Point further down the fall line. There is no boost button and no accelerator - gravity is your engine, and how much of it reaches you depends on the angle between your board and the slope. Riding straight down is the fastest and least controllable line on the mountain; cutting across is the slowest and safest. Tucking (Space) sheds friction, but it takes away both your edge and how quickly the board answers the wheel - tucked, you need roughly twice the distance to dodge something. It is the same trade in miniature, not a free top-up.

Those are ice. Your board still turns on ice - the input is not being ignored - but there is almost no edge grip, so your velocity keeps going the way it was already going while the board points somewhere else. You slide. That is what ice does in real life and it is why the fast line and the safe line are rarely the same line here.

A storm front coming down the mountain. It moves at a fixed speed within a face and steps up at every face boundary, so it is a clock that ticks harder the deeper you get - not a rubber-band system that reacts to how well you are doing. You do not have to outrun it in any given moment, you have to average faster than it over the whole descent, which means a crash costs you far more than the speed you lost in it. Gates and clean landings are the only two things that push it back.

Hit a ramp or a cornice and steer in the air to spin. Only complete rotations count: land a full 360 and the storm loses 38 m, but come down half-turned and the board is crossed against the direction you are actually moving, the edge cannot catch, and you wash out. So a spin is a bet that you can finish it before the snow arrives. A 720 needs about twice the hang time, which only the cornices on the third face give you - and only if you arrive there fast.

No. The descent is split into three faces and each one changes what you are being asked to do rather than how big the numbers are. Powder Bowl is surface reading. Timber removes ice completely and sends the trees at you as walls with one gap, so the decision moves from reacting to committing early. The Cornice makes ice the dominant surface and puts snow lips across the whole piste, so you are launched whether you wanted to be or not - and landing on ice while you are already sliding sideways is the hardest thing in the game. Then the mountain narrows into a single snaking chute for the last 135 m.

Time. Passing between the poles pushes the storm 14 m back down the mountain, and that is the whole reason they are interesting: the gates are not placed on the racing line, so the fastest line and the most gated line are never the same line. Going for all of them costs you speed and puts you somewhere on the slope you would not otherwise have chosen, and whether that trade is worth it depends on how close the storm already is.