Turbo Pudding

HelicornFriday pudding

What Thistle wears: three paint jobs from Greenfold Meadows

· The Turbo Pudding team · 4 min read

Thistle in Cornflower hovers over a green meadow under a pale sky, seen from the front at a slight angle: a round white helicopter with a big round blue glass canopy, two deep blue hoppers with bright blue nose cones on short gray stub wings, bright blue bands along her side and on her back behind the canopy, a dark nose cannon, gray skids, a deep blue fin at the end of a long white tail boom, a blue cap on the rotor and long dark rotor blades with pale tips; below her the grass rolls away to a wooden fence, pine trees and round leafy trees on the right, and a small scorched patch ringed with flowers lies at the bottom left

It’s Friday, so here’s something light: what Thistle wears. Thistle is the helicopter you start Helicorn with, and Hatch’s Shed sums her up as “Old Hatch’s seeding helicopter, now with a cannon. Steady and forgiving.” After thirty years of sowing clover, she has earned a wardrobe.

In Greenfold Meadows, the free first world, she can wear three paint jobs: Ranger Stock, Sunrise and Cornflower. The picture at the top is Cornflower. More about it at the end.

Three colors and not one more

Every paint in the game swaps exactly three colors: the body, the stripe and the accent. On Thistle, the body color covers her round pod, the long tail boom and the little stabilizer at its end. The stripe color goes on the wide band around her middle, the band on her back behind the canopy, a short band on the tail boom, the nose cones of both hoppers and the cap on top of the rotor. The accent takes a thin line along her back, the tail fin and the two hoppers themselves, the seed pods on her stub wings that hold her missiles these days.

The rest never changes: the glass canopy, the dark nose cannon and rotor mast, the gray metal skids, the dark rotor blades with white tips, and the white ranger number 7 on both sides of the fin.

Ranger Stock

Ranger Stock is what she wears from the very first minute: a white body, an orange stripe and green trim. That makes her hoppers and fin green and the noses of her hoppers orange. It costs nothing, and you can always switch back to it.

In the drizzle of Wet Gravel, Thistle in Ranger Stock hovers beside a long black road with yellow center lines, seen from the front at a slight angle: a round white helicopter with a big blue glass canopy, two green hoppers with orange nose cones on short stub wings, orange bands along her side and on her back behind the canopy, an orange cap on the rotor, a dark nose cannon, gray skids and a green fin with a white mark at the end of her tail boom; round leafy trees and pines stand on the green hills behind her, a few small flowers grow at the bottom left, and an orange traffic cone peeks in at the bottom edge
Searched “what to wear to a road job.” White, orange and green.

Paid in patches

Paints aren’t sold for Scrap. They open with Ranger Badges, the little patches you earn in missions, and each mission holds three. Trail cleared is for finishing it. Clean sweep is for taking out at least four out of five of the machines and buildings that showed up on screen. All gold targets is for the three targets in every mission that wear a gold beacon, and each of those pays double Scrap as well. A badge counts once, whichever difficulty you earned it on.

Greenfold Meadows has four missions, Fresh Tarmac, Roller Rows, Wet Gravel and The Big Dig, so there are 12 badges to earn in the browser. In the Shed, the paint chips sit under a count of how many of the 12 you have. A paint you can’t wear yet shows how many badges it asks for, and when you earn one, the mission report says so: “New paint: Sunrise.”

Sunrise, at 3 badges

Sunrise is the warm one: a cream body, a red-orange stripe, and golden yellow trim, hoppers and fin. It’s also the quickest to get. Three badges is exactly what one mission holds, so a perfect run of Fresh Tarmac, finished, swept and with all three gold targets down, opens it on the spot.

Thistle in Sunrise, seen from her right side, hovers over a brown dirt track that runs down a green slope: a cream helicopter with red-orange bands along her side and on her back, a thin golden line on top, a golden yellow hopper with a red-orange nose cone on her stub wing, a red-orange cap on the rotor and a long cream tail boom that ends in a golden fin in shade, with a big pale number 7 on it above the black cross of the tail rotor; behind her stand a red barn with a gray roof and a tall gray silo among pines and round trees, and a yellow road sign leans at the bottom left
Typed “lucky number for a helicopter.” Hers is on the fin.

House rules

Next to the list of paints in the game’s files sit three rules that every one of them follows. Thistle’s body stays light, so she is always the brightest thing on the screen. No paint is yellow with black. And no paint is magenta, because magenta belongs to the other side: it’s the color of enemy fire, and a machine’s beacon turns magenta just before it shoots. Even the names had to pass a test, for how they sound in slang.

One paint each

Every paint fits all three helicopters, and each helicopter keeps its own. Picking a paint costs nothing and changes only the helicopter you’re looking at, so in the full game Dandelion and Ironbark can wear something else entirely. Changing your mind is just as free.

Six more paints wait beyond Cornflower: Fernleaf, Snowcap, Redrock, Tidewater, Aurora and Goldleaf, from 14 badges up to 66. Each asks for more than Greenfold’s 12, so in the browser their chips show just a swatch of color and the words “Full game.”

Cornflower, at 8 badges

Back to the picture at the top. Cornflower is the cool one: a white body with a touch of blue, a bright blue stripe and deep blue trim, hoppers and fin. Eight badges can’t come from fewer than three missions, so this one asks for a good run through most of Greenfold. It’s the last paint the free world can open, and from the front, with her big round canopy between two blue hoppers, it may be the one that suits her best.

World 1, Greenfold Meadows, is free to play in your browser at helicorn.com, and all three paints above are in it. The full game, all six worlds, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on its Helicorn page.

More about Helicorn

HelicornScreenshot Saturday

Helicorn: postcards from all six worlds

Blossom trees, red mesas, open sea, a snowy glacier, a foundry and an endless car park: one frame from each of Thistle’s six worlds.