This is one of the best virtual pinball experiences ever made, but it can get very chaotic and hard to follow, and it can be easy to quickly lose your balls, especially for pinball novices. There will be some tips below to increase your survival time on a given ball, but a small tip to start off with is to keep your flippers raised when the ball is looping around the tiers at lightning speed. The ball can sometimes go so fast that reaction time won't save you (and sometimes even so fast it can drop down and go into the gutter off-screen) so being prepared can save your ball in those situations. With your flippers raised, the ball on a loop will bounce into your flippers and usually hops over to your other flipper, which will let you control it and do a precision shot.

If you are new to pinball, you might just be mashing the flipper buttons whenever the ball gets close to them, in the hope it will hit something and increase your score. This is fine for exploring the table and developing some reflexes, but sooner or later it's going to result in the ball smashing into something nearby and quickly bouncing into the gutter, and you can often complete objectives much faster if you aren't randomly launching the ball around.

It's better to aim your shots for quickly completing objectives, snatching up jackpots, and increasing survival. The best way to learn precision shots is cradling the ball (holding the ball still in one of your raised flippers) and trying out different angles when launching it away. Some specific precision shots to escape tiers will be shown below.

Most virtual pinball games allow you to nudge, but XENOTILT demands you to nudge if you want to keep your balls and get ridiculous scores. The ball can move very quickly, and often the only way to catch the ball with your flippers (for cradling the ball in your flipper to line up a precision shot) is to brake nudge; when the ball is rolling down towards your flipper, simply nudge in the opposite direction of where it's going to slow it down, which allows you to catch it.

Nudging is also important for making certain precision shots (more on that below), and ofcourse, to simply nudge it where you want it to go when it's teetering on an edge. The game is quite forgiving and allows you to nudge often. It's an essential tool to survive and thrive in XENOTILT, and i advise consciously doing it often until it becomes a part of your pinball muscle memory.

Learning how to get out of the dreaded tier 1 consistently is going to be your most important survival skill. My advice is to spend as little time down here as possible, until you get a multiball. Having multiple balls in play gives you some room for error and will let you complete objectives safely in tier 1 while your other balls are doing god knows what elsewhere on the table, or are also chaotically bouncing around tier 1. Keep in mind how many balls you have left, but your main clue to being back on your last ball from the multiball is being zoomed in to the original zoom level again. The game zooms out a bit when you have multiple balls in play.

Even when using precision shots in tier 1 the game can catch you off guard with some enemies or bullets. When there is a bunch of stuff on the screen, use your flipper turrets first to clear the screen, and then go for precision shots. Getting the ball lock upgrade that allows you to pierce bullets will help a lot with the ball trajectory staying predictable.

On the image below you can see some precision shot examples on how to consistently escape tier 1.

If you are shooting with the bottom right flipper, hit the ball late so the ball goes toward your upper left flipper and continues upward to tier 2.

If you are shooting with the bottom left flipper, hit the ball somewhat late and immediately nudge it to the right to get the ball into the outer lane. This will deposit the ball on the left side into the pop bumpers, where it roughly has a 50/50 chance of being launched to tier 2. Otherwise it will be deposited back onto the bottom left flipper, and you can try again.

Experiment with these and more precision shots to easily escape tier 1!

Tier 2 is a much more comfortable place to be than tier 1, but you will be here regularly because of falling down from tier 3, so you might as well try to get back up to tier 3 as quickly as possible. The method i like to use is nudging the ball between the top left flipper and the little wall below it. This will drop the ball into the 3 lanes where it will either shoot up to tiers 3 or 4, or on some occasions come back to tier 2.

When the ball is slowly rolling down the top left flipper, nudge left as it's just past the flipper. Also nudge left when the ball is hovering around there from bouncing around on the boss.

Tier 3 is where i generally aim to be until i've finished the objectives here. The ball will inevitably fall down to tiers 1 and 2 and you will complete objectives there because of that, but tier 3 is the safe place to be. You can experiment with a bunch of precision shots here but the most basic ones are launching the ball from the middle of either flipper to start objectives and access the area where you can beat up the boss (tier 4).

These were just a few examples, and there are a variety of escape paths to discover, and ofcourse ways to reliably complete protocols, lock balls to get upgrades, and find secrets. Once you are able to survive for longer stretches of time you can experiment and find your own precision shots to add to your arsenal. Enjoy and good luck!