.