Every Setting and What It Does

Volumes, ghost piece, screen shake, scanlines and touch controls, plus which ones are worth changing.

Settings live on the title screen. Everything is stored on your device and nothing is sent anywhere.

Music and effects volume

Separate sliders. The music is a generated soundtrack whose tempo and arrangement climb with your level; the effects are the individual sounds for moves, locks and clears.

Both can also be muted instantly with M and N during play, which is faster than opening settings.

Ghost piece

The outline showing where the current piece will land. On by default.

Worth turning off deliberately once you are comfortable, as a training constraint: it forces you to build an internal model of the stack, which is what you rely on at speed anyway.

Screen shake

The camera kick on hard drops, line clears and level-ups. Purely cosmetic.

Turn it off if it makes the board harder to read, which it genuinely can during a long combo.

Scanlines

The faint horizontal lines over the whole screen. Also purely cosmetic, and the first thing to disable if you want maximum clarity.

Always show touch buttons

Forces the on-screen controls to appear even on a device with a keyboard. Occasionally useful on a touchscreen laptop or a tablet with a keyboard attached.

Clear best score

Resets your stored best to zero. There is no confirmation, because there is nothing irreversible about a number stored in your own browser.

Reduced motion

Not a setting but worth knowing: if your system asks for reduced motion, TETERI turns screen shake and scanlines off by default and damps the particle effects and full-screen flashes. All of it remains adjustable afterwards, since the system preference sets the starting point rather than the ceiling.

What is deliberately not adjustable

Auto-shift timings. Competitive games often expose these, and exposing them tends to produce players who spend more time tuning than playing. The values here are fast and sane.

Read next

• Why Play TETERIFree, instant, offline-capable, and it asks nothing of you before you can start. A straight account of what it offers.
• The Four Game ModesMarathon, versus CPU, split-screen and online duels, and what each is actually for.
• Every Control in TETERIThe complete list for keyboard, touch and gamepad, including the ones that are not obvious.
• Playing on a PhoneTwo layouts, two control schemes, and the specific problems that had to be solved to make touch work properly.
• Telling a Flick From a DragTwo gestures that differ only in speed, and why measuring velocity at release is the only reliable answer.
• Why the Simplest Games Outlive Everything Around ThemForty years of hardware generations have discarded nearly everything. A few rectangles survived all of them.