Important: powerup details below are now outdated. See our main Powerups post for current details on how each powerup works.
Zwift’s latest update included important changes to two of the game’s key powerups: the feather and burrito. Here are all the details!
Not sure how Zwift’s powerups work? Read “Your Guide to PowerUps in Zwift” >
Feather PowerUp: Helping the Heavies
The Feather powerup used to make you 9.5kg lighter, so you could climb a bit easier or sprint a bit faster. Heavier riders have complained that giving every rider the same weight advantage means the feather has a greater effect on lightweight riders than heavier riders – and they weren’t wrong!
For a 60kg rider, the old feather’s 9.5kg advantage meant a 15.8% reduction in body weight. For a 90kg rider, the same feather gave them a 10.6% reduction in weight. Since heavier riders already struggle on climbs, the mismatch seemed especially unfair.
The updated feather now reduces everyone’s body weight by a flat percentage: 10%, by our calculations. Here are some numbers we saw in our tests:
- 75kg rider @ 300 watts (4 w/kg): goes to 4.4 w/kg with feather activated
- 60kg rider @ 180 watts (3 w/kg): goes to 3.3 w/kg with feather activated
- 60kg rider @ 360 watts (6 w/kg): goes to 6.7 w/kg with feather activated
Due to the way Zwift sizes our avatars, this 10% weight reduction will typically result in a visible change in size for your avatar.
A 95kg rider won’t notice any change with the new feather powerup, since it will reduce their weight by 10% (or 9.5kg, the same as the old feather). Riders lighter than 95kg may notice the feather has less effect, especially very light riders (60kg or below). Riders over 95kg may notice an increased effect.
Burrito PowerUp: Bringing the Pain
The old Burrito powerup simply turned off your avatar’s slipstream for 10 seconds, so no other riders could benefit by sitting in your draft. The problem with this setup was, the burrito is an event-only powerup, used for races. And most racing is done in a pack setting. And if you’re in a pack and activate the burrito, riders behind you are still benefiting from the slipstream effect of other riders ahead of them, even if they aren’t benefiting from you.
Basically, in a group of any significant size, activating the burrito did nothing.
It was useful if you were attacking off the front – but that’s such a rare occurrence in races that riders would often “burn their burritos” – using them immediately, or clicking the link to throw them away.
The new burrito is much more… er… powerful. It now disables the draft effect for all riders within 2.5m of yourself. Here’s a visual comparing normal pack dynamics to the old burrito effect to the new burrito effect:
Note: the draft “trail” show above is for illustrative purposes only and not indicative of Zwift’s actual draft “shape” or strength.
This change makes the burrito especially effective when used in the peloton, because it makes every rider within 2.5 meters work harder! The rider who activates the burrito still receives the same draft benefits as before, but riders within 2.5 meters are receiving zero draft benefit for 10 seconds.
Strategic Burrito Usage:
- Watch for friendly fire: if you are riding next to a teammate, keep in mind that activating your burrito will adversely affect them. Consider moving away from your teammate or warning them via Discord to move away before activating.
- Don’t double burrito: if a nearby rider already has a burrito activated, activating your burrito powerup will have a negligible effect since nearby riders will already have their draft disabled by the first burrito. Wait until the first burrito expires (it only lasts for 10 seconds) or move elsewhere in the pack.
- Burrito-powered teamwork: to facilitate a team breakaway, move within 1 rider of the front of the pack (but still within the draft of the front rider(s), then activate your burrito as teammate(s) attack. This will let the teammates get away, while making it difficult for anyone to bridge across the draftless space to grab their wheel.
- Mind the gap: when you see a nearby rider activate a burrito, increase your wattage so you don’t drop away from the pack. Keep in mind that riders just ahead of you may also have their draft disabled by the burrito, which means they may let a gap open up to riders ahead. Keep your eyes open, and bridge that gap before it becomes a problem!
Questions or Comments?
Share below!
Get rid of all power ups
No, they add an interesting dynamic. Some events have them, some don’t. Pick the one you prefer but I don’t see a reasonable argument for removing them completely.
If two riders of equal watts, bike/wheels and weight are in a sprint for a race win, a favourable power up will increase one person’s chance of winning. This is the obvious reasonable argument against them as it reduces the need for skill in favour of luck.
You’re right, it is a reasonable argument, but in a Zwift race no one is likely to suffer a puncture, drop a gear or take a corner too quickly and come off taking half the group with them. The powerups add a little unexpected randomness to a race, like a mechanical or accident does in the real world.
Also creates some space for individual strategy within a race, in working out when is the best time to use it.
dropped the burrito in real life, works great to dump wheel suckers (those who ride in the draft but never take a turn at the front).
Still prefer races without power-ups but feel these are good changes for both power-ups. Received the feather power-up a couple times during the Specialized event last weekend and being a rider leaning towards the heavier side it was a very noticeable difference vs the old feather that seemed to do nothing.
Meanwhile, the user interface is as dated as MS-DOS. We still don’t have basic things like family plans, or switch routes without exiting the application. The founder gets on a podcast and says rowing will drop in a few weeks…multiple months ago. Enough with the gimmicks. The new courses are nice, but the priority needs to be getting the new UI out, fixing the most basic of issues and actually deliver some innovation.
i kind of agree but the “gimmicks” are easier to do, easier to test and less of an issue if they go worng so can be released much quicker and easier than the others you mentioned (payment plans aside)
Yes gimmicks are easier to do. But then they should stop promising things they know they aren’t going to deliver. It shows a lack of respect for the user community. They have been promising a redesigned UI for a year or more now. Then they said they pivoted for COVID-19 even though it was supposedly “done”. Then they said rowing was imminent in a few weeks. Months later, no rowing. If they aren’t going to release or develop something, fine. But then they shouldn’t mention it and imply it is coming. There are only two possibilities when they perpetually don’t deliver – either they are intentionally misleading the user community, or they lack the ability to manage their internal development team. Neither is good.
have never found a burrito to eat in my races
What power up is there to help the light riders come downhill quicker?! 🧐
Anvil
The new anvil power-up adds a certain percent of weight to your rider. Only available in races/events if I recall correctly.
I like the new burrito power…super beans! i’m sure i’m going to suffer the results of this one 😟 But, it was less useful before.
I can appreciate the feather changes, especially for heavier riders. I feel like this made the feather less powerful for more riders. It’s probably mostly a placebo feather anyway haha!
my biggest powerup frustration is when racing and I really need power up and I get XP…and only a small amount. In one of my last races, I really needed any power-up (except the ghost) and got a little XP…dropped 8 places as all of the helmets, trucks and feathers when flying past. Of course, I could just get stronger legs 😂
I can confirm your lighter-rider test result for the feather.
During stage 3 of the Tarmac series last week, my 61kg avatar went up Mt. Ventoux at 6.0 W/kg before using the feather which got me up to 6.7 W/kg.
The old feather added a full W/kg for me.
Nice to see ongoing “improvements” in base features. Although i would have thought there were more important features that could have been addressed first.
Sadly, this is the poor level of ‘improvements’ Zwift now offer… While we sit waiting for improvements to the terrible graphic non customisable interface, Club features, bug fixes, better responds from the event tems and many many other items suggested by the community, all Zwift can come up with are tweaks to minority issues. The ‘racing’ fraternity may be happy with this fodder butt about the majority of paying users… Come on Zwift, this isn’t good enough.
you are the crying minority pretending to be the majority
There should be clarification on how power-ups affect each other. Does the burrito subtract a known value and does the draft power-up add a know value? In other words, do they cancel out, leaving you with a normal draft effect? Does the burrito just multiply the draft effect by zero and does the draft power-up multiply the current draft by 2x, meaning the draft power-up is useless in the burrito’s area of effect? Or does the draft power-up supersede the burrito altogether, giving you the full benefit??
Burrito disables the draft effect entirely. Draft boost (van) increases whatever draft effect you’re experiencing by 50%.
So if you’ve got the van activated and someone activates their burrito next to you, the van is useless.
I suspected as such. They’re going to have to nerf the burrito at some point as teams designate 1-2 people to use them in a sprint finish. Obviously everyone will be trying to hoard aeros, but if you’re unlucky enough to be stuck with a draft, it’s as good as useless. Just the ability to daisy chain several of them together in the middle of the race is overpowered. I’m just glad most people haven’t figured that out for themselves and haven’t read this…
There is one more strategy for the burrito, particularly if several of you use them one after the other – Pack thinning.
Drift towards the back, then activate. Anyone on the limit could have this push them over the edge.
Great point, (Ralph! Devious, but smart.)
Huh. Interesting strategy. Drift to the back and waste your energy and power-up trying to crack riders that are about to crack on their own anyway. Apologies to Eric, but I’d call that being foolish (or being a bully?) I wish more of my competitors thought like you. I’ll be the guy trying to use my energy and power-ups to force the stronger riders to burn matches.
Done right, it wouldn’t waste any energy. And thinning the pack is a smart strategy if (for example) you’re anticipating a sprint finish, but don’t fancy your chances against some of the sprinters who have drifted to the back on the climbs…
My understanding of all the other power-ups is that they benefit the rider.
The burrito in its new incarnation is the exception. Instead of directly benefiting the rider, it penalizes a group of other riders.
That difference feels critical to the enjoyment felt by Zwift’s paying customers.
My mind turns to the psychological principle of loss aversion, which (in some, tightly defined experiments) suggests that we feel the pain of a loss about 2.5 times as much as we derive pleasure from an equivalent sized gain.
When one rider triggers a burrito, several riders run the risk of falling out of the blob. That’s very different to someone gaining an aero boost or using a feather to ride off the front of the blob.
I’m just puzzled that Zwift reckons that the pleasure of the person triggering the burrito exceeds the pain felt by the several riders who run the risk of being dropped as a consequence.
Agree on the suggestions that the Burrito is now ‘evil’ – it used to be that if you made a break, or had been dropped and were toiling along on your own with someone wheel-sucking then ‘dropping the Burrito’ to shake them off (or at least make them work to stay with you) seemed ‘fair’… now it’s kind of a ‘tactical nuke’ that can be used to penalise other riders in a way that is un-sportsmanlike at best…
I agree with the rational of using %weight for the feather powerup. However, wouldn’t it be equally fair to apply %weight for boost-mode as well? It must be said that I haven’t had the chance to test this race type event myself yet, but a 50W penalty at 4wkg would be different for a 60kg rider compared to a 100kg rider. Not sure if the boost would equal that out, since hanging with the pack can already be challenging for lighter riders without being penalised. Any thoughts/experience? Cheers.
Doing a % weight for boost mode would only make sense if the watt boost was also based on weight. Otherwise, a 60kg rider would get (for example) a 6kg weight penalty for a 300w boost, while a 90kg rider would get a 9kg weight penalty for… the same boost! Doesn’t make sense.
Boost mode is best thought of as carrying a rechargable battery with you. Same weight, same boost, regardless of the rider.
Indeed it would need to be all %based, both weight and power. As a simplified illustration; lets say a B pack travels at 350W. In draft this might require 250W to hang. At 90k this would translate to 3wkg (not sure how much correction is actually needed to compensate for a bigger frontal area). However, at 60kg your already at the top end of the 4wkg cutoff. In other words, the heavier rider might be able to recharge whilst in the pack, whereas the lighter rider would be dropped instantly. Vice versa, a lighter rider deploying the boost uphill will gain a greater advantage than a heavier rider, similar to the feather issue prior to the update. It’s a complicated issue..
Not sure what the calculations are for the anvil, but if this is also a % of body weight then isn’t this just as ‘unfair’ (more?!) to lighter riders as the original feather was for heavy riders?
Eg. if its a 10% addition then a 60kg rider gains 6kg, whilst a 90kg rider who will already descend faster gets a 9kg boost.
So it feels like both power ups have less impact on lighter riders – and that’s before getting into the fact that the lighter rider still carry the same bike weight (and hence require greater w/kg): but that (approximately) mimics the real world so is less contentious.
With the help of http://bikecalculator.com/ I’ve run some numbers to illuminate the ‘real world’ impact the feather/anvil approaches would have (note: I’m assuming anvil is a 10% weight gain, I haven’t been able to confirm this anywhere but the zwift website states “Think of it as the opposite of the feather power-up”).
I’ve worked through a detailed scenario below – but the summary is:
Here’s some numbers
So Given those conditions, and the assumptions of the calculator used in the uphill scenario
In the downhill scenario:
Nice work! Imagine if in a running race we asked each runner to carry a 9.5 kg brick. Next event, I suggest we race w/o the brick. Is that unfair to heavy riders? But it remains to be seen what the actual Zwift “physics” are.
Good change. An idea: I’d like to see an ‘anchor’ power up. The feather is great for heavier riders on climbs, so why not have a power up that’s useful for lightweight riders on descents? Smaller riders have every bit the disadvantage going downhill as larger riders have going uphill. If I’m going to get dropped during a ride or race, it’s usually on a downhill!
They announced an anvil powerup with the last update which does exactly this.
counterpoint: In addition to rider mass, there’s also bike + equipment mass. This is IRL a larger fraction of total mass for light riders than for heavy riders (data Eric has posted suggests this may not be true in Zwift: a 9.33% increase in mass resulted in a 10.70% slower Alpe time — how’s that possible?… I’ll assume it’s like IRL for here). 9.5 kg is a reasonable approximation to this added mass. What the feather previously did was eliminate this “dead weight”, meaning climbing became a true W/kg exercise. So it wasn’t unfair to light riders — to the contrary, it eliminated the existing unfairness experienced by light riders. Indeed this just makes that disadvantage greater.
Suppose the feather was perfect — 100% loss of body mass. Then heavy riders and light riders would have only the bike mass. Since heavier riders have more power, this demonstrates how the new approach is unfair to light riders.
Of course it’s possible the Zwift physics aren’t like IRL, which would be another problem.
burrito: fantastic stuff. Watching the MAAP tour coverage I know a lot of elite riders aren’t yet aware of the enhanced power of the burrito. A sprinter leading with aero and a teammate following with the burrito would be very hard to beat.
to all the commenters who say “there shouldn’t be powerups”, or “Zwift should implement feature xyzzy instead of adding powerups”: why the clutter here? Just enter races w/o powerups and when the ones with powerups have no entries Zwift will get the clue that nobody likes powerups. I happen to like them.
Agreed – I ran some scenarios above to this point.
so the feather benefits the fat rider more; they already get a huge benefit on the flat and downhill. there’s nothing worse than seeing a fat guy get dropped, and he coasts back onto the bunch doing 2+wpk less than the group
It would be nice if I could log in. I have been a member of Zwift almost from the beginning and your site does not recognize my email [email protected]. Perhaps I should stop paying since you don’t seem to know me. Please don’t apologize just straighten it out. An apology is worth about a nickel.
Charles, I’m not Zwift – I’m just a Zwifter. If you need Zwift support, you’ll need to contact [email protected].