What Is Cargo?
You are flying a small freighter over open country with a hold full of pallets and seven airstrips scattered around you. One of them wants what you are carrying. Fly over its beacon and the pallet goes out the back, you are paid in tonnes, and a heavier contract appears on the board.
The map is drawn at five hundred pixels to the kilometre, so a leg across the screen is about one and a half kilometres and the furthest strips are seven or eight away. Your airspeed runs from seventy pixels a second at idle to two hundred and forty at the stops, and the wind is doing somewhere between thirty four and sixty two in whatever direction it feels like.
The score is tonnes delivered. The clock is fuel, and it is the same clock for everything you do. There is no timer counting up and no distance to beat. There is a hundred per cent in the tanks and a burn rate that answers to every decision you make.
How to Play
- Hold the up arrow to open the throttles and the down arrow to close them. That one lever sets your climb rate and your airspeed at the same time, and it also sets your fuel bill. It is the only continuous control you have.
- Steer with the left and right arrows. The nose comes round at a steady rate and the aeroplane does not care how fast you are going, so a turn costs you the same at idle as it does flat out.
- Look at the top right of the display. The small map shows all seven strips, marks the one you are flying to, and draws the wind so you can see which way it is pushing you before you commit to a heading.
- Fly over the beacon, not the runway. The beacon is a wider circle than the field itself, so a pallet will go out while you are still short of the threshold and you can pull away without touching down.
- Land if you want the tanks filled. Put the aeroplane down anywhere inside a field and it is refuelled to a hundred per cent on the spot, which is nearly always worth more than the seconds it costs.
- Watch the load on the board. The first contract is three tonnes, the next is four, and it keeps climbing, so the aeroplane you fly at minute three is heavier than the one you took off in.
The Tank Is the Clock
Four separate charges go into the burn rate, and the readout in the bar is just their sum. Knowing which one is biggest at any moment is most of the game, because two of them are free to avoid and two of them are not.
- Being airborne
- One point six per cent a second, flat. You pay this from the moment the wheels leave until the tanks are dry, and nothing you do makes it smaller. It is the rent.
- The throttles
- Three per cent a second at the stops, charged on the square of the setting. Half throttle costs three quarters of a per cent, full throttle costs three. This is the one that decides whether a flight is long or short.
- The hold
- Five hundredths of a per cent a second for every tonne aboard. Three tonnes costs fifteen hundredths, nine tonnes costs nearly half a per cent. Small, but it only ever grows.
- Climbing
- Six per cent a second for every unit of climb rate, and a full power setting only gets you seventeen hundredths of a unit. Going up costs more than the load does. Going down costs nothing extra at all.
- All four together
- Three tonnes at cruise burns two and a half per cent a second, which is forty seconds on a full tank. At the stops the same aeroplane burns five point seven seven, which is seventeen seconds and an early bath.
Why the Wind Picks the Route For You
Your airspeed is what the aeroplane does through the air. Your groundspeed is what the map sees, and the map is the one that decides whether you get there. A sixty two pixel a second wind is two fifths of a cruise airspeed, so the same leg can take twice as long depending on which way you fly it.
That is why the little wind arrow on the minimap matters more than the distance to the strip. A strip four kilometres downwind is closer than one three kilometres upwind, and the board does not tell you which is which. You have to look.
It also means a there and back trip is never symmetric. The leg out that felt generous is the leg home that runs you dry, and the burn rate does not change to warn you. The only signal is the distance readout crawling.
Four Ways to Waste a Full Tank
- Holding the throttles open. Five point seven seven per cent a second against two and a half at cruise. A hundred per cent lasts seventeen seconds at the stops and forty at cruise, so the fast aeroplane is not twice as quick, it is two and a half times as expensive.
- Climbing because height feels safe. The climb charge alone is one per cent a second at full power, a fifth of the whole bill, and it buys you nothing except room to come down again. Climb on the leg you were going to spend at cruise power anyway and it is free. Climb on top of a full throttle setting and you are paying twice.
- Parking on a field. Idling on the ground burns three tenths of a per cent a second, which is slower than flying, so it is cheap. It is also the only place where the tonnes stop arriving. A hundred per cent lasts five and a half minutes parked and delivers nothing at all.
- Arriving high and late. The aeroplane cannot dump height quickly. The band is one unit deep and you can only take it off at seventeen hundredths of a unit a second, so an arrival that is both fast and high is a go around you did not plan.
Closing the Throttles Is Cheap, and That Is the Trap
Pull the lever all the way back and the burn drops to one and three quarter per cent a second. That is thirty per cent better than cruise, and it is the cheapest flying in the game. It is also descending, because the same lever that sets the speed sets the height.
From the middle of the band you have two point nine seconds of it before the wheels are on the ground. Land on a field and that is a refuel. Land anywhere else and the flight is over, and the message you get is that you put it down in open country.
The ceiling is the mirror of that. At the top of the band the aeroplane stops climbing, so the climb charge disappears and full power suddenly costs a dollar less than it did on the way up. But there is nothing above you to trade back, and coming down is the only direction left.
What the Ground Is Actually For
A field owns a hundred and seventy pixels of ground and the beacon pays out inside two hundred and ten. The drop window is wider than the field, which is the whole shape of the thing. You can deliver without landing and land without delivering, and the two are separate decisions at the same place.
Landing refills the tanks immediately, from whatever you had left, and it costs you nothing but the idle burn while you sit there and the time it takes to get back up. A field is a fuel station that happens to be a runway.
Which turns the long legs into a different problem. A five kilometre leg with a full tank is nothing. The same leg with twenty per cent aboard is a strip search, and the strips you can reach are only the ones inside your remaining forty seconds of fuel.
What Doing Nothing Looks Like
The first outstation is placed dead on the track the aeroplane is already flying, four point eight kilometres out. That is not luck. It is the game teaching the loop without asking for an input: point at it, fly over it, pallet away.
Left completely alone, the aeroplane delivers its first load eleven and a half seconds after takeoff, runs the tanks dry at thirty nine and a half seconds, and is on the ground three seconds after that. One pallet, three tonnes, forty two seconds of flying.
That is the number to beat, and it is meant to be easy to beat. Every technique on this page is worth something against it. The wind is worth more than the throttles are, and refuelling is worth more than both.
Cargo on a Phone
The stage is split into three zones for touch, and they are big enough that you do not have to look at your thumb. The left and right fifths of the screen steer. The middle of the screen works the power, top half for more and bottom half for less, and the throttle creeps while you hold rather than jumping.
The readouts are all large type: fuel, distance and best score sit in the bar in a size that works at arm's length, and the minimap in the corner of the stage is drawn in fixed pixels so it holds its proportions when everything else shrinks around it.
One warning: the throttle is a held control, so a finger that slides off the edge of the zone stops answering. The pointer zone is re-read every time you move, so sliding from the top half to the bottom half of the middle will reverse the throttles mid climb. That is meant to be useful, and it is occasionally expensive.