How to play
Your team fights on its own. Your job is the decisions between fights: who stands where, what they evolve into, and what they are wearing when the horde arrives.
The window
The game runs in a small desktop window instead of taking over your screen. Two ways to run it:
- AFK mode — a lean strip that keeps fighting while you work. This is the default way to leave it running.
- Active mode — the full view, for when you actually want to optimise: swapping gear, spending runes, reading the battlefield.
In Settings → Game you can turn on always-on-top so the window stays above your other apps, change the window scale, cap the frame rate, hide damage numbers, hide monsters, and disable skill effects (which also removes screen shake and hit-stop). There is a Save button next to the autosave, so you can force a save whenever you like.
Combat
Fights resolve themselves — there is nothing to click during a battle and no timed input anywhere in the game. What decides the outcome:
- Hordes, not duels. Waves of enemies come at your line from three flanks, so a formation that only holds the centre gets taken apart from the sides.
- Roles do different jobs. Tanks hold the wall, carries and damage dealers delete targets, supports keep the line standing, summoners add bodies, buffers make everyone else better.
- Position matters. Where a hero stands changes what reaches them and what they reach.
- Elements matter. Every world adds a resistance profile to its enemies and a modifier to your party, so a composition that walked through one world can stall in the next.
The starting seven
Seven classes, each with its own role and its own pair of evolution branches:
| Hero | Class | Role | Branches |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baldric the Knight | Knight | Tank | Wall · Bruiser |
| Bram Ironforge | Forger | Tank | Survivor · Undead |
| Rose the Archer | Archer | Carry | Turret · Switch |
| Apprentice Milo | Mage | Damage | Fire · Ice |
| Lumen the Cleric | Cleric | Support | Healer · Shield |
| Mira Nightshade | Necromancer | Summoner | Minions · Reaper |
| Vex | Symbiote | Buffer | Devourer · Parasite |
Evolution and ascension
At level 20 a hero picks one of its two branches, and that choice reshapes how it plays — a turret archer and a switch archer are not the same unit. From there each branch ascends through five tiers (20 · 40 · 60 · 80 · 100), gaining a new form and new skills at each one. Seven classes × two branches × five tiers is 70 evolved forms on top of the seven starting ones.
The Solar System campaign
One thousand stages, from Earth to the Sun — ten worlds of a hundred stages each. Every world layers an element and a rule on top of the fight, and ends in a capstone gauntlet against a World Boss.
| # | World | Element | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Earth | Nature | Grasslands — where the horde first breaks against your wall. |
| 2 | Moon | Void | Low gravity — everything drifts; timing beats brute force. |
| 3 | Mercury | Fire | Scorched rock — molten ground burns anything that stalls. |
| 4 | Venus | Poison | Acid storms — damage-over-time rules the battlefield. |
| 5 | Mars | Earth | Rust deserts — armored waves grind your front line down. |
| 6 | The Belt | Impact | Shattered field — debris falls; no safe ground, only motion. |
| 7 | Jupiter | Lightning | Storm bands — chain lightning arcs between clustered foes. |
| 8 | Saturn | Ice | Ring ice — frozen enemies shatter for bonus splash damage. |
| 9 | Neptune | Ice | Deep cold — the last frontier before the light. Everything slows. |
| 10 | The Sun | Solar | Solar flares — no cover, no line. A pure race against the burn. |
Gear
Loot drops as you fight. What to look at:
- Tier — the ladder from the authored baseline upward; a higher tier is the same item multiplied.
- Sockets — slots you fill to bend an item toward what your build needs.
- Unique items — pieces that change a rule instead of a number: execute thresholds, true damage, gold on hit, extra casts, party-wide auras.
- Fit, not rarity. The best item for a tank is rarely the item with the biggest number on it.
Growth systems
- Runes — a large tree of permanent account-wide upgrades.
- Training — long-form stat investment per hero.
- Pets and mounts — companions that add stats and effects.
- Blessings — account-level bonuses.
- Missions and challenges — directed goals; challenges award titles you can equip.
- Codex — what you have found, and what it pays you for finding it.
Dungeons
Timed horde survival runs, separate from the campaign, with their own reward tables. These are where the gold and the key materials for the systems above come from.
Guilds
Join or create a guild, contribute to a shared pool, unlock guild skills that benefit every member, spend guild coins in the guild shop, and fight guild bosses and global bosses alongside other players.
Currencies
Gold is the working currency and it grows without bound — expect numbers with names on them. Gems are the premium currency. Guild coins only spend in the guild shop. Keys come in several kinds and gate specific systems.