Something that was conspicuously absent when I began playing Audiosurf 2 was any useful, in-depth documentation. There were (with one or two exceptions) only a handful of resources that either address quite specific situations or are more suited to being called quick reference material than actual guides. With this in mind, I have decided to write my own guide with a somewhat broader focus now that I have reached a level of knowledge I am comfortable with.

With this guide, I have two main aims:

- To provide a more detailed introduction to Audiosurf 2 than is found in the game itself/"official" sources.

- To give an overview of the basic skills involved in playing Audiosurf 2.

This guide is not intended to give advice on how to increase your scores, and is aimed at complete newcomers to the game.

All of the information I'll try to pass across in this guide is either from my own experience as a player, or from discussions with friends who also play. I make no guarantees of 100% accuracy or even that it will be useful.


So, a brief overview of who I am. My name is Taylor, and I use the steam name Cilfaen pretty much exclusively. I have (no idea if I still do) held positions on the global high scores for a handful of highly contested songs in the mono, ninja, ninja turbo and mono turbo game modes, although by no means do I consider myself to be among the best players for any of them. In mono mode particularly I am nowhere near the upper echelons of players.

Whilst I do not consider myself to be among the best players, nor even a particularly consistent player, I have picked up some knowledge about how to play the game that I wish I'd known when I first started out, as I would have been saved a lot of frustration early on.

Some of the terms I'll be using throughout this guide.

Track - The surface generated from an audio file upon which all gameplay
takes place.

Block - Coloured blocks that are collected to gain points.

Spike - "bad" blocks with effects that vary depending on the game mode
being played.

Power block - Magic blocks that rain points.

Throne - The highest score for any given song.

In this section I shall be describing the various interfaces you need to understand and be able to navigate in order to get to actually playing Audiosurf 2. There will be no gameplay information here, That will be covered later on.

Unsurprisingly, the main menu is the first screen you see after loading up Audiosurf 2. This is mostly self explanatory, but I'll go over it a bit anyway. The screen is split into four sections, labelled 1-4 above.

This shows the currently selected song as well as three of the "popular songs" to select from. More explanation on what makes a song "popular" will come later. The only thing here not immediately obvious is that clicking on the album art of the current song will start playing the song, which can be useful for making sure you've found the song you meant to. It also lets you play music whilst on menu screens, which is something I've seen complaints about on the discussion board every now and then.

This shows the currently selected game mode and the next three of your most played game modes. More on what game modes are later. The "Browse modes" button allows selection from the range of included game modes as well as any that you have subscribed to on the steam workshop.

This shows the currently selected skin for the game. Skins are one of the most important aspects of Audiosurf 2, since they're responsible for all of the graphics once you're playing a song. The "Browse skins" button brings up all of the default skins plus any player-made skins from the workshop you've subscribed to.

The first three tabs in this box show you the global, regional, and friend-specific scoreboards for the currently selected song. The small line graph next to each players score shows the track profile for the run in which the player achieved that score, and the bar chart overlaid onto it shows where in the song they gained points. If anyone has a suspiciously high score, this graph will give an indication if they cheated or not (significantly different track profiles or scoring from the other highscores are things to look for).
In the case that someone may have cheated, the small flag to the right of the track graph allows you to report that score as suspicious. 10 unique reports will get a score removed from the scoreboard.

The final tab ("Dethrones") is where you find pretty much anything else score-related. This tab has a box to input your email address so you can be notified any time anyone takes one of your thrones. Notifications will appear in this list whenever you are:

- Dethroned (globally or regionally).

- Beaten by someone on your friends list.

- Challenged to play a song by someone on your friends list.

In the top right of this screen you will also see a gear icon and a cross. As you would expect, the gear icon takes you to the settings menu, and the cross exits the game.

On opening the music browser there are a few things to note. The left hand panel contains a list of directories to choose from. The right hand panel shows the songs (with album artwork) contained in the currently selected directory. You're probably wondering about the directories that clearly aren't from your own local files, so I'll give a brief overview of the options you have to choose from.

Audiosurf 2 is able to load music from any local file you have, as well as (most) songs that are uploaded to Soundcloud. By default, the search bar above the right hand panel will search both local files and Soundcloud files. The checkboxes next to the search bar allow you to filter out online/local results, but are currently only present in the "bleedingedge" beta build of the game. The Soundcloud search is a tad unreliable and I often need to try several variations of the search term to find the song I actually want.

On to the directories on the left hand side, then.

This is, as the name suggests, a single song that is chosen by Dylan each day. Competition for scoreboard spots on this song is usually fierce.

This directory will bring up a selection of the songs (from Soundcloud, not local files) that have cumulatively been played the most across all game modes in the recent past. I don't know exactly how long the time bracket is. As a side note, I have never seen the first song in this directory be anything other than the song of the day.

The last 90 songs that you have personally played in Audiosurf. Pretty simple.

This is quite a nice feature in concept, but in practise it's been implemented pretty sloppily. I have yet to find a way to choose the directories that Audiosurf 2 will scan for music, so for me this brings up maybe 4 songs and then a whole bunch of random sound files from applications and games. Not hugely useful.

The remainder of the directories listed here are your local files. You can see in the screenshot that it includes the default music library followed by a list of drive letters. Directory navigation is pretty simple, clicking on a name will open that directory, repeat until songs are listed.

It is worth nothing that in the "bleedingedge" beta build, only directories show up in this list, any songs/audio files in the directory will be displayed in the panel to the right.

The game modes that are available to play are separated into two general groups:

The mono colour modes involve blocks, spikes and power blocks and are generally considered to be easier to pick up than the puzzle modes. Each individual mono mode has a separate scoreboard.

Puzzle modes involve multiple distinct colours of block, colour and multiplier powerups and mode-specific game mechanics. Puzzle modes are more complex and therefore harder to pick up. The ``default'' puzzle modes (with the exception of casual puzzle) share the same scoreboard, with the symbol to the left of each score indicating the game mode it was obtained in.

I do not recommend playing puzzle modes until you're comfortable with the mono-colour modes.

There are some game modes that do not fit into these two groups which are available on the workshop, but these are usually unique and you'll need to read more about each specific mode to understand how they work.

Finding a skin that you're comfortable looking at is one of the most important things you can do to start enjoying Audiosurf2 to its fullest. This is entirely down to personal taste, and there are skins covering the entire range of preferences to choose from on the workshop. Personally, I prefer simple skins without many of the big flashy effects, but I know many people who prefer to play at the other end of the scale with the full-on epilepsy inducing ones.
Generally speaking I would say that the simpler skins are better for competitive play as there are fewer elements to distract you from the important things you should be concentrating on.

Obviously the most certain way to end up with a skin that perfectly suits your style of gameplay is to make it yourself, but I appreciate that not everyone will have the time, knowledge or inclination to do this.
That being said, the one part of skins that I would strongly recommend everyone to learn how to change is the camera position. I promise you, finding the camera that suits you best will only improve your play.

For general information on how to create and edit skins, Dylan's guide covers what you need to know. The details on editing the camera are found under the "Functions - Setters - The Player Vehicle" section.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=413812198

All of the screenshots in this guide will feature the clean_v1 skin of my own design. Yishai's Simple-Y skin is another that I would highly recommend.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=551365311 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=624920622

This right here is the main event. Unless you particularly enjoy looking at menu screens, the majority of your time playing Audiosurf 2 will be spent looking at this screen. There are several areas to cover, all of which can give you different information about the song you're playing.

The minimap in the top left of the screen contains a wealth of information about the song you're about to play, and yet is basically not explained in any way anywhere that I've managed to find.

Otherwise known as how steep/gentle the track is as it progresses, which will also be coloured according to your skins colour scheme for the intensity of the track. My skin, and (I believe) most of the default skins follow the same scheme: purple/blue show gentle speed, yellow/green are getting faster and orange/red are the most intense.

This is shown by a white circle along the track profile, and tells you how soon the track is likely to speed up and how long you have until the next power block, which brings me on to the white vertical lines shown along the track.

The white lines show power blocks, which are placed in corkscrews at "big moments'' in the song. There will be one power block (in this case the 5th one along the track, circled in blue for clarity) per song that is the "big'' power block for the song. Normal power blocks grant 150% of your grid score upon hitting them, the big power block grants 200%. The indication of which one this one is is a slightly longer white line on the minimap, that's it. Hitting this block also plays a cheering/applause sound, but that isn't useful as it doesn't happen until after you already hit it.



In puzzle modes, the white lines show the multiplier powerups, with 2x and 3x multipliers shown by the shorter white lines and the 4x multiplier shown by the longer line.
The colour lines pointing below the track profile represent both the paint powerup and the storm powerup, which always appear together side by side as the same color. Paint will turn your entire grid into one color, while a storm will drop nine blocks of that color on top of the grid, three per column, or filling available slots if less than three remain in a column.

In the top right of the screen is a scoreboard. This scoreboard is not, as many new players believe, showing other people playing the song at the same time as you. Whilst it does show how each players' score increased throughout the song, the scores shown here are taken from the leaderboards.

Scores you will see here are :
- The first and last placing scores on the both the global and regional leaderboards
- Your own personal best score
- Any scores that your friends have posted for the song.

The main thing to take away from this as a new player is that you should not feel disheartened if these scores are all well above yours, especially on tracks like the song of the day.

It's possible to disable this scoreboard from the game settings menu if you don't want to see it.

Ah the track. The way this looks varies from skin to skin, but for all of the default modes will be a single track with three lanes. Your ship travels immediately in front of your scoring grid, which is a 7x3 grid that ``stores'' blocks you collect to convert into points.

Blocks and spikes can appear in any of the three lanes, and when collected will go into the corresponding column of your grid. I won't go into too much detail about this since different modes all have slightly different effects on your grid.
Given that it's the main platform on which you play the game, there's remarkably little to actually say about the track in general.

The score screen is what you will see immediately after finishing a song. The panel on the left shows your raw score, any bonuses that you earned (which are game mode specific), and your final score that will get posted to the scoreboard. The scoreboard panel on the right is identical to the one shown in the main menu.
The buttons for your next action aren't particularly clear about what they do.
"Recommend to friends'' actually sends them a challenge that will show up in their dethrones tab, "Retry'' is self explanatory, and"`OK'' takes you back to the main menu screen, with the NEXT song in the directory as the currently selected song if you're playing a local file.
The play button in the bottom right hand corner does exactly the same thing as the retry button.

That's it! I've gone over all of the interfaces you're likely to see in your Audiosurf 2 experiences now. Next up, gameplay.

In this section I will go over a few things that are applicable to all game modes in audiosurf, from casual mode through to the wacky mods on the workshop. I shall be assuming absolutely no knowledge on the part of you, the reader, and explaining things from the ground up. Feel free to skip any sections you feel you already know enough about.

The general concept of audiosurf 2 is to "ride'' along a track that has been generated from an audio file. As you ride, there will be blocks along the track in time to the music. Your aim is to collect the blocks to gain points. Tips on how best to do this to maximise your score for each game mode can be found in other guides, but only really apply to people looking to play competitively and get their names on those leaderboards.

That's it. Armed with only this knowledge, you are fully capable of playing and enjoying Audiosurf 2.

If, however, you would like some more help with getting started on the long road to the global highscores of those popular songs, read on!

This one may seem fairly obvious, because it is. Being able to control your ship as you play a song is the entire basis of the game, and is integral to reaching those higher scores. However, there is more to it than you may think at first.

The first thing to tackle when it comes to controlling the ship is finding the input device that you are most comfortable with. Audiosurf 2 supports mouse, keyboard and gamepad input and it's up to you to experiment and find which you find easiest to use. At the current time (02/2016) I would strongly recommend using the mouse over keyboard or gamepad, for the reasons discussed in this thread on the discussion board. Until this bug is fixed, the mouse has a definite advantage.
This bug has, as far as I'm aware, now been fixed. Feel free to use whichever input device you'd like, although I'm still going to be an advocate of the mouse.


Another consideration that only really applies to the mouse is finding the sensitivity you prefer, either by using the in-game mouse sensitivity or custom DPI settings if your mouse supports them. Again, this is down to personal preference and what you find most comfortable. I play with quite a high sensitivity, but there are people who score higher than me consistently who use relatively low sensitivity.

Following this, it's important to understand where the hitbox (The section of the ship that actually collects blocks/spikes) lies. With the default ship, the hitbox does not cover the entire ship. It's only the very frontmost point.

This makes it possible to collect blocks that get placed immediately behind spikes by, very unintuitively I might add, moving your ship sideways into a spike so that the hitbox is in the correct place to pick up the block.


The ultimate aim of controlling your ship in Audiosurf 2 is being able to collect or miss every block (and spike) that you need to, regardless of block density or speed. This is not an easy thing to do by any means, especially in the faster modes, and even the best players are constantly improving their ship control through practise.

This section actually covers a few different concepts which will improve general play once you get the hang of them, although there is a high chance that your scores will drop slightly initially.

The general concept of track awareness is (surprise surprise) to be aware of what's going on on the track. For the purposes of this guide, the track can be split into four different ``sections'' to pay attention to; the minimap, the grid, the near track and the far track.
Awareness of each of these individually ties into awareness of the others, it's near impossible to separate them in practise, but in theory it's useful to consider them separately.

I have previously covered the information that the minimap provides, all of which is useful to take note of at the start of the track. As you play through the song, the thing that you really want to be aware of is roughly how long you have until the next power block/powerup, in order to know when you should begin building your grid to get the most points from it.

The grid is possibly the most important thing to be aware of, since filling it effectively is directly responsible for your score. Your grid consists of a number of rows and columns, which in the default game modes (except pusher) consists of 3 columns and 7 rows, for a total of 21 blocks. Each ``slot'' in the grid holds exactly one block, which is filled when you collect a block. I personally use the audio cue to know when I've picked up a block.

In the mono-colour modes, when you collect a block into any column which is already full your grid will be cleared and a corresponding number of points added to your score total.The newly-collected block will be the first to occupy your "new'' grid.
Clearing your grid is somewhat more complex in the puzzle modes, and is beyond the scope of this guide.

Being aware of the general state of your grid is important because it gives you an idea of which blocks to skip and which to collect. Again, this touches on advanced strategies for individual game modes but it's an important concept to understand.


The far track is what I refer to the section of track roughly 1 second ahead of your ships current positions. Exactly how far ahead of your ship this is depends on how fast the track is moving at the time. In the most intense moments of the song it could well be a fraction of a second, but on very slow parts it could be much longer. The point is that you should be focussing ahead of where your ship currently is and planning which blocks you want to hit before you actually reach them.



It follows then that the final area of the track, the near track, is the space between the grid and the far track. This is the space your ship actually moves in, but despite that it should be the area you pay the least direct attention to. This section of track is where you carry out the ship movement to follow the plan you created whilst looking at the far track, before it became the near track. This takes some practise, but when it comes to the faster songs the extra fraction of a second of planning time you gain will make all the difference.

That about sums it up I think. I've covered the information that each of the game interfaces gives you and how to understand it, and general gameplay information techniques that can be applied to pretty much all of the game modes available in Audiosurf 2 (Well, except the weird ones like audiosprint...).
If you notice any mistakes in this guide, or have anything you think I should include by all means leave a comment to let me know.

All that's left for me to do is wish you good luck in your Audiosurfing efforts, and thank you for reading my guide!

Ah. Here we find the real reason for me having written this guide. This is where I tell you that I stream Audiosurf 2 on twitch.tv at twitch.tv/cilfaen several days each week, and that if anything in this guide is unclear or you'd like some further tips, You're very welcome to drop by and ask, or request that I play stupidly hard songs.

At some point in the future I'm thinking about writing a guide aimed at more experienced players, with more mode-specific advice, if that ever happens then this space will magically turn into a link to that.