A lot of you are probably wondering, "why even include this section?" However, some of you may be like one of my friends, whose response to being told how to unlock other abilities was loudly complaining that he had to talk to the people in the game. Jokes on him, these characters are delightful.

The Sage's Cowl, much like the other abilities (The Heir's Javelin and The Wraith's Hourglass) can be unlocked using Anti-Sparks, the meta-currency gained by entering shards and not failing horribly on the first level. You get these items by talking to their respective owners (Daro the Sage, Niada the Heir, and the nameless Wraith), who can be found at the terrace near the center of the hub after finding them during a shard and convincing them to come with.

Well, I say all that, but basically it happens automatically just by playing through the shards. Either way, Daro is available at the hub after finishing the tutorial, so all you need to do is collect 1000 Anti-Sparks and speak with Daro until she gives you the option to repair it!

After that, you can access the ability menu by pressing tab or whatever equivalent that's mapped to on a controller. I'm lame and can't stand controllers.

If you're thinking all of this is extremely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ obvious, it probably is, but I swear to god some people need this info.

Much like The Courier's Board, The Sage's Cowl can only be activated once one "bar" of energy is filled, and consumes the entire bar when activated. Unlike the board, however, the effect is instantaneous and cannot be held down for continuous usage.

When activated on the ground, you will gain a sudden burst of momentum upwards and slightly forward, effectively jumping. Due to the way this works, the upwards momentum will be far more drastic while on a downwards slope, "slowing" you relative to the ground in exchange for a large boost in height, as opposed to on an upwards slope, "increasing" your relative speed for a lower boost in height.

Meanwhile, in the air, you will flap the cowl's wings, shifting your momentum more upwards and increasing it in the resulting direction. Improper usage can mean that this results in you moving slightly slower, though after the recent (as of writing) buff this is less of an issue than it was before.

Since the Cowl's mid-air flap redirects some of your momentum, this results in Zoe shifting her pitch. From what I can tell, perfect landings are measured by Zoe's pitch relative to the ground she lands on. The results are honestly even better than how that sounds; you will almost always land perfectly if you flap just before touching down. Since perfect landings will always preserve or sometimes increase your speed, you can maintain your natural top speed (generally somewhere between 97k/s and 108k/s without boost) very efficiently doing this.

Without some other form of energy generation, this is unfortunately not net energy positive if you have to course correct every single landing, but following the game's natural slopes will generally result in more perfect landings than not, so you can pretty reliably use the Cowl for this alone.

If there's one problem most players run into with the Cowl, it's speed. After the patch, it doesn't reduce your speed as much, but using it at random will very rarely give you speed, either, which is what people generally rely on their abilities for. At first glance, this makes it a weaker choice than most other abilities, but that's only because gaining speed with the Cowl and maintaining it requires a bit more thought than the Board or the Hourglass.

Diving converts upwards momentum into horizontal and downwards momentum, which combined with the Cowl's jump when on the ground can result in a significant burst of speed. If you've messed with it at all, you probably already know that! But the problem after that is maintaining that speed, which is where a lot of the skill of using the Cowl comes in.

If you want the idea in a nutshell to play with, it's basically centered on using the dive to keep dipping Zoe's momentum to a downwards slope, and then using the Cowl to convert that downwards momentum into horizontal momentum.

A very slight dive is usually all it takes, and then flapping the cowl will turn that dive's full momentum into pure horizontal momentum, just like using the redirector item. A sufficiently large dive will take more flaps to level out, but when it does the momentum is even stronger. Basically? Think like an eagle, swooping down and leveling out to move at speeds it can't achieve just by flapping. This can take a lot of energy to maintain, but on average it's only about as much as the Board uses, since the Cowl is pretty energy efficient.

One of my partners figured this out before me, mostly because I focus too much on using the cowl for lengthy mid-air maneuvers and generally end up being slow as ♥♥♥♥ and finishing levels with Cs as a result, but I just started implementing it to fantastic results.

While timing your flaps to just before you land can help you maintain speed, and timing your flaps during dives can help you build speed, if you're already making perfect landings without the Cowl's support, you can instead use it to seriously boost your speed.

If you time a flap to just after you make a landing, preferably on a downwards slope, you won't move directly upwards as expected, but instead convert almost all of that momentum forwards, with only a slight hop up. If you can time this reliably and don't need the Cowl for perfect landings otherwise, you can maintain a good 20-25k/s higher than your natural top speed.

At first glance, the little mid-air flaps of the Cowl seem kind of lackluster. Certainly, they can't let you suddenly scale a vertical slope, no matter how much you want to ride the train rollercoasters over the big rotating harvester devices. I'm telling you here and now that they can get you further than you'd expect. With a full energy bar with no upgrades, you can expect to reliably swoop through the booster ferris wheels or the boosters in the crossguards of the giant swords in the ice shards. With upgrades? A full energy bar could let you spend the majority of a level in the air. That goes doubly if you have items that let you generate energy; with just two plutonium coins, you never have to touch the ground.

Just as much as the flaps doing more than you'd expect can help you, they can also hurt you. Try to line up arcs through boosts from further out than you think you need; the Cowl can just as easily boost you up into the solid part of whatever's holding the booster you want to go through, which means taking damage, slowing down, AND largely wasting the benefits of that flap. This is also an obvious point, but it's useful to keep in mind, and also I just wanted you to have the mental image of me being incredibly smug when it happens to you as though I haven't domed my skull against a booster ferris wheel sixty thousand times before.

Listen folks. I'm like 5 drinks in and just finished a race to the finish of shard 10 with two of my extremely cool partners. This guide is maybe a little impacted by the time of night and inebriation. Do I regret that? Not at all. You get my charming stream of consciousness printed directly to your computer monitor for the low low cost of whatever your electricity bill is divided by 14600. Will I change that? Maybe! I might add gifs of my stellar and unimpeachably perfect gameplay at some point just to emphasize how to use the Cowl to its best. I might not, though, so don't hold your breath or anything.