Hot Lava Cheats: Tips & Tricks Guide To Get the Fastest Times

The floor is lava… litereally! Child’s play time this is not, Hot Lava by Klei Entertainment is the real deal! Players will jump into the shoes of acrobatic action figures who must navigate a series of deadly courses filled to the brim with obstacles and of course hot lava that will melt you down to your plastic heart!

Hot Lava is a first-person platformer where every course is a practice in staying off the floor. In our Hot Lava tips and tricks guide, we will go over all the different movement abilities in the game.

Our goal is to help you become a great speedrunner so that you can get all those fast times needed for the stars. Let’s get started with our Hot Lava cheats, tips and tricks strategy guide to get the fastest times!

First off – change your controls (or use a controller)!

When you start up Hot Lava for the first time, you will be thrown into a tutorial which teaches you basic movement. By default, the game has movement set to gyro controls. You simply move your iDevice in whatever direction you want to move, and use the left virtual joystick to run.

This works to an extent, but if you do not have a lot of room or your gyro is being a little funky, you can also enable the setting which allows you to use both touch and gyro controls. (Settings -> Control Scheme)

“Look with Both” is our preferred control scheme if we must play using our iDevice. You can use gyro look for smooth turning and fine tuning, and touch look for big directional changes.

But, ultimately, if you have the means, we highly recommend playing Hot Lava with a controller with maximum accuracy. iOS 13 has been updated to connect to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers seamlessly, so if you have one of those lying around you are good to go. Other bluetooth enabled controllers may work as well.

You may be able to get through the courses with enough effort using the touch controls, but if you really want to get down and try for the fastest times, a controller is strongly recommended! Now, let’s get into it!

Play around in the level hubs!

The many courses in Hot Lava are accessed through various themed level hubs. The very first hub is the Gym Class, and you appropriately in the middle of a gymnasium. This is the perfect intro level to get you acclimated to the controls and feel of Hot Lava.

There are a lot of different sized platforms you can jump on, and there are also poles you can swing and climb on as well. We recommend taking a second to run around in the hub world to get used to the physics of the game. You can even meet other players in the hubs if you are playing online!

Take your time on your first run through a level!

Every course in Hot Lava has six achievement stars to collect. These will range from completing the course in a certain time, not using specific tools, or finding hidden shortcuts and the like.

Do not try to get all stars on your first run through a course, as it is a daunting task. Instead, on your first run through, take your time and study the course’s layout. If you want, you can even peek around to look for shortcuts and alternate paths.

Don’t sweat it if you die a lot and get a bad time; your first run through a course should be treated as a practice run. Run, get used to the controls, and most importantly have fun!

Time trampoline jumps right!

You will start to see trampolines as soon as the second course in Gym Class. When you jump on these things, they will bounce you up into the air at greater heights. If you jump at the right time, you will go even higher!

One mistake we were making is that we were timing our jumps to be exactly as we landed, but Hot Lava is actually a lot more lenient than that. If you jump about half a second before you hit the trampoline, it will count as a timed jump. You will know if you did it right when you hear a different sound than usual.

Well timed jumps preserve your speed in addition to the boosted bounce, so they are very important for getting through courses quickly.

Perform perfect jumps to carry your momentum!

You may have noticed that little bar at the bottom of the screen. Think of it as your “jump momentum” meter. After you jump and land, you will notice a small blip on the meter start from the middle and roll to the right, until it is off the gauge.

This is basically a visual indicator of whether or not your jumps are keeping your momentum. If you see a little number above the meter, that means you are gaining that much speed.

Going into a full run on a flat floor will cap you out at 3.50 m/s. With the help of slants, slopes, and well timed jumps, you will gain speed. When you make your next jump, take a look at where the blip stops on the meter.

If the blip stops in the yellow area of the meter, that is the zone where your jump maintains your momentum, and adds more depending on the terrain. If you jump too late and the blip goes into the white area, you will lose some momentum. So string together rapid jumps to really bring on the speed!

How to boost and when to use it?

Here is an advanced technique that is a bit tricky to pull off at first, and it requires some dexterity. You may have accidentally filled up some white meters around your center reticle. What’s up with that?

That’s boosting! To perform a boost properly, you must jump and strafe left or right. When you are in the air, you have to rotate your view in the same direction you are strafing. If done correctly, you will hear a sound and one of the meters will fill up.

Another sound will notify you of a fully charged boost, and when you hit the ground you will get a big speed boost. Using boosts in conjunction with perfect jumps is the key to hitting those hard time attack records!

Try practicing this first in a hub so that you do not have to worry about lava. Once you get the basics of it down, the hardest part comes next: actually applying it to your runs!

If you have ran through a couple of courses, you probably noticed that more often not the game likes to lay patterns down in a sort of zig-zag formation. These stretches are the best place to do boosts, as boosting moves you in a sort of zig-zag motion.

As a side note, you do not need to fully charge a boost to get the increase in speed. Even partially filled boosts will give you a small bump up!

Utilize the crouch jump for low clearance!

Remember that you can crouch! This slows you down obviously, but you can also jump while crouching for a crouch jump. As you can probably guess, you do not go as high as a normal jump, but this is useful in several situations.

The first place you will probably get a use of this technique is the Bouncy Castle in the Playground hub world. There are rotating poles that will knock you off of pillars if you are not crouching. You can also crouch jump over them to get past.

If you have a bunch of platforms packed closely together and you are having trouble making short precise jumps, try crouch jumping!

Earn stars to unlock new hubs and toys!

Every time you earn a star, you will earn some experience. When you level up, you will unlock a new hub world and some fancy new toys to customize your figure. Once you have gotten a bit of experience under your belt, why not revisit earlier levels and shoot for all of the stars? It will be good practice!

And with that, you are armed with all of the techniques you need to get the fastest times! From here on out, it is simply practice until you get it. If you have any other tips or tricks to share, let us know in the comments below!