Fruit Drop Puzzle Tips: Where to Drop in Pomeroll

The first fruit drop puzzle tip for Pomeroll is to aim at a fruit of the same size: our bot that did this lasted a median of 136 drops and scored 416, while the bot that always dropped in the middle lost after 21 drops with 25. We let a script play 18 rounds on the real page and wrote down what happened, so every number below comes from the game itself.

How a round works

You slide a fruit along the top of the jar and let go. It drops from the same height every time, and when two fruits of the same size touch they become one fruit of the next size. The jar has ten sizes, from a blueberry to a watermelon. A merge scores the size of the pair, so a pair of apples (size 5) is worth 5 points. If a fruit that has settled stays above the dashed line for three seconds, the round is over.

What fruit you get

Across the 18 rounds, the first seven fruits were 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4 in 18 of 18 rounds, and the 1459 fruits after that never went beyond size 5. Their mix, counted over all rounds:

Counts come from the bot rounds below; the share is a count of what we saw, not a promise about the next game.

Three ways to aim

A script played the page at 1280 by 800 pixels with real mouse clicks and read the jar from the page, which publishes the position and size of every fruit. Each rule was played for six seeded rounds and stopped at 150 drops:

• Always the middle: every fruit is released at the centre of the jar.
• Random spot: every fruit is released at a random place inside the walls.
• Aim at a match: a fruit goes onto the highest fruit of its own size; if there is none, large fruit goes to the left wall and small fruit next to the biggest pile.

One test browser and 18 rounds, so treat the numbers as a small sample. The bot never uses the three helpers and cannot plan; it only reacts to where fruit is.

Checking the rules on the page

We watched 40 merges one at a time. In 39 of them the score went up by exactly the size of the two fruits that disappeared. For the dashed line we pushed a heap of big fruit over it and counted game steps (sixty per second): the countdown ran about 3 seconds, and the round closed about 2.4 seconds later while the offending fruit flashed red.

The line timing is one run, read about ten times a second, so it is good to roughly a tenth of a second.

4 tips from the numbers

• Do not fill the middle. The middle-only bot piled fruit under its own drop point and lost after 21 drops; spread the weight out.
• Drop on a twin. Aiming at a fruit of the same size lifted the median from 25 to 416 points.
• Know the early queue. You always start with three 1s, two 2s, a 3 and a 4, so the first seven drops are predictable.
• Watch the line, not the score. Three seconds is long enough to fix a tall pile, so pop or blast something instead of waiting for it to settle.

Where to try it

Try it yourself in Pomeroll. For another quick game about where to put things, Slabspire is a one-button tower stacker, and Pathloom is a glowing maze game.