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Stratofloat flight guide

Stratofloat is a free, original turn-based navigation puzzle inspired by atmospheric soundings. Every altitude layer has a different horizontal drift, so you rise, coast, or descend with limited ballast and vent controls to pass research samples on their exact turns and finish inside the recovery corridor. This guide explains each rule.

Every turn adds the published gust for that turn, which is listed in the gusts-by-turn panel and applied after the layer wind. The model is intentionally discrete and fictional: it rewards reading a forecast but cannot plan or represent a real balloon flight.

How does one turn work?

Choose Rise, Coast, or Descend. Rising spends one ballast unit and moves the balloon up one available layer; descending spends one vent pulse and moves down; coasting holds altitude. The chosen layer’s drift and that turn’s pulse then move the balloon horizontally. Before committing, every control button shows its exact next position. Samples are collected only when turn, horizontal position, and altitude all match the mission window. On the final turn you also need every required sample and a position inside the marked recovery zone.

What is the three-turn flight plan?

The Flight Plan pad lets you queue up to three controls without spending a turn or resource. A dashed orange trajectory appears directly on the chart, and each queued row names its projected turn, horizontal position, and layer. “Fly next planned turn” commits only the first control, leaving later controls queued if the flight continues. You can remove the last choice or clear the whole plan freely. Directly flying a different control, rewinding, restarting, or asking the solver for a nudge clears the scratch plan so an old projection can never masquerade as current guidance.

Can I recover from a mistake?

Yes. The turn tape records launch and every flown control. Select any earlier entry to restore that exact position, altitude, resources, samples, and control history. “Undo one turn” is a shortcut, and a missed final recovery keeps the flight log visible with an undo action. Restart returns to the published launch state without changing the mission’s winds. Rewind and planning are core tools, not paid or limited consumables.

What assistance and accessible alternatives are included?

Profile analysis identifies the strongest wind and direction reversals without revealing a route. Solver nudge finds a verified continuation from the current state; if the branch is impossible, it safely rewinds one turn. Hints remain free, while medal logic records assistance for fair comparison. The flight chart has a descriptive text alternative and a full text wind-profile table. Controls are keyboard operable, touch targets are sized for coarse pointers, focus is preserved across rerenders, and settings offer reduced motion, stronger contrast, and larger readouts.

How does the flight chart behave on a small screen?

The chart keeps a fixed drawing scale so every layer label, wind reading, sample marker, and recovery label stays legible instead of shrinking with the viewport. Whenever the drawing is wider than its panel it becomes a horizontally scrollable region with its own keyboard focus, a visible scrollbar, a shaded edge, and a line of text saying so; it re-centres on the balloon after every turn, rewind, and restart so the current position is never off screen. Layer numbers are printed at both edges of the chart. If you would rather not scroll at all, the text wind profile below the chart lists every layer and its drift, and the objectives panel lists every sample position, altitude, and turn.

Does anything teach me the game?

The immediate controls are labelled Fly now, and the three-turn plan card below them is separate: queueing a control there spends no turn, no reserve, no sample, and no score, and the card prints the queued track as a line of positions as well as drawing it dashed on the chart. Each flown turn is announced in one polite live region with the new position and layer, any sample collected, the remaining ballast and vent, and the turns left before the recovery corridor. That countdown also sits under the recovery-corridor objective, so the last descent never has to be worked out in your head. A collected sample fills its chart marker and is marked collected in the text wind profile.

The first programme mission opens on a four-step walkthrough that puts the planner first: read the wind profile and the next-turn forecast, queue three controls into the flight plan, fly only the first of them, and learn that the turn tape rewinds for free. It can be skipped at any point and never returns once closed; erasing local records brings it back. This order matters, because the game rewards reading the profile before spending ballast.

Can I fly with the keyboard alone?

Yes. The up arrow or W drops ballast and rises, Space or K coasts, and the down arrow or X vents and descends. Hold Shift with any of those to queue the control into the three-turn plan instead of flying it. F flies the next planned turn, Backspace removes the last planned control, Z undoes one flown turn, N asks for a solver nudge, A runs the profile analysis, R restarts, and the question mark key opens the shortcut list from anywhere. Arrow keys scroll the chart while the chart itself has focus.

Where can I see my own record?

Settings opens a flight statistics panel holding programme missions recovered, daily soundings recovered, the current daily run, Gold, Silver and Bronze counts, best and average mission score, recoveries made without a nudge, turns flown, science packets secured, nudges used, and qualifications earned. The debrief adds the score arithmetic for the flight you just finished, your best for that brief, the authored benchmark (the score of the solver-verified sequence flown with no nudges and no restarts, which is what Gold requires), and a one-line suggestion of what to try next drawn from where the points went. The daily run in days appears only on a daily sounding result. Copy debrief prints the exact copied text in the panel with a copied or not-copied state.

Where do records live, and does offline play work?

No login, advertising pixel, or remote gameplay service is required. This site counts page visits through Cloudflare: it sets no cookie, it cannot follow you from here to another site, and nothing from your play is part of the count. Mission records, separate in-progress drafts, daily soundings, achievements, and preferences stay in local storage. The settings console exports a bounded, schema-checked JSON flight log and rejects malformed, oversized, cross-app, or unsupported imports without replacing valid data. After the first successful load, the campaign, guide, science notes, and interface are cached for offline play. When a newer release is published, a small notice appears with a Reload button; nothing reloads on its own, so an in-progress flight is never interrupted. Read the science notes and simulation boundary or the privacy page for more detail.