How to grind and fly with your Skimmer in Destiny 2

Destiny 2 got a new (and stylish) vehicle type: the Skimmer, a hoverboard that lets you grind in mid-air and fly even if there’s nothing to hold on to.

The Skimmer quickly caught guardians’ attention due to its style as well as its ability to traverse long sections of the map very quickly. Two glaring examples are the section between the second and third encounters in Prophecy and the sparrow section in the HyperNet Current Strike, though the skybox is the limit there.

Here’s how you can use your Skimmer to fly across the map and grind the air in style in Destiny 2.

How to grind with your Skimmer in Destiny 2

The Skimmer works like a souped-up sparrow. Its ability to fly is its main draw, but another huge advantage is that it doesn’t consume any fuel when boosting. Instead, the Skimmer’s fuel is used exclusively to jump or grind, letting it excel at map traversal.

The first step in flying with your Skimmer (after, of course, obtaining your Skimmer) is making sure you have the correct bindings. Hover over your Skimmer in your inventory to see which buttons it’s using. In our case, it was mapped to the Crouch binding, though it will use different inputs if you have primary and secondary buttons. In our case, X got us off the ground and Control would grind before we changed it.

Before you can fly, you must have a keybinding for Toggle Crouch instead of Hold Crouch. The option to hold doesn’t work properly, though Bungie is looking into a solution. If you can’t fly or grind with your Skimmer, make sure you have an assigned button for Toggle Crouch and check your bindings for the right keys.

Once you’re set, you can double-tap the assigned button to start flying. The timing to start grinding is somewhat tight, but a double press hasn’t failed us so far. Don’t hold the button, though, or your guardian will quickly start and stop the motion.

If your guardian moves the tail of the Skimmer to the left, it will start an animation that stopped us from grinding on our tries when it happened, so make sure to get the timing right.

Jumping consumes fuel, and grinding/flying also costs a bit of your gas. Sustaining a grind will slowly eat up the bar, which gives you a good deal of time to traverse around the map. You can use your camera and movement keys to change your direction mid-air.

Keep in mind that, at least on mouse and keyboard, the jump key will not cancel your flying. If you’re grinding, Space will do nothing, and if you’re on top of your new Destiny 2 Skimmer, Space will actually dismount instead of jumping. This can be a bit tricky to get used to since it’s been the default jump key on most games we’ve played, though you have to use the Skimmer’s jump button again (Control in our case) to get off the air.