Manifold Trophy in ZEN Pinball

This is one of the tougher bronze trophies, but with practice it’s not as bad as it seems. The manifold is the mini playfield you can enter by shooting the cooling fan target (behind the left target out of the three in the middle of the table), and then shooting the ball into the engine hole. The engine hole is at the left side of the table and is enabled when you see the little license plate light with the word “ENG INE” on it lit up. This is where learning the table comes into play. First of all, hitting the cooling fan target can be problematic to say the least. There are two ways to hit this target; first you can hit the ball early on the left flipper. This will often drop the ball right back down onto the flipper for a nice catch, but many times it will drop the ball right down the center of the table in which case you’d better have great nudging skills or a ball save enabled! The other (preferred) way to hit this is using the right flipper. If you hit the ball when it’s between the middle and the end of the flipper (you’ll have to find the right spot), you will hit the target. Your goal is to hit the right side of the target so that the ball deflects up and to the right and is easily caught by one of the lower flippers after it bumps around a bit. Unfortunately it’s more common to hit the target head on which bounces the ball directly into the left outlane. The reason I prefer this is because kickbacks are easy to enable on this table and they don’t go away until they are used. This pretty much gives you an insurance policy to make this trophy doable. If you end up using the kickback, just re-enable it before you do anything else.

Once you are in the mini-playfield area, just tilt it using the flipper buttons to get the ball to go into all 12 holes. You’ll get used to this after a while and it won’t be so bad. Don’t worry if you get it into the same hole multiple times. I got pretty used to tilting one way a lot and quickly tilting back to get into various holes and I could pretty much get into the hole I wanted every time. Don’t tilt the field until you are near the hole right before the hole you want to get into or you’ll end up in the wrong one.