The Eight Ships of TUNL
Every ship flies the same one-button physics. What changes is a single trade: one thing it does better, one thing it does worse. Here is the roster, how you earn it, and how it is drawn.
Why the ships are trade-offs, not upgrades
In a lot of games a better ship is a bigger number. TUNL deliberately avoids that. Every ship pairs a buff with a drawback, so picking one is a build choice: a smaller hitbox that holds less shield, a wider coin reach that is easier to clip a spike with. None of them is strictly the best at everything. When an early version had one ship that clearly beat the rest, I measured it against the others with a replay simulation and rebalanced until it no longer did.
The thrust, gravity and terminal speed are identical on every ship, and every ship flies the same daily cave. What differs is the margin the ship gives you when something goes wrong, and what a pickup does for you. I keep the exact numbers off this page on purpose. The trade is meant to be felt, and the ships are best learned by flying them.
The roster
| Ship | What it is good at | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| PEARL | Nothing in particular. The neutral baseline every player starts with. | Nothing either. It is the reference the other seven are measured against. |
| AMBER | Reaches further for coins than any other ship. | A slightly bigger hitbox, so tight gaps are less forgiving. |
| CRIMSON | Slips through gaps that other ships cannot fit through. | Carries less shield capacity. |
| ELECTRIC | Bends time harder and for longer whenever a slow-time (hourglass) coin lands. | A slightly shorter combo window, so coin chains are less forgiving. |
| TOXIC | Every gold coin buys more corridor room. | The extra room burns off faster, so it has to be kept topped up. |
| VOID | Every third shield coin gives two shields instead of one. | A tighter near-miss window, so the close-call bonus is harder to earn. |
| NOVA | A magnet coin pulls coins in for much longer. | Less ammo held in reserve. |
| SOLARIS | A very wide near-miss window, so the close-call bonus triggers from much further away. Built for players chasing the deepest runs. | A larger hitbox. The rarest ship in the roster. |
A practical way to read the table: AMBER and TOXIC are gold-economy ships and reward a player who already routes coins well. CRIMSON is the tight-gap specialist, and is the one to pick for a dense stretch of stalactites. SOLARIS and VOID are about the near-miss bonus, the points paid for flying close to a wall, which SOLARIS makes easy and VOID makes hard. ELECTRIC, NOVA and VOID are power-up ships that make a specific coin worth more when it arrives, so they shine in a run where you are picking up plenty of that coin. PEARL is the honest starting point, and a lot of strong players keep flying it.
Mastery: the drawback fades, the buff grows
Every ship has its own mastery track. It fills with the coins you collect while flying that ship, and there are three levels above the start. At each level the ship's drawback eases a little and its buff grows a little. Mastery is per ship, so time spent in AMBER does nothing for CRIMSON.
That gives the roster a second dimension. A freshly unlocked ship is the version with its edges sharp. A ship you have flown for a while is a smoother version of the same idea. There is also an achievement for maxing out the whole fleet, and it requires every ship, not just the ones you own. It was once possible to complete it with a single ship. That was a bug, and it is fixed.
How you earn a ship: shards and stardust
Every paid ship needs two different things at once, and it is worth understanding why.
Shards are the skill currency. The coins you collect during a run are banked as shards when it ends. Fly better, collect more, earn faster. There is a daily cap on how many run-earned shards count, so a single marathon session cannot buy the whole roster. Daily missions and one optional bonus a day pay on top of that cap.
Stardust is the time currency. You get a little for simply opening TUNL on a new calendar day, plus a bonus for an unbroken week. It is never spent. It is only checked as a threshold, so a ship's stardust requirement does not stack on the next ship's. No amount of skill buys it.
Why both? Shards alone would let a strong player finish the roster in days and then have nothing to come back for. Stardust alone would ignore how well you play. Together, the cheap ships fall to shards quickly and the expensive ones need weeks and months of showing up. SOLARIS, the last ship, is the one that takes the longest, by design. The shard prices were tuned so that the calendar, not the coin count, is the binding constraint at every tier.
If you would rather skip that, there is a one-time Unlock All Ships purchase in the apps. It unlocks every ship, including any added later. It does not touch your shards or stardust, and it is optional: every ship can be earned by playing.
Paint: six finishes, purely cosmetic
Once AMBER is unlocked, a PAINT button appears on the ship sheet. It opens the paint shop, where you can buy liveries with shards. You buy a finish once for the whole hangar and then choose it separately for each ship you own, so every ship keeps its own look. A livery has no perk, no hitbox change and no effect on the leaderboard.
- FACTORY: the ship's own colours. Free.
- STEALTH: a rim of light that slowly breathes and neon seams along the facets.
- STRIPE: a band across the span with a pulse running down it, wing chevrons and tip caps.
- SPLIT: one half of the hull re-shaded against the other, divided by a clean lit seam whose colour cycles.
- CHROME: a hard reflected horizon and a specular sweep that throws the ship's neighbouring hues.
- AURORA: four curtains of polar light drifting over the hull at different speeds.
Every finish is built out of big masses of colour rather than fine patterns, because in flight the ship is only a few dozen pixels across. An early pass used a carbon-fibre weave and pinstripes. On a phone in motion they were invisible, and the finishes read as a recolour that was not worth buying. A finish also never changes the ship's hue, so you can always tell which ship is which. The ghost of your best run and the wrecked ship on the death frame always use the plain factory paint.
How the ship is drawn
The hull is a slim, F-14-style silhouette cut into flat facets that are lit from above: the top half is mixed toward white, the bottom toward near-black, all from the ship's own colour. The engine plume is tinted in the ship's colour too, so orange-red is kept for the ON FIRE afterburner that lights when you beat today's best.
Since version 15.0 the ship in flight is shown in a three-quarter side view instead of from straight above, which suits a game where gravity is down and the stalactites hang from the ceiling. A few things move on it:
- The wings swing like a swing-wing fighter's: halfway back in normal flight, folded fully back through a warp, and swung fully forward while a blue coin slows time.
- The hull rolls a few degrees with your climb: climbing turns the back toward you, falling turns the belly. It is a second read on your vertical speed.
- A blue coin throws the wings forward like an air brake and they fold back as time returns to normal.
- Flying through the warp ring gives you a full barrel roll.
The hitbox is exactly what it was before the change. The 3D view is drawn only, and none of it touches collision. The hangar, the shop and the share card still show the ship from above, because those are portraits of the ship rather than pictures of a flight.
For the rules that make the ships worth choosing between, see the how-to-play guide. To try the game right now, play today's cave in your browser.