Celeste Advanced Movement: From B-Sides to Beyond
Celeste teaches you to jump, dash and climb, then builds one of the deepest movement systems in the platformer canon on top of those three verbs. It does teach the advanced material, eventually. The hyperdash is introduced and required in Core's C-Side, Farewell's Event Horizon subchapter stops to explain the wavedash outright, and both moves are illustrated in the game's own manual. What Celeste never does is drill them, or explain the speed system underneath.
Worth saying up front, because guides love to overstate this: Farewell is completable without a single wavedash or extended hyper. The tech makes it far easier, not mandatory. What follows covers the core techniques in rough order of difficulty, with the inputs spelled out and, more importantly, the why behind each one. All of it works on a standard controller.
Two rules everything else is built on
Rule one: the ground gives your dash back, but not instantly. Celeste's released player code sets a dash-refill cooldown of 0.1 seconds, and the ground-refill check only runs once that timer has expired, as you can read in Player.cs from the source Maddy Makes Games published. Dash a hair above the floor, land immediately, and you land dashless. Most "why didn't I get my dash back" moments trace to that window.
Rule two: momentum survives unless something takes it away. Nearly every technique below is a scheme for turning a dash into lasting horizontal speed and then protecting it. Once you read the game that way, advanced Celeste stops being a trick list and becomes physics with a controller attached.
Dash jumps (supers)
Jumping during a horizontal dash keeps the dash's speed. The community calls the result a superdash, or just a super: dash horizontally, jump before the dash ends, and you leave the ground at roughly 260 initial speed, faster than either input alone would give you. The jump also hands your air control back, letting you steer a trajectory the dash would otherwise lock. An extended super is the same move with the jump deliberately delayed past the refill cooldown, which costs extra runway and buys you your dash back in the air. Practice the plain version on flat ground until it stops needing thought. Everything below grows out of it.
The hyperdash
Stand on the ground, dash down-diagonally forward, and jump during the dash. The result is a long, low hop: about half the height of a normal jump, leaving the ground at roughly 325 initial speed. The crouch is the whole mechanism. Jumping out of an uncrouched horizontal dash gives you a super; jumping out of a crouched one gives you a hyper. A grounded down-diagonal dash puts Madeline into the crouched state automatically. That is why the diagonal input matters, and the community Celeste Wiki's hyperdash page covers the move and its variants. You can also reach the crouched state from a horizontal dash using the in-game Crouch Dash bind added in version 1.4.0.0, or a precise four-frame demodash input. That variant is a demohyper, and it is a speedrunner's tool for mid-air situations rather than a beginner's consistency aid. Low ceilings that block a normal jump will usually still allow a hyper, which is exactly why designers put them where they do. Core's C-Side is the chapter built around this move.
The wavedash
The wavedash is the hyper's airborne sibling rather than a separate move. Start the same down-diagonal dash while you are in the air and close to the floor, then jump the instant you touch down. The output is identical: same 325 initial speed, same low arc. The wiki is blunt about it, calling wavedashes functionally the same as hyperdashes. What differs is the setup. A hyper needs ground to start the dash on; a wavedash needs almost none, so it fits in tight spaces. And because the dash begins in mid-air, the refill cooldown from rule one has usually elapsed by the time you land, which is why the wavedash is the dependable way to keep your dash. Feel the rhythm as a drumbeat: dash, land, jump.
Extended hypers, chains and ultras
An extended hyper is not a second dash. It is the same hyper with the jump held back. Dash down-diagonally on the ground, wait out the refill cooldown (Madeline's hair flashes white), then jump before the dash itself ends, releasing down as you do. It wants more runway than a normal hyper and hands you your dash back for the trouble. Coyote time off a ledge is what lets you stretch it to maximum distance.
Dashing down-diagonally into the ground again during the flight is a different technique: a chained wavedash. Chain those and you are into ultra territory. An ultra is a down-diagonal dash performed while already carrying high horizontal speed, which in practice means straight out of a hyper or a wavedash. The dash has to finish in the air. Landing then converts it into a crouched horizontal dash and applies a 1.2x multiplier to your horizontal speed. Land while the dash is still running and you lose the momentum instead, which is the most common way this fails and gets its own entry in the wiki's ultradash troubleshooting. So start high enough that the dash expires before you touch down, and do not buffer the jump. Chained ultras are how top players cross entire screens in seconds, and wavedashes feeding into them are the backbone of Farewell routing and most speedrun strategies.
Neutral jumps
A wall kick shoves you well clear of the wall, which is useless when you need to climb one flat surface with no stamina left. A neutral jump solves it: release grab and left and right, then jump off the wall. Madeline drifts only a short distance sideways. Move back toward the wall without grabbing, and jump again. The reason this climbs for free is that grabbing is what drains stamina, and wall jumps do not, so as long as you never press grab the meter never moves. Chain the input cleanly and you can walk an even wall upward indefinitely, which turns several "impossible" B-Side screens into puzzles with a known answer.
Spiked walls and the five-frame grace
Celeste's spikes are directional. They spare Madeline only while she is moving away from them, in the direction they point, at a speed strictly above zero, however tiny that speed is. The wiki's tech page states that condition outright in its spike climb section. Moving exactly parallel to a spiked surface, with no velocity away from it, still kills you. That narrow allowance is what makes the alarming-looking wall tech possible: the spike climb and the spiked wallbounce, where you work your way up or off a spiked wall on a sliver of outward speed. Note that the community reserves "spikejump" for the other cases, where wind pushes you into spikes or a moving block pushes spikes into you.
Pair the spike rule with coyote time and buffered inputs and the engineering starts to show. The same released source sets the jump grace period to 0.1 seconds, which the community counts as five usable "coyote frames", during which a jump still registers after you have walked off a ledge, and inputs pressed slightly early are held rather than dropped. A famously hard game, quietly generous underneath. The chunky, readable pixel art belongs to the same logic: you can only demand precision when the player can see everything.
A practice routine that works
- One technique at a time. Pick the wavedash. Fifteen minutes on a safe screen, then stop before frustration compounds.
- Use flat, empty ground. Chapter 1, or the opening screens of any chapter, with nothing trying to kill you.
- Rebind if it helps. Many players move dash to a shoulder button so jump and dash sit under different fingers and can be pressed near-simultaneously.
- Assist Mode counts as a practice tool. Dropping game speed to 80% while you learn an input rhythm is legitimate, and the rhythm transfers when you speed back up.
- Diagnose failures instead of grinding them. A wavedash that produces no speed usually means the jump came late. A wavedash that leaves you dashless means you started the dash too close to the floor and landed inside the refill cooldown. Different bugs, different fixes.
Why bother
None of this is needed to finish Celeste, and a fair amount of it is not needed to finish Farewell either. The argument for learning it is narrower and better than "you'll need it": a screen you can only solve one way is an obstacle — a screen you can solve three ways is an instrument. The first time a wavedash comes out under pressure before you have consciously decided to do it, the game changes shape.