First steps

What you need for your first run — spoiling nothing that’s best discovered.

The first run

You pick one of the 4 races —Human, Dwarf, Elf or Mage—, you appear on a map and the hordes start coming. There is no winning: the run is infinite and only ends in two ways, with your death or when you choose to abandon. The goal is to last longer every time and walk out with the loot that persists between runs.

Everything enemies drop is physical: experience crystals and gold coins fall to the ground and you must walk up to collect them. Your base pickup range is short, so move through the remains of each horde — or extend it with items like the Ring of Attraction.

The loop of a phase

Each phase lasts 10 minutes. At minute 8 the Phase Boss appears, and killing it opens the advance portal: cross it and you continue the same run, at higher difficulty. If you stay past the end of the phase you enter overtime, and difficulty grows per minute — quickly before killing the boss, and much faster after. The game calls it “advance or die” for a reason.

Leveling up

On level up you pick 1 of 3 cards: only runes and weapon upgrades.

Each level asks for 100 × your current level in experience: 100 for the second, 200 for the third, and so on. On level up you choose between 3 cards — and here’s a rule worth knowing: on level up only runes and weapon upgrades appear. Passive items, artifacts and infusions come from chests and the merchant, never from leveling.

Gold, chests and the merchant

Gold is spent inside the run. The chests scattered across the map come in 6 types: 25% are Mix gamble chests, another 25% normal Mix, and the rest go by rarity — 20% common, 15% uncommon, 10% rare and 5% legendary. The gamble chest is a coin flip: half the time it drops loot with bonus luck; the other half it throws a horde at you.

The merchant charges run gold. The Reroll Token rerolls his offers without spending gold.

Death is not the end

When you fall —or abandon— the run ends, but you don’t leave empty-handed: you keep your Mithril, your records and the progress of unlock missions, most of which accumulates across runs. Mithril is invested in the Forge: permanent upgrades per race plus 20 Global Upgrades that make every next run stronger.

Guide checked against game v0.8.4.