When do blimps spawn, and how do I kill them?

If you look under your Steam directory, SteamApps/Common/Luftrausers/data/res/ there's a number of json files that contain all the variables. spawncoodinator.json and spawncoordinator_sfmt.json contain all the spawn characteristics for the two modes.

There's a number of "difficulty levels" that determine what spawns when. You initially start at a difficulty level of 60 and the Blimp only spawns at the last difficulty level of 600.

So if you're really having a hard time getting the blimp to appear, you can set it so the blimp can spawn at any difficulty level by adding it to the JSON array list:

{
    "difficulty" : -1,
    "choose" : ["Blimp", "Fighter"] 
}

After which you get it to spawn more frequently, you can easily take out the blimp by using the nuke body. After hitting it with a few shots of whatever weapon you are using.


There is no certain way to spawn a blimp, but it seems that the more enemies you kill and the higher difficulty/score you have, the higher chances there are of spawning blimps (oh,and more blimps spawn after you kill one). As for killing it, cannon seems to kill it in 5-6 shots, armor helps a lot, and engine can by any as long as it isn't underwater or gungine (they make things worse), although superboost seems to be a popular choice.


Luftrauser has a hidden score called difficulty. Killing enemies increases the difficulty score, and different enemies increase it by different amounts. Difficulty starts at 60 and blimps "start spawning" at 600, but luftrauser will only spawn up to (0.001 * difficulty) blimps at a time, which means you actually need 1000 difficulty to spawn at least one blimp.

The difficulty increases for each enemy type are:

  • Fighter: 15
  • Jet: 25
  • Ace: 80
  • Laser Ace: 80
  • Small Boat: 40
  • Big Boat: 160
  • Submarine: 250
  • Submarine gunship: 1500
  • Missile: 5
  • Blimp: 1000

To keep track of your progress toward a blimp without being a human calculator, count "fighter equivalent" kills in your head. The fighter equivalent kills of an enemy kill is the difficulty score increase of the enemy kill divided by the difficulty score increase of a fighter kill minus the remainder. For instance, since a small boat kill increases difficulty by 40, it's fighter equivalent kills is 40 / 15 = 2 + 10 / 15 ≈ 2.

Since blimps start spawning at 1000 difficulty, it takes at least (1000 - 60) / 15 ≈ 63 fighter equivalent kills for them to start spawning.

The fighter equivalent kills for each enemy are:

  • Fighter: 1
  • Jet: 1
  • Ace: 5
  • Laser Ace: 5
  • Small Boat: 2
  • Big Boat: 10
  • Submarine: 16
  • Submarine Gunship: 100
  • Missile: 0
  • Blimp: 66

And the minimum number of fighter equivalent kills for each enemy to start spawning are:

  • Fighter: 0
  • Jet: 7
  • Ace: 30
  • Laser Ace: 30 (1.67% chance of spawning instead of an ace)
  • Small Boat: 0
  • Big Boat: 11
  • Submarine: 28
  • Submarine gunship: 28 (must have killed at least one submarine, then 33.33% chance of spawning instead of a submarine)
  • Missile: 5
  • Blimp: 63

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Luftrausers