The seven route sliders
Underneath the two preset buttons sit seven sliders. Each one is a preference you hand to the router — more of this, less of that — and each has five positions, with the middle meaning you don’t mind either way.
The sliders live in the planning sheet, below the Road and Adventure buttons. The round trip sheet has the same set.
The grey line under each one is its current position in words. That caption changes as you drag, before you let go.
How a slider works
Every slider has five stops and snaps to them, so you land on a position rather than somewhere between two. Drag it and the caption underneath updates as you go; let go and the route recalculates.
The middle stop is the one to understand. It means no preference — you are not asking the router to seek this thing out, and you are not asking it to keep away either. Left of the middle avoids, right of the middle prefers, and the further you go the harder you are pushing. A slider parked in the middle has no effect on your route at all.
These are preferences competing for the same route, not switches. Asking hard for twisty roads and hard for motorways at the same time gives the router two instructions that pull opposite ways, and what comes back is a compromise you may not have pictured. Move one at a time and look at the result.
The seven, one by one
Prefer motorways
How much you want the big roads. It runs from Avoid highways when possible on the left, through Balanced in the middle, to Strong highway preference on the right. Push it left for a slower run on smaller roads, right when you want distance covered.
Prefer trails & unpaved
How willing you are to leave the bitumen. It runs from Strongly prefer sealed, through Mix of sealed and unsealed, out to Seek dirt and gravel tracks. This is the one that decides whether a route is an adventure or an errand.
Prefer twisty roads Premium
How much the router should go looking for corners. From Avoid twisty roads on the left, through No twisty preference, to Maximum twisty roads on the right. Wound fully right it will happily add distance to find bends.
This is not the same thing as the twisty road layer. That layer paints bendy roads on the map so you can see them; this slider changes the route the router hands you. Turning the layer on does nothing to your route, and moving this slider does nothing to the map.
Hilly routes Premium
Terrain rather than tarmac. From Avoid hills, through No hill preference, to Seek mountain roads. Worth pairing with the elevation profile, so you can see what you have asked for before you set off.
Paved surface preference Premium
Sits alongside the trails slider and pulls the other way — how much you want sealed surface specifically. From Avoid paved roads, through No surface preference, to Maximum paved preference.
Toll roads
From Strongly avoid tolls, through No toll preference, to Prefer toll roads. The left end is a strong preference rather than a ban — if the only sensible way through is tolled, you will still be sent that way.
Ferry crossings
From Strongly avoid ferries, through Ferries when convenient, to Strongly prefer ferries. Same caveat as tolls: the far left discourages ferries rather than ruling them out, so a route to somewhere only reachable by boat still works.
No slider bans anything outright. The ends are strong preferences, and a strong preference loses to necessity. If you need a road, a toll or a crossing genuinely ruled out, check the route on the map before you ride rather than trusting a slider to have excluded it.
What you get on a free plan
Four of the seven — motorways, trails, tolls and ferries — work on any plan. The other three, Prefer twisty roads, Hilly routes and Paved surface preference, are Premium.
On a free plan those three show a padlock beside the name, are drawn in grey rather than green, and do not move when you drag them. Your routes are still planned with a setting for each of them; what you cannot do is change it.
Tapping one does nothing you can see — no message, no upgrade prompt. That is unlike the Adventure preset button above it, which does explain itself when you tap it while locked. If a slider seems dead, the padlock beside its name is the reason.
Presets overwrite all seven
Tapping Road or Adventure snaps every one of the seven to that preset’s baseline, including any you had set by hand. There is no confirmation and no undo. Set the preset first, then fine-tune — see Road and Adventure presets for what each one is for, and how per-leg profiles work.
What you set is remembered on the phone and comes back next time you open the sheet. Saving a trip to the calendar keeps which legs were Road and which were Adventure, but not your hand-tuning — a restored trip comes back at its preset baseline.
Seven sliders is a lot of rope. Move a single one, plan the same trip again, and compare the distance and time on the result card against what you had. You learn what each slider is worth far faster that way than by moving four at once and trying to reason about the result.