FlowState: ATC

How to Play: A Quick Guide

Rift Update

NEW May 2026

Portals mode adds two new hazards you need to watch out for:

  • Punchers: purple glowing circles on the map. If a plane flies into one, it gets sent off in a completely random direction with a new destination. Steer your planes around them.
  • Portals: blue and yellow circles that come in linked pairs. A plane that enters one immediately exits from the other, keeping its speed and heading. Use this to your advantage or it will catch you off guard.

From now on your control panel shows FL (flight level) instead of a raw altitude number, and speed in knots. Adjust them the same way as before: use the sliders to change flight level and airspeed, and the turn buttons to change heading.

Turbulence Mode

NEW June 2026

A whole new weather system. The sky fills with drifting clouds and the wind is never still:

  • Wind: a shifting current pushes every plane off its commanded heading. Read the wind dial and lead your turns into it. As the waves climb, the weather darkens from fair clouds into a full thunderstorm with lightning.
  • Storm cells: dark swirling clouds with a glowing red core. Fly a plane through the core and it gets stirred — spun violently off course onto a random heading. Steer around them.

Everything else works the same: guide each plane to its correct exit edge, just with the wind and storms working against you. Turbulence has its own leaderboard.

1. The Goal

Welcome, Controller! Your mission is to guide airplanes safely from where they appear to their designated exit. Each plane's destination (N, S, E, or W) is shown in its info tag. Successfully guide a plane to the correct edge to score points!

2. Taking Control

To control an airplane, simply click on it. The plane will be highlighted with your unique cursor color, and the control panel will appear on the right side of the screen. Only one player can control a plane at a time.

3. The Control Panel

The control panel is your command center for each plane:

  • Altitude Slider: Adjust the plane's altitude. Planes at different altitudes (more than 50 units apart) can cross paths safely without causing a warning.
  • Speed Slider: Increase or decrease a plane's speed to manage spacing and prevent traffic jams.
  • Turn Buttons: Use the left and right arrow buttons to change the plane's heading by 15 degrees with each click.

4. Scoring & Game Over

  • +1 Point: A plane reaches its correct destination.
  • -1 Point: A plane exits through the wrong border.
  • Game Over: The game ends immediately if your score drops below zero, or if two planes collide.

5. Danger Warnings!

Keep your planes separated! If two planes get too close at a similar altitude, the entire screen border will flash red. This is your final warning to take evasive action. If they get any closer, it's game over for everyone.

The exact thresholds are worth memorising, because they tell you how to escape a conflict. Two aircraft are only in danger when they are within 30 pixels of each other horizontally and less than 50 apart in altitude. The warning flashes at 75 pixels, under the same altitude condition. Both conditions have to be true at once, which leads to the single most useful habit in the game: a change of flight level resolves any conflict instantly, without changing where either aircraft is going.

6. Your First Three Waves

At wave 1 an aircraft arrives every five seconds, which is far more time than it feels like. Use it deliberately. For each new arrival, do three things before you look away: check which edge it has to leave from, point it there, and put it on a flight level that nothing else nearby is using.

Aim to give every aircraft a level that belongs to its destination: one level for northbound traffic, another for eastbound, and so on. It takes a few seconds per plane while arrivals are slow, and it means that by wave 8, when a new aircraft appears every 1.5 seconds and you have no spare attention at all, most of your potential conflicts have already been designed out of existence.

The other early habit is the sweep. Every few seconds, run your eyes around the edges of the radar and check that every aircraft near a boundary is pointed at the right one. Planes that are about to exit through the wrong edge are the most common way a run ends, and they are always avoidable, because the mistake is forgetting about them rather than misjudging them.

7. What Each Wave Changes

You advance a wave every 10 points, and two things get harder at once. Arrivals speed up from one every five seconds to one every 1.5 seconds, reaching that floor at wave 8. Aircraft also get faster: each new plane spawns 8% quicker than the wave before, and that keeps climbing with no ceiling.

Faster aircraft are what really raise the difficulty, because your warning band stays a fixed 75 pixels wide. The quicker planes close, the less time that band gives you. This is why the speed slider matters more than most players think: slowing an aircraft that is already correctly lined up buys you reaction time everywhere else on the board, and speeding up one that has clear air ahead gets it out of your sector and off your mind.

8. Where To Go Next

The guides section goes deeper on everything above, using the real numbers from the simulation: separation and the altitude system, scoring, waves and the miss budget, wind and storm cells in turbulence mode, portals and punchers, and coordinating a sector with another player.

Questions the guides do not answer are probably in the FAQ.