ZX Spectrum game · play free
Mothfall
Fly the Lamplighter through caves that narrow zone by zone, blasting glimmer, dart and spore moths without touching the rock.
In short
- Mothfall is an original side-scrolling cave shooter for the ZX Spectrum 48K and 128K.
- You fly the Lamplighter, a small lantern ship, while flocks of starmoths sweep in from the right.
- Touching the rock is fatal, and the cave narrows and twists more in every zone.
- Clearing a zone pays 1,000 points times the zone number; every second zone earns an extra lamp.
- It runs at a steady 50 frames a second, scrolling the cave one character at a time.
How to play Mothfall
The cave scrolls from right to left. Steer the Lamplighter up, down, forwards and back, and fire at the moths before they reach you. Anything you can see as rock will kill you, and the game checks the colours on screen, so what you see really is what you hit.
You start with three lamps (lives). After a crash, the cave straightens out into a safe tunnel while you get going again, and moths can't hurt you for a few seconds. The rock still can.
Know your moths
| Moth | Points | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Glimmer moth | 50 | Follows a gentle wave through the cave |
| Dart moth | 100 | Fast, and steers towards you |
| Spore moth | 150 | Slow, but fires spores that drift to your height |
Moths arrive in groups of four, or five from zone four. Zone one has only glimmer moths; darts join in zone two and spore moths in zone three.
How the zones get harder
Each zone changes the colour of the rock (blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, then round again). The gap between roof and floor shrinks a little every zone, the cave scrolls faster from zone three and again from zone six, groups of moths arrive more often, and more spores can be in the air at once. From zone eight onwards the difficulty stays at its peak.
Tips
- Stay in the middle of the gap where you can. It gives you room to dodge both ways.
- Shoot dart moths first. They come for you; the others mostly don't.
- Move vertically, not forwards, to dodge spores. They drift towards your height, not your position.
- Bank lamps early. Every second zone cleared gives you another, up to five.
How Mothfall was made
Mothfall is written in Z80 assembly and needs no Sinclair ROM routines. Its sprites are pre-shifted eight ways, so drawing them never has to shift pixels on the fly, and the cave only redraws the character cells that change. That keeps the busiest frames well inside the Spectrum's fiftieth of a second. An autopilot flew through to zones 8 to 13 on both the 48K and 128K, and the colours on screen matched the game's own map of the cave in every one of 925 checks.
On a 128K the AY chip plays "Lanterns in the Dark" on the title and "Starmoth Run" in the caves, with a new key and beat for each zone. Read about why colours on the Spectrum work in 8×8 cells in our guide to attribute clash, or see how to load your own tapes into Speccy, the same emulator.
