First steps
What you need for your first run — spoiling nothing that’s best discovered.
Before your first run: the Forge
The first step isn’t a run: it’s the Mithril Forge. The game won’t start any run —solo or co-op— until one character has 2 completed branches, and a branch is completed by buying and confirming its final node (the tip of a fork). In the full game you start with 550 Mithril, just what you need: the cheapest pair of branches costs 410–530 Mithril depending on the race. Meanwhile, the Tutorial can be played.
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. In Survival and Expedition a run is 3 phases, but clearing them doesn’t end it: the match continues into endless overtime, 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.
“New game” offers three modes: Survival (pick a map and clear its 3 phases), Expedition (3 phases on 3 maps of rising difficulty) and Dungeons (untimed indoor maps driven by objectives, where the record is your time). To begin, Survival on an Easy map.
The loop of a phase
Phases get shorter as you advance: 10 minutes for phase 1, 8:30 for phase 2 and 6 for phase 3 — and a map may bring an even shorter clock of its own, like the Corrupted Desert (8:30 from phase 1) or the Marshland (6 in all three). When the last stretch begins — 2 minutes into a 10-minute phase, 1:30 into an 8:30 one, 1 into a 6-minute one — the phase boss appears, waits asleep next to the portal and wakes up with its entrance as soon as you come close; with the boss dead and the phase clock run out, the portal opens: use it with Interact 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. In phase 3 the portal no longer advances: it announces that you’ve completed the 3 phases, and the overtime that follows is the final stretch for scoring.
When you get hit, your character flinches toward the side of the impact and flashes red, and red numbers fall with the damage you take. Those numbers can be turned off in Settings → Configuration (the “Damage taken” option), and the flash is softened by “Reduce flashes”.
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 (those can be bought once you have a character with 2 completed branches). Dungeons add a third ending: using the exit marks the dungeon as finished and saves your time.
Guide checked against game v0.9.16.