Guide
Flying
Everything else in Paulie Paulie sits on top of the flight model. It is the reason the game exists: the family fell for Dragonflight's dragonriding together, and this is that feeling rebuilt around a small bird. (The full story is on the home page.) What follows is the whole system, in the order you will meet it.
Taking off
Double-tap Space on the ground and you are airborne. One tap is a jump; a second tap inside the window opens flight. You can fly from level 1, since it is the first level-up reward rather than something the endgame hands you.
There is one restriction. You cannot take off while something is fighting you, because disengaging should cost a moment of exposure. Otherwise flight would be a free escape from every fight you picked.
Vigor, the fuel
Every flap in the air spends one Vigor charge. How many you hold grows as you level:
| Level | Charges |
|---|---|
| 1 | 3 |
| 5 | 4 |
| 10 | 5 |
| 20+ | 6 |
On the ground, charges refill steadily, and about twice as fast once you have been out of combat for a few seconds. In the air they barely refill at all. Cruise in a straight line and you are slowly running out of sky.
Thrill of the Skies, or diving to refuel
The way out is to dive. Push your speed well past cruise, roughly half again as fast, which a shallow dive reaches easily, and Thrill of the Skies engages: charges start flowing back while you hold the speed. The wind streaks and the cyan glow on your energy bar tell you it is working.
How fast the charges return depends on your level, and the curve is steep on purpose. At level 1 a charge takes about sixteen seconds of diving. By level 15 it is under four. At the cap it is about one second, which is effectively unlimited flight for a pilot who keeps moving. The intended arc is that the mid-game still plans routes around the tank, and only a capped bird stops thinking about it.
Run the tank low and the bird gets heavy. Below a quarter of your energy, flight speed halves until you recover. Treat it as the fuel light: land, or find a dive, before you reach it.
The two flaps
What a flap does is read from where you are aiming.
- Surge Forward. Aim level or downward and the flap is a hard push along your heading. This is the racing flap, the chase flap, the one you will use most.
- Skyward Ascent. Aim upward and the flap trades most of that push for height: a strong climb with a little forward drift.
Surge Forward has a second job, borrowed straight from Dragonflight's Whirling Surge. It disrupts whatever is flying in the cone ahead of you. Flying creatures are knocked back and staggered for a moment; a rival player is knocked out of the sky entirely and has to recover on the ground. It deals no damage at all, so think of it as a positioning tool, and in an aerial fight position is most of what decides the outcome. Each target gets a few seconds of immunity afterwards, so you cannot chain-juggle the same enemy.
Speed, the halt, and the glide
Cruise is comfortable. A committed dive with surges behind it runs at around three times cruise speed, and it feels like it: the field of view widens and speed lines stream past. The bird itself flies the way you steer it, nosing into your aim so a dive reads head-first, and banking into turns the way a real flier does. None of that is decoration. The body attitude is how you read your own heading at speed.
The aerial halt
Double-tap Space while flying and you brake hard. Nearly all of your momentum goes, you hover briefly in low gravity, and you are still in flight. It is how you stop overshooting a landing pad, a checkpoint line or a fight. A brake, in other words, and not a landing.
The glide
If you are falling rather than flying, because you stepped off a branch or ran out of charges, a single tap opens a glide: a brisk, steerable forward descent that prevents fall damage. It covers a surprising amount of ground, so a drop from the home tree's canopy turns into a travelling glide rather than a plummet. Tap again to cancel it and fall properly. A double-tap while falling opens full flight, charges permitting.
Landing
Aim down and touch a surface, and you have landed. Or tap the jump control in flight for a controlled descent: a brief hover, then a gentle sink to the ground. Speed matters. A gentle touchdown is free, and a full-speed dive into the ground is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds.
The ceiling
Your altitude ceiling grows by ten metres per level, to a maximum of three hundred. The important part is where it is measured from: the surface you launched from, rather than the world's ground. Stand on a floating island and your ceiling starts at the island. Any place you can stand is a place you can fly from.
That rule exists because the obvious version, one absolute height limit, trapped players on the islands and yanked them below the plateau the moment they took off. The devlog tells that story properly. What keeps you off the higher islands now is what patrols them.
Where it all pays off
The flight model is the whole skill of racing. A course flown flat runs dry mid-lap. A course flown as a chain of shallow dives keeps Thrill engaged and charges flowing, so the best line is rarely the shortest one. If you can hold Thrill of the Skies through a full circuit, you have graduated.