And now onto the ever depressing Bad Future. The stars can no longer be seen at all as they are covered by threatening red-ish clouds, the sky occasionally set alight by a thunder bolt in the distance. Pink lights create the city mass below it, amid red terrain, and the bottom features some of these square factory buildings close up, adorned with many windows and illuminated by bright magenta lighting. Roads are a particularly dull, metallic shade of green, with various half-destroyed technical gubbins and flashing lights within them. Those once shiny horns are now corroded and broken, the same colour as the roads, and the lighter coloured green pipes, disconnected from bits missing, dart around all over the place. Occasionally you'll see neon background boards flashing with dull red colours, taking patterns of various straight lines, and these are particularly common around the huge Eggman statue, which is now fully complete, with ominous yellow eyes. Laser lights of both red and yellow variety are here too.

Stardust Speedway mixes speedy routes with features of a typical pinball type level as well, with springs and other devices annoyingly sending you back to places you don't want to go to, and puzzles emerge by trying to figure out a pattern of how to avoid them, in certain places. On the plus side, all the speed makes time travel practically inevitable, and level designs and even features don't really differ that much between time zones. Again like Star Light Zone, multiple routes are so abundant it's barely possible to decipher them all, with as many as five or six brief diversions going on at any given horizontal point! All pretty much heading right for the most part, they maintain a very loose structure, so plenty of gaps and slopes in the stacked up pathways ensure difficulty in staying on the same vertical plane or route. The thin paths are all nested quite close to each other too, so they regularly intersect, creating foreground paths and background paths, and you can only be on one at a time. It's easiest to think of the whole level in three-dimensional terms: The main road has two "lanes" - sometimes they're together and it makes no difference which one you're on, other times the two lanes wander away from each other for a while before rejoining. Sometimes if the two lanes have points that are far enough away from each other, you can simply jump to whichever takes your fancy. However, there are loads of places where you can see a dull piece of pathway, usually behind structural decoration, which you'll just fall through unless you're on the background lane. Also, vertical paths cross horizontal ones all the time, creating a solid wall on the horizontal one, if it's activated. It can all be a bit tricky until you realise the easy way to switch between them (which I've only just recently figured out while assembling the last touches to this guide and therefore I've been forced to re-write quite a lot of it!) - near each of these instances, there are yellow panels in the air sporting a blue sphere. Simply jump into them to toggle between the two roads. Clues as to which is currently activated come from the various thin piping networks decorating the stage, which are layered in the middle, so both Sonic and the panels will be either behind or in front of this piping. Without this knowledge, the level remains much less bearable than it can be.

Enemies include several airborne pests. A fly robot (red when healthy, purple and slower when damaged) will circle a given section of a pathway by flying up behind it, and down in front of it, repeatedly. Their sprites change size in order to create this effect, and you can only hit them when they're on your applicable z-axis option (see above paragraph). One of the "WTF is THAT?" variety of enemies, there are also very strange grey chick-like things that are small, but feature a series of ghost images following along like a slithering tail. They float around an open area and occasionally fire a ghost image of themselves at you, which is obviously harmful. The ghosts that are trailing them are not harmful, and though older ones look the same, they are slower and incapable of throwing ghosts at you. Light bulb flies always hang out in pairs as they float slowly across an area. Once you come nearby, they immediately lock their positions relative to you, so for a few seconds they will always stay in the exact same area of the screen regardless of where you go, or how fast you're travelling. They usually maintain a fair distance between each other and when they're ready, they'll stay in one place (allowing you to then avoid or kill them), and create a damaging energy beam of large circles between them, which can be disturbed by destroying one of them. Once done, the two fly upwards, and damaged ones are, you guessed it, incapable of creating this beam. Luminous green armoured bugs patrol some sections of the path. They move slowly at first, but once they've locked their eyes on you, they curl up into a ball and roll across the ground, at which point, you will only bounce off of them if you attempt to hit them, and this usually alters their direction. You can only destroy them when they're in their original, un-rolled state, and although they appear almost identical, damaged ones are considerably slower, both in response times and speed, than the newer models. The flowers within the enemies feature sharp, dark green stems and pink petals and stigma.