Juicing Meepits

How the game works is simple: click on the pipes to rotate them and allow the juice to flow from the starting pipe to the meepits waiting in the tree. For the first level, you are given 60 seconds to save 5 meepits, one at a time. If you fail to feed a meepit in time, you'll lose a life! You start with three lives, represented by the small red meepits perched on a branch below your score. Since you have such a surplus of time for the first couple of levels, your goal should be to use as many pipes as possible. For each piece of pipe that juice flows through, you get one point, and if it's the same colour juice as the meepit, you get two points/pipe! The colours you'll see in the first level are red, yellow, and blue.

The first thing you should do in each level is turn away the last pipe to ensure that you don't accidentally feed the meepit too early and waste your chance at lots of points. Once all of the other pipes (or as many as possible) are juiced up, flip around the last pipe to feed (juice? what's the drink word for feed?) the meepit, which will not only give you lots of points at 2points/pipe, but you also score 50 bonus points for using every piece of pipe!

There are a few different types of pipe you will see throughout the game. The most common is the corner pipe, which has two openings. You'll also have many horizontal and vertical straight pipes. Less common, but the best pipe in the game, is the T-intersection pipe. This pipe has three openings, which greatly helps in providing flexibility with your juice pathway, as well as including extra pipes to gain those important points. Lastly, there is the four-way pipe. This pipe is great for distributing juice to as many other pipes as possible, but can be very frustrating if it appears in the first column next to the wrong coloured juice outlet. Don't think that you can just avoid it and it'll disappear for the next meepit either – the pipes not used simply drop down to the empty space below them throughout the game. If you get a 4-way pipe in such a spot, I normally restart on level one, or simply grumble in a later level and try to use all the pipes, even if I feed the meepit the wrong coloured juice.

From the second level onwards, meepits that aren't any of the base colours will appear, so you'll have to start combining colours to make these meepits happy. As you should be able to figure out, red + blue = purple, red + yellow = orange, and yellow + blue = green. Combining all three colours will give you pink juice!

As there are now two meepits on the tree at any time, you have to start prioritising which meepit to feed first. What you must do is always try to feed the meepit with the least amount of time left. As mentioned above, use as many pipes as possible, but WITHOUT jeopardising the other meepit's life. So, basically, don't spend 45 seconds trying to feed the first meepit with all of the pipes and give yourself five second to feed the second, because that scenario is not going to end well.

It is also around this time that bonus fruits will start appearing on screen. These are blue round fruits that are worth 25 points, and red and green fruits that are worth 10 points. Later on, apple cores will appear, and these result in a loss of 10 points from your score. However, you only gain or lose these points if juice flows through the fruits. My suggestion is for you to not going out of your way to collect or bypass these bonuses. The most important thing is using as many pipes as possible, so if the bonus fruits are close by, then link them in, but don't waste too much time trying to collect them.

When you've only got one meepit left to collect before finishing a level, rather than feeding just it and leaving the other one there, you should link the two together and feed them both, giving you +3 for each pipe rather than +2, assuming you feed them the correct colour juice for at least one of the meepits.

Things start to become more difficult once you have three meepits appearing at a time. Sometimes if you've had a tricky run with an earlier meepit in a level, multiple meepits will be running low on time. If that's the case, I also suggest combining them, and feeding them a colour to keep at least one happy. That way, whilst you only manage to get +4 for one layout, rather than +2 three times, you get to keep all of your lives, which is the hugely important.

That's about it! For the rest of the game, you'll just have to feed more meepits each level for less and less time. Seriously, it gets crazy fast. The most important thing to remember is just to use as many pipes as possible for the time you have, especially in the earlier levels, and you should easily be able to get the avatar score!