Depot Dash three-star guide: what accuracy, efficiency and speed actually measure

Clearing a Depot Dash level asks one question: did every parcel reach a valid exit before you ran out of mistakes? Three-starring it asks three harder ones. They are scored separately, they reward different behaviour, and two of them actively pull against each other. This guide breaks down what each star is measuring and how to plan a run that satisfies all three at once.

If you have not played yet, Depot Dash runs free in your browser, Chapter 1 is twelve levels, which is plenty of material to practise everything below.

The three stars are three different games

Accuracy measures misroutes. Every parcel that reaches the wrong exit costs you, and every level has a mistake limit that ends the shift when you exceed it. Accuracy is the star you lose to inattention: a junction you meant to flip and didn’t, or a parcel whose destination you misread because you were watching a different belt.

Efficiency measures junction switches. Not switches per parcel, total switches for the whole level. This is the star that punishes reactive play, because reacting to each parcel individually always costs more flips than routing groups of parcels together.

Speed measures how long the shift takes. Lane choice affects it directly, and the section below explains how to balance it against switch efficiency.

The tension is between efficiency and accuracy. The safest route for any single parcel is to set its junction the moment you see it and never touch that junction again, but a junction serves every parcel that crosses it, so a setting that is safe for the box in front of you may be a misroute waiting for the one behind it. Efficiency wants fewer flips. Accuracy wants the right flip at the right moment. Three stars means finding the route where those are the same thing.

Plan speed and switches together

The speed star measures total shift time, so lane choice matters. Express lanes move electronic and toy parcels faster and can shorten a clean run. Fragile parcels cannot use them safely.

The switches star can reward a different route. A rusty slow lane may create useful spacing, allowing another parcel to pass while a junction keeps the same setting. That can remove a switch even though one parcel travels farther or more slowly.

Read several parcels ahead and decide which target needs help. Use express lanes to cut safe travel time, and use rusty lanes when the added spacing lets one junction setting serve more of the queue. Accuracy remains essential because every parcel still needs its matching electronic, toy, or fragile exit.

Read the queue and the belts

The single habit that separates a one-star clear from a three-star run is where you are looking.

The visible parcel queue is the planning tool at the centre of each level. It tells you the next several destinations before those boxes reach a junction, which means every routing decision is available to you early. If you are only looking at the parcel currently on the belt, you are working with a fraction of the information the game handed you, and you will always be one switch behind.

Ask: “What is the smallest set of junction settings that correctly routes the next three boxes?” Often the answer is one setting that serves two of them, then a single flip for the third. That is two switches where reactive play would have spent four.

Route in groups

Once you are reading ahead, the efficiency star becomes a batching problem.

Look for runs of consecutive parcels that share a destination, and treat them as one unit, set the junction once and let all of them through. Then look at the parcel that breaks the run. An alternate route across a rusty lane can delay that parcel while others pass, preserving the current junction setting and saving one or more switches. Check the speed target too: the slower route has a real time cost, while an express lane can recover time for compatible cargo.

Switch early, and switch once

Two rules that follow directly from the scoring:

Switch early. A parcel takes whichever path was set when it entered the junction. Flipping while a box is crossing does not redirect it, it only strands the next one and costs you a switch you will have to undo. If you know a destination, set it the moment the parcel appears in the queue, while the junction is empty.

Switch once. Every flip counts. A junction you set, unset and reset has cost three switches to achieve what one would have. If you find yourself flipping the same junction repeatedly, re-plan the route before repeating the same approach.

Plan the hazards first, fill in around them

From the moment fragile parcels and express lanes enter the campaign, the planning order inverts. Do not build the route and then check whether the fragile cargo survives it. Build the route for the fragile cargo first, then fit everything else around what is left.

The reasoning is that fragile parcels have hard constraints, certain lanes destroy them outright, while durable parcels have soft ones, since they will survive any path that eventually reaches the right exit. Solve the constrained pieces first and the unconstrained pieces almost always fit. Solve it the other way round and you will find yourself flipping junctions to rescue a fragile box, which costs both stars at once.

There is a fuller treatment of those hazards in the fragile parcels and express lanes guide.

Nothing here is luck

Worth stating plainly, because it changes how you should treat a failed run: Depot Dash has no random elements in its puzzles. The queue is visible, the layout is fixed, and every level is tested to be solvable. If a route failed, a different order of switches would have worked.

That makes a failed attempt genuinely informative. You are not waiting for a better queue, you already saw the queue. The question is only which switch was in the wrong place, and because everything on the depot floor is visible, you can usually answer it from memory before the retry finishes loading.

A three-star routine

Put together, the loop looks like this:

1. Clear it blind once. Learn the layout and the queue order. Ignore stars entirely.
2. Replay and plan. Before touching anything, look at the first several parcels and decide the junction settings that serve the most of them.
3. Batch the run. Set junctions for groups. Use rusty lanes to create spacing when that saves switches, and express lanes to improve safe delivery times.
4. Handle hazards first. Route fragile cargo away from express lanes before planning anything else.
5. Retry immediately on a misroute. A run with a mistake in it will not three-star, and the level is short. Restart while the queue is still fresh in your head.

The levels are small enough that this whole cycle takes a couple of minutes. That is deliberate, the game is designed so that “I know exactly what I did wrong” is followed immediately by the chance to prove it.

If you work through Chapter 1 this way and want harder material, Chapters 2–6 are on Android in the Depot Mastery Bundle, where multi-way junctions and stricter mistake limits make the efficiency star considerably less forgiving.