CP Knowledge: Cart Surfer

Welcome to another post of the series CP Knowledge. This is a series where I will talk about every single minigame on Club Penguin, continuing today with Cart Surfer. The posts include how you play the game, its history, stamps, trivia, high scores, and a personal review of the game! Hope you enjoy it!


GAMEPLAY AND INTRODUCTION

The popular single-player minigame Cart Surfer is located inside the Mine. The game’s main objective is to perform different tricks to earn points, similar to Catchin’ Waves. Instead of surfing though, you are riding a minecart on a track. The game ends when you either finish the track or crash three times. Crashing is done by either tilting too much to one side, or missing a turn. There are 12 different tricks that earn you a set amount of points (excluding Jump, which doesn’t earn you anything). There are also two other tricks, but the amount depends on how long you perform them. You can also bring your black puffle along in this game mode, which may help you recover from a wobble.

   In Club Penguin Rewritten, there is another game mode called the Hardcore Mode. You only have one life, but the track never ends. Therefore, you can earn an infinite amount of points, as long as you have the time and stay alert. The Hardcore Mode is equipped with a leaderboard, which resets every Sunday at 12 am PST. If you finish first on the Leaderboard, you get a golden Cart Surfer pin and a postcard.


HISTORY

An early prototype for Cart Surfer was called Cave Runner, but Club Penguin game mod Chris ‘Screenhog’ Hendricks said the game was very underwhelming. “We switched to Cart Surfer for a reason…”, and “I’ll put it this way… you’d play it once. Maybe twice. And then you’d forget it completely”, are things he has said on his Twitter account, suggesting that the game was indeed very bad. The finished game was originally released on June 6, 2006, after having been delayed for one week. On July 17, 2007, three new tricks were added to Cart Surfer. They are known as the Cart Slam, Handstand, and Run on Tracks. The stamps for the game were all released on October 4, 2010. 

   On Club Penguin Rewritten, there was a redesign of the game on January 24, 2018. The Hardcore Mode was added, along with the leaderboard. On February 8, 2019, the font for the text was changed. The Hardcore Mode also received its own music, written by Chris ‘Screenhog’ Hendricks (he worked for the original Club Penguin but has occasionally made some music for CPR). 


STAMPS 

The stamp update contained twelve stamps, and no more were added later on. Club Penguin Rewritten changed that and added four more to go along with the Hardcore Mode. There is one easy stamp, six medium and hard ones, two of difficulty extreme, and one insanity stamp. One of the only three insanity stamps in the game.


COINS

Coins, cart, and surfer are words often said in the same meaning. Cart Surfer is easily one of the best games to earn coins fast. Like in most games, the coin system works like this: you earn points, and get the number of points divided by ten. The best tricks are Flip and Spin. A Flip can be done by pressing the down arrow and then the spacebar. In order to do a Spin, you have to press the spacebar and then the left/right arrow. Remember to press the keys one by one, and not at the same time. If you do the same trick twice in a row, you will only get the half amount the second time. The best strategy is thus to alternate Flips and Spins, and Grind around the corners. To Grind, you press the down arrow and then the left/right arrow.

   The reason behind these three being the best is that they earn you the most points, in the shortest amount of time. As with all games, if all stamps are earned you get the doubled amount. A quite advanced Cart Surfer meta was developed to earn penguins over 1000 coins per game (with all stamps earned). I won’t go into all the details here, since there are way too many. But a normal game of Cart Surfer is eight turns long. Using the crash technique you can get a game of thirteen turns. The regular crash technique involves crashing on the 7th turn and then every second turn until the end. That will get you around 900 coins, which is frustratingly close to 1000 coins. Therefore, penguins have discovered the optimal crashing strategy depending on what turn pattern you get. 


HIGH SCORE

The highest score for Hardcore Mode that I could found is 515 446 points. Absolutely insane. It was set by a penguin called Avatar and uploaded to his Youtube ShinobiCP. The record was set in February 2018, so it has likely been broken. But there is no way we can know for sure. For the regular mode, the best score I could find is 6770, a score that got penguin Dozi 1354 coins. The video was uploaded on Dozi’s Youtube channel AsuraTKD in March 2020.


TRIVIA

  • The description for the earn coins-stamps was updated from “Earn (amount) coins in one game”, to “Earn (amount) coins in classic mode”. This was due to the Hardcore Mode being added.
  • A Penguin on Reddit once reported that he had gotten negative coins. 
  • Cart Surfer is the only game in Club Penguin Rewritten that allows you to obtain a pin.
  • There was a glitch where the player could get 6000 coins in a matter of seconds, this was later patched. 
  • Sometimes a black puffle would briefly appear even if you didn’t have one with you. Your penguin would also turn yellow (unless your penguin already was yellow), this glitch was never fixed. 
  • At one time, you were able to earn more than the maximum amount of stamps available, presumably due to a removed stamp. When you completed a game, it would display as “13/12” stamps. This glitch was never fixed.

PERSONAL REVIEW

I know I’ve said this in almost all of my posts, but I really like this game. I like almost all Club Penguin minigames, so I will most likely continue to say that :). However, the game is very simple, but it is actually a bit hard. I’d rate this game 8/10, it is such an amazing game in terms of making a fortune, but also because of the stamps. There are many stamps to collect, and the ones that include playing the Hardcore Mode aren’t always that easy. If you like to do repetitive tasks (like I do), playing the Hardcore Mode while listening to music or something like that can be quite fun to do. Unfortunately, the leaderboard is down due to the switch to HTML5 right now. But when it will be up again I highly recommend trying to get your score there!


Did I miss anything? What do you think of Cart Surfer?

Comment below!

That’s all for me today, hope you enjoyed this post! See ya next time!

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