Picking Among Tanubi’s Five Characters — Unlock Order and Terrain Fit

Here is what is actually inside the five. Tanubi, the starter, glides. Rabbit glides and can also jump a second time in mid-air. Mole gives up the glide entirely in exchange for a horizontal dash. Fox keeps the glide and adds the ability to cling to walls and kick off them. Otter has exactly the same dash as Mole.

The part people misread is Rabbit and Fox. Neither of them is a replacement for the starter; both are the starter plus one thing. The glide is still there, untouched. So once you unlock Rabbit or Fox there is essentially no reason to go back to the base character. They are straight upgrades.

Mole and Otter are a different story. They are the only two without the glide. Press the ability key and you do not shapeshift into a leaf and float down, you fire sideways instead. The dash is therefore a trade, not an addition: you hand over all of your descent control and buy horizontal reach with it. That single fact is the biggest fork in the road when you choose a character.

The fact that it is all one button also causes accidents until you adjust. The gliders respond to the key being held; the dashers fire on the press. Hold the key expecting a float and nothing happens on the way down; jab it reflexively at the edge of a pit and you launch sideways into the pit. Treat your first run on a new character as time spent rewiring what that key means, not as a scoring attempt.

For completeness: the leaf throw sits on its own separate button and every character has it. What actually changes between the five is locomotion, and only locomotion, which is to say how you fall, how high you reach, and how far across you can get.

Unlocks run off a cumulative score. Tanubi is available immediately, Rabbit opens at 500 total points, Mole at 2000, and Fox at 5500. That total is simply every run score added together, and it never goes down.

What matters here is that the total accumulates from runs you did not clear. Die halfway and everything you banked up to that moment still counts. You lose the time bonus, but the coins you collected and the enemies you stomped stay on the ledger. If unlocking is your only goal, a failed run is not a wasted run.

There is one precondition, though. That cumulative total is only saved while you are signed in. Play signed out and the total lives only as long as the tab does; close it and you start from zero. Rabbit at 500 might land in a single session, but chasing Mole at 2000 or Fox at 5500 signed out is not realistic. If you intend to collect characters, signing in with your alzy.kr account is genuinely the first move of the plan, before any run.

It helps to have a feel for the sizes involved. Clear inside 45 seconds and the time bonus alone pays (45 minus your clear time) x10, so a 30-second clear is 150 points from the clock by itself. Suppose you settle around 400 points a run: that is two runs to Rabbit, five to Mole, fourteen to Fox. Run at 100 points instead and Fox is past fifty runs away. If you want unlocks sooner, cutting clear times moves the needle far harder than grinding more attempts.

One quirk in reading the gauge. The progress bar is not relative to your last unlock; it is your total divided by that hero’s threshold, an absolute figure. So the moment you unlock Rabbit at 500 and the next target becomes Mole at 2000, the bar drops from 100 percent to 25 percent. Nothing broke and nothing was taken away. Only the denominator changed.

Start with the glide. While the ability key is held, your fall speed is capped at 105. Normal terminal velocity is 780, so you are descending something like seven times slower. Note that it only applies once you are already descending: it produces no lift whatsoever and is purely a tool for how you come down. A tile is 24 pixels, so gliding down five tiles, 120 pixels, takes 1.25 seconds. Falling that same distance takes about 0.33 seconds. Every glide is therefore spending around 0.9 seconds, which is 9 points. Cheap if it removes a death, reliably negative if you are just enjoying the float.

The double jump fires at 92 percent of your first jump’s launch speed, and it refills every time you land, so it is strictly one per airtime. For the first 0.09 seconds after leaving a ledge you still have coyote time, which means a button press immediately after walking off a cliff spends a normal jump rather than the air jump. Panic-mashing therefore tends to leave you with no second jump exactly when you need it. Your first jump clears roughly three tiles; adding the second takes you past five.

The dash runs at 430 per second for 0.16 seconds, covering about 69 pixels, just under three tiles, in one go. Your top running speed is 200, so the same 0.16 seconds of running would cover 32 pixels. The net gain is 37 pixels, about 0.18 seconds, worth 2 points. That is why the dash looks worthless if you think of it as a way to move faster. Its real value is that your fall speed is pinned to zero for the duration. It crosses gaps that are simply too wide to jump, and in doing so deletes the five-second detour that loops down and around, and five seconds is 50 points. The cooldown is 0.55 seconds, so it is not built for chaining gaps back to back.

Wall-cling is really two features. Hold the direction into the wall and your descent caps at 130, a controlled slide. Jump while touching a wall and you kick off at 540 upward and 210 away from it. A normal jump launches at 560, so a wall kick is worth close to a full jump’s height, repeatable as many times as there are walls. In a vertical shaft it is the only ability in the game that lets you keep climbing.

This maps cleanly onto how the campaign is laid out. Stages where the number leaves a remainder of 3 when divided by six (3, 9, 15, 21 and so on) are vertical towers; a remainder of 5 (5, 11, 17) sends you underground on a descent stage; a remainder of 1 (7, 13, 19) gives you a long horizontal stage. Towers are Fox territory, with Rabbit a clear second. From stage 15 some towers add a threat chasing you from below, so climbing without stalling stops being style and starts being survival. Descent stages have long falls where the glide earns its keep, and long stages are dominated by horizontal distance, which is where the dash characters cut the most time. Every tenth stage is a boss in a fixed-width arena, where movement matters less than the precision of getting above the target.

One exception worth planning around: low-gravity event stages run gravity at 0.45. Launch speeds are unchanged, so your reachable height more than doubles and both the double jump and the wall kick become dramatically stronger. The glide, conversely, is worth relatively less, because everything already falls slowly.

Otter is the one character that does not open on cumulative score. The score threshold on the record is 999999, an effectively unreachable sentinel, and the real check runs off something else entirely: whether your campaign progress has reached stage 100.

This is the part that gets garbled most often, so to be precise: the requirement is not clearing the campaign 100 times. It is your highest cleared campaign stage reaching 100, which is to say finishing the main run once. That figure only ever increases, so once you touch 100 you are done, and there is no need to replay anything. Stop partway and you resume from the next stage rather than the beginning.

The campaign is 100 stages with a boss every tenth one, so ten bosses stand between you and Otter. Past 100 there is an endless mode running from stage 101 onward, but the unlock only cares about reaching 100.

And the payoff, stated plainly: Otter’s ability is identical to Mole’s dash. Same speed, same duration, same cooldown, and the same absence of a glide. The belly slide is a different presentation of the same movement; nothing mechanical was added.

That matters practically, because it means there is no performance reason to rush the campaign. If what you want is the dash, Mole at 2000 cumulative points gives you all of it. Otter is proof that you finished the main run, not the top of a power curve. Read the other way round: run the campaign on Mole or Fox, and let stage 100 arrive as a by-product.

Also worth knowing: Otter never appears in the score progress gauge. The gauge only tracks the four characters that open on points, so once Fox is unlocked the "next unlock" readout disappears entirely. An empty gauge does not mean there is no fifth character; it is still sitting there as a silhouette on the character select screen.

Total between 0 and 500. There is exactly one thing to do here, which is sign in before you run. Signed out, nothing carries over and you will reset short of 500 again and again. The running itself needs nothing clever: take the starter and clear inside 45 seconds. Two clears in the low thirties gets you Rabbit on their own.

Total between 500 and 2000. Once Rabbit is yours there is no reason to go back. The glide is unchanged and the extra air jump quietly removes falling deaths, and removing falling deaths means removing the situations where you forfeit an entire time bonus. This stretch is about accumulating runs, so prioritising a no-death run over a greedy one will actually get you to Mole faster.

Total between 2000 and 5500. Mole is the first character whose handling genuinely changes, and the first few runs feel wrong. With no glide, carrying over the habit of leaping off high ledges leaves you with no way to manage the fall. Start on the long horizontal stages (7, 13, 19) and get a feel for deleting one detour per stage. And do not force Mole through terrain it hates just because you are chasing Fox: pushing a glideless character up towers and tight vertical sections adds deaths, and deaths make the whole grind slower, not faster.

Total past 5500. Fox holds both the glide and the wall-cling, which makes it the widest movement kit in the game at that point. Run towers and shafts on Fox, swap to Mole for the long horizontal stages, and that two-character rotation is the standard setup for pushing the campaign toward 100.

One last calibration. Price an ability by the seconds it deletes. A dash that erases a five-second detour paid you 50 points. A glide that prevents one fatal fall protected the stage’s entire time bonus plus everything you had banked. Conversely, holding the glide because floating feels nice, or burning a dash across a gap you would have cleared anyway, is throwing away ten points every second. Abilities are not for using because you have them; they are for using when the arithmetic against the clock says so.