Tanubi Scoring, Taken Apart — What to Grab First

The formula itself is short. Your base score is coins x10 plus kills x20 plus broken tiles x5 plus a skill bonus pool. On top of that, and only when you actually clear the stage, you get a time bonus of (45 minus your clear time in seconds) x10. It never goes negative; it bottoms out at zero once you pass 45 seconds. So there are five inlets: coins, kills, destruction, skill bonuses, and the clock.

Those five are priced very differently. A broken tile is 5 points, which converts to half a second of time bonus. That is essentially nothing, so treat destructible blocks as pathing tools rather than as score: break them to open a route, never as a detour. An apple coin is 10 points, or one second. A jar carries a value of 5, so it lands at 50 points, or five whole seconds. A kill is 20 points, or two seconds.

The term people misread most is the clock. Ten points per second means one coin evaporates every second you spend. A five-second detour is a 50-point expense: break even if it nets you a jar, clearly negative if it nets you three apples. Every question of the form "should I go get that?" is really a subtraction against how long it takes.

And there is that 45-second ceiling. Because the term floors at zero, the moment you cross 45 seconds the clock stops producing a single point. That is the sharpest decision boundary in the game. Under 45 seconds, route for speed. Past 45 seconds, there is no longer any reason at all to hurry, and the correct move is to flip into cleanup mode and sweep every remaining coin and enemy before you exit. Players who watch the timer and change gear score visibly higher than players who run one way the whole time.

One more asymmetry: the time bonus only applies on a clear. Die and it is zero. Whatever you banked early in the stage, the time component vanishes entirely if you never reach the goal. That asymmetry is the foundation for the safety judgments further down.

Stomp enemies back to back without touching the ground and, starting from the second one, you earn (chain length minus 1) x15. That is +15 on the second, +30 on the third, +45 on the fourth. Cumulatively a three-chain is worth 45 bonus points and a four-chain is worth 90.

The important part is that this is entirely separate from the 20 points per kill. Four enemies killed individually is 80 points. The same four killed without landing is 80 + 90 = 170. More than double, from the same four enemies. You cannot rearrange the level, so this margin comes purely from your own entry: which enemy you drop onto first, and from what height.

Every stomp bounces you back up at a fixed 380 of upward speed, so height for the next hop is handed to you automatically. Which means the resource you actually run out of is horizontal distance, not altitude. The pattern to look for is not "enemies in a neat row" but "an enemy sitting where my bounce is going to bring me down".

The counter resets to zero the instant you land. Touch the floor and the streak is gone. Bonuses you already banked, however, are not clawed back: only the chain counter resets, and the points stay. That makes stopping cheap. Cashing out at a clean three-chain rather than forcing a fourth costs you exactly the next rung, 15 points, and nothing else.

As a rule of thumb: a two-chain is something you take when it is on your way, a three-chain is worth going out of your way for, and four or more only when the terrain hands it to you. Overreach for a fourth, miss your air trajectory, clip the enemy instead of landing on it, and you also lose the 25-point flawless clear. Whether 45 extra points is worth risking that plus your run depends entirely on how many hearts you are holding.

Chargers and divers become defenceless the moment they commit to their move. Two different rewards hang off that committed window. Slipping past it untouched is a graze, worth 8 points. Landing on top of them mid-commitment is a punish, worth 30.

The near-fourfold gap is earned. A graze only requires that you pass within 36 pixels, a tile and a half, of the enemy centre without actually touching it, and it fires automatically once the conditions are met. A punish requires you to get above an enemy that is already winding up or already charging and stomp it. Because that stomp also kills, a punish is really 50 points in one action.

So the correct answer after you bait a charge is not to dodge it, it is to get on top of it. Settling for the 8-point graze is haggling a 50-point opportunity down to 8. The way to frame the graze is as insurance: when you have put yourself somewhere the charger is coming straight at you and there is no time to swing above it, the graze is what you collect instead.

There is a condition on the graze that is easy to miss. It does not fire during the 1.4 seconds of invulnerability you get after taking a hit. Take one hit and, for the next 1.4 seconds, no amount of beautiful last-pixel dodging pays you anything. The real cost of getting hit is not just a heart and the flawless flag.

You also cannot farm a single enemy. The graze is limited to once per charge, so orbiting a charging enemy will not keep paying out. It is less a thing you set out to collect and more a thing that shows up when you commit to the right spacing.

Clear a stage without taking a single hit and you get 25 points. There is a detail here that most players have backwards: a hit absorbed by a heart still counts as a hit. Holding a heart does not preserve your flawless status. The moment contact happens, the 25 points are gone whether the heart soaked it or not.

So hearts are not a tool for protecting the flawless bonus. What they protect is the run itself, which means the clear and the time bonus hanging off it. Keeping that distinction straight stops you from agonising over whether a heart pickup is worth a detour.

It is also worth being unsentimental about the size of the number. 25 points is 2.5 seconds, half of a single jar. Spending five seconds looping around on the safe route to protect a flawless clear is already a losing trade. A safety measure that costs two seconds or less, on the other hand, is worth taking every time.

Then why avoid damage at all? Because of death. Fall and the time bonus goes to zero, and everything you accumulated in that stage leaves with you. You are not defending 25 points, you are defending a clear worth several hundred. You can carry up to three hearts, so picking them up while you have slack is cheap insurance against the run ending.

In a campaign run, where stages come one after another, the 25 stacks every single stage. Small per stage, but ten stages is 250 points. That double character, negligible in isolation and heavy in aggregate, is the thing to keep in mind about the flawless bonus.

Descent stages, the ones with the treasure goal underground, also pay a flat 30 points on clear. That value is fixed regardless of seed or input, so you can simply add it to your expected total for those stages before you even start.

Put every number so far on the same scale. At 10 points per second: a jar is 5 seconds, a four-chain including kills (170 points) is 17 seconds, a punish including the kill (50 points) is 5 seconds, a kill is 2 seconds, a flawless clear is 2.5 seconds, an apple is 1 second, a graze is 0.8 seconds, and a broken tile is half a second. Read each of those as the maximum detour you are allowed to spend on it.

Applying it is mechanical. If the jar in front of you is a six-second round trip, you are spending 60 points to earn 50, so you skip it. If it is three seconds, you take it. Circling four seconds to kill one enemy is a loss; two seconds or less is a gain. A destructible tile is worth half a second, which is why there is never a reason to hit one except to open a path.

The golden apple doubling only lasts six seconds. Its entire value is therefore determined by what you can reach inside those six seconds. If your reachable set is two or three apples, that is 20 to 30 points and the trip to get the apple already cost more than that. If even one jar is in reach, that is an extra 50 and you take it without thinking. Sequencing matters too: the golden apple should be picked up before the jars, not after.

Put together, the opening plan looks like this. Default to clearing inside 45 seconds. Take the jars that sit on your route and the kills that are within two seconds of it. When something charges you, do not dodge it, get above it. Extend chains only when your bounce is already going to land you on the next enemy. Then, when the timer rolls past 45 seconds, invert the whole plan: from that point on, sweep the remaining coins and enemies before heading for the exit.

One caveat on all of the above: it assumes you can clear reliably. Death zeroes the time bonus, which makes it the most expensive line item in the whole system by a wide margin. Apply these priorities only within the range where your clear rate holds up. If a decision pays 45 points and you fall on eight of every ten attempts, that decision is not generating score, it is spending it.