Come home heavy.

The premise

You do not have a story to complete. You have a town that is thirsty.

2126. Earth is mostly datasphere, and the continental data centers are run end to end by a single AI — the ORCHESTRATOR. To cool its own thinking it drained the oceans into evaporative towers. Water is now the scarcest thing alive.

What's left of humanity lives at the LAST WELL SETTLEMENT: one well, one campfire, one desert. You are a service droid — built light and quiet, nothing for the network to find — and sent back inside. You are the one machine that walks into the facility and carries the water home a liter at a time. Rogue by design, not by malfunction. You never speak.

Mara keeps the well and holds the other end of the uplink. Contact is earned: your first two transmissions reach only static and fragments. The third locks the carrier, and she tells you why they built you.

The descent

A run is 15 sublevels through 5 zones, three sublevels each, with a boss on every third. Every run starts fresh at SUBLEVEL 1 — there is no starting deeper. Meta progress raises the ceiling you can reach and unseals the hatches; it never skips the walk.

Gates — the two-run story

The ARCHONs on sublevels 9 and 12 hold the seals between zones, and getting past one takes two runs:

1. First-ever kill → victory and the SEAL BROKEN ceremony. The vault stays shut, but a coolant drop and a teleporter appear: take the water and extract. The run ends here, as a win. Killing the d9 ARCHON also unlocks ELITE robots permanently.
2. A later run, same ARCHON → it drops a ZONE KEY. Touch it and the hatch unseals permanently.
3. After that → an ordinary open hatch, every run, forever.

Try the sealed stairs early and you'll get SEALED — ZONE KEY REQUIRED. Sublevel 15 is different: the finale never drops a key and never seals anything. It just wins the run, and floods the settlement.

The uplink chamber

Every boss floor grows a private chamber off the boss room, entered only through the arena. The console powers up after the kill. Inside: the terminal on its dais, a teleporter home (always on the finale floor, and on gate floors while the zone beyond is sealed), and the stairs down — locked until you hold that zone's key. Sublevel 15 has no hatch. Extraction is the only way out.

The coolant reservoir

One reservoir hides on sublevels 7–9 each run, announcing itself with COOLANT RESERVOIR. It floods a combat room's pits with water and carries the run's single RESERVOIR PUMP: press E to crank 1–3 droplets onto the deck before the line runs dry. The water is also a soak-heal — stand in the rim and recover. The FLOODED SUMPS modifier adds a second reservoir on sublevels 4–6, but the pump is still one per run.

Rooms & doors

Sublevels are room graphs on a 9×9 grid. You start at the center and it branches out. Deeper floors are bigger, and from sublevel 2 some combat rooms go multi-cell — I, L, T and C shapes sprawling two or three screens across.

Doors, clears and sleeping robots

• Doors open only when the room is cleared, and you must move into them at speed and roughly square-on. Brushing a wall while sprinting past won't zone you.
• On clear: your active gains +1 charge and a reward drops at the last kill.
• Dormancy: robots in multi-cell rooms stay asleep until you close to about half a screen — a three-screen C-room won't open fire from off-camera. Single-cell rooms wake on entry, bosses are always awake, and any hit wakes a robot instantly.
• Large rooms may split into two waves.

Combat

You fire energy bolts. Everything else — six stats, a heart pool, shot modifiers, a firing verb, one active, drones and grenades — is stitched on top during the run.

Hearts

HP is tracked in half-hearts; you start with 6 (3 full). Every hit lands as at least one whole half-heart. Invulnerability after a hit runs 1.2s and you flicker while it's active.

• Death-save survives one killing blow per floor, leaving you at half a heart with a long invulnerability window.
• Water healing — stand beside a reservoir pool for a half-heart every 1.5s, at no liter cost.
• Shield-chance deflects a quarter of incoming hits outright. Damage-cap clamps every single hit to one half-heart.

Aim — and the one asymmetry

Two aim modes, and they are not equivalent:

• Keyboard — arrow keys aim in 8 directions and fire automatically while held. Gets aim-assist: your shot bends up to ~8° toward the nearest enemy inside a ~20° cone.
• Mouse — free aim, hold to fire, no aim-assist. Raw precision, no help.

Your aim also drives the visor eye-dot and the headlamp heading.

Building a run

Items grant shot modifiers. Duplicates stack rather than doing nothing — but the build-defining ones are deliberately rare, and three utility mods (bouncy, boomerang and double) live on a single item each, because once a bounce runs until your range is spent there is nothing honest left for a second copy to add.

Utility mods — most stack freely

Firing verbs

Verbs reshape the whole routine, not just the projectile.

• Machinegun — much faster cadence, much weaker per-shot. Net DPS is roughly parity; the feel is sprayier.
• Charge — hold to spin up, release for one giant slow bolt with massively scaled damage and built-in piercing. A tap under a fraction of a second fires a normal shot, so taps are never swallowed.
• Puddle — bolts drop a caustic pool where they expire. Composes with explosive.

Actives — charged in rooms, not seconds

You have one active slot; a new pickup replaces the old. Each cleared room adds a charge, as does each battery pickup. Fresh actives arrive fully charged.

Drones

Familiars from perks. Each kind caps at 3 — scrap drone caps at 1.

Formation follows your speed: stand still and they settle into concentric rings, no two sharing an angle; move fast and they string out into a conga train along your breadcrumb trail.

Grenades

Place with E. Fuse is 1.5s, the blast is sizeable, and a floor ellipse telegraphs it — firming up and blinking in the final moments, readable even in deep-zone dark.

• Self-damage is 2 half-hearts, but only well inside the blast. The safe margin is generous; a quick step clears it.
• Shooting a grenade doesn't destroy it — it pushes it. Your shot kicks it along the shot's direction, another bomb's blast kicks harder. Shooting your bomb where it needs to go is a real technique.
• Rocks and ore in the radius shatter (ore pays out), and a blast near a concealed doorway blows secret rooms open.
• Frozen residue: leave a room with a live grenade and it freezes mid-fuse, resuming when you return.
• Fire turrets are bomb-only. Nothing else destroys them.

Carry caps

Bombs and keys cap at 5, raised to 8 by OVERCLOCK BAY talents. Scrap and carried water are uncapped.

Enemies — the part grammar

Most enemies are procedurally assembled from a parts budget. Learning the grammar lets you read a body at a glance and pick your kill order before the first shot.

Quirks — the props are the readout

Each robot carries 0–2 quirks, and each quirk is a physical prop on the body using consistent colours across every robot. The vocabulary is learnable on purpose.

The mechanic quirks — reflector (dashed ring), energy-shield (double ring), aegis (octagon), slow-aura (field), dampener, cloaked — are the rings. In zones 1–3 they belong to curated specials only. From zone 4 most graduate into the procedural pool at high cost, one per robot. Energy-shield and cloaked stay curated-only forever.

What unlocks when

Elites

Unlocked permanently after your first ARCHON kill. From then on, one seeded combat room per floor promotes its strongest ordinary enemy: double HP, much faster, visibly larger, two bonus quirks, gold aura. Sublevel 12+ promotes a second elite room; ELITE PATROLS promotes a second at every depth.

Elite loot is a three-way split — a third keycard, a third a water droplet, a third bombs or scrap. Your first-ever elite kill also drips new items into the loot pool permanently.

The specials

Hand-authored enemies that attack a build's assumptions — raw DPS, screen-wide fire, standing still — rather than competing on stats. Each one is a puzzle with an answer.

One special per wave below floor 10, two at 10–12, three at 13–14, four at 15. They never appear in boss rooms and are never promoted to elite. Duplicates start at floor 13, so a build-breaker can stack two or three deep.

Each card below carries a live render from the game's own draw code — the actual body you'll meet, animating its actual tell. Watch the prop or ring; that's the readout.

The eleven that attack how you shoot

The four that ask how you move

Specials 1–11 attack how you shoot. These four attack how you move, and when you commit.

The eight that ask what you want

Shooting was taxed first, then movement. These eight tax everything else: your build, your aim, your loot, your exits — and whether you finish what you start.

The three that bend the arena itself

Each of these needed its own machinery: mid-fight terrain, a fog of war, typed damage.

The two that ask when

The newest pair. Everything above is continuously present; these two are window problems — one gives you windows, the other takes them away.

Bosses & gates

Two phases, a boss modifier, an escort wave, and an arena that examines you on the zone's mechanic. Boss HP gains extra for every item you're holding — a stacked run fights a stouter boss.

Boss modifiers

Every boss from sublevel 4 has one; the sublevel-3 boss coin-flips.

• Shelled — an armour shell absorbs all damage until it shatters.
• Podded — spawns four killable shield pods; the boss is completely untouchable until they're all down.
• Burrower — dives untouchable, tracks you underground, erupts in a radial rock-spray.

Escorts: a first group opens the fight; reinforcements arrive the moment the boss first drops below half hull. The instant the boss dies, unspawned reinforcements are cancelled and every surviving escort self-destructs — no loot, because they weren't earned kills. The room clears immediately and the fireworks start with no delay.

Arena hazards are untargetable and never count toward room clear.

Hazards

Hazards arrive on a schedule. Each zone teaches exactly one new mechanic, and that zone's boss arena is the exam on it. Once a mechanic appears it stays for the rest of the run, and gets denser.

Darkness & the headlamp

Zones 1 and 2 are bright enough to fight in freely. Zone 3 is where the lights go out, and the overlay thickens every zone after.

What still reads in the dark: hearts, water, keycards and charge all self-light, as do pedestals, stairs, the uplink terminal, teleporters, coolant drops, zone keys and the pump. Scrap and bombs do not — they're ambient clutter.

The headlamp (LAMP WORKS, two ranks) lights only in zones 3+. It is deliberately doused in zones 1–2 — if you took the talent and see no beam early, that's correct, not a bug. The cone eases toward wherever your visor points, so it follows your aim with a slight lag. Rank 2 is noticeably longer. Separately, your pilot carries an always-on warm glow, and that glow is what casts the shadows you see rocks and enemies throwing.

BLACKOUT makes lighting behave one zone deeper than you actually are — room art and the zone card still show true depth. Side effect: it switches your headlamp on early.

Water & the wager

Water is the thing people drink. Every liter you bank, somebody at the settlement lives on. Death spills all of it.

Where water comes from

Generic room-clear rewards never pay water. It comes from bosses, elites, the pump, and the rare ore.

The triangle

• Carried water rides your run save and shows in the HUD droplet cell. Death spills all of it.
• Transmit at any uplink terminal (E → overlay → E) to flush every carried droplet home at your current multiplier. Once banked, death can't touch it.
• Extraction banks carried water at the multiplier too — including loose droplets in the room and any frozen residue next door, so extracting from the chamber never loses the boss ring.

Transmit early to secure it. Carry it deeper to multiply it. Die and the desert drinks it.

Scrap

In-run cash, and — transmitted home — settlement build material.

Sources: robot drops (2–4 per roll), crates, ore pockets, shop sales. Shop prices: bomb 7◈, keycard 10◈, items by rarity.

Transmit: every full 10-scrap chunk ships home 1:1 as build material. BONEYARD doubles it. Each chunk also has a 40% chance to dispense a supply pickup — a heart, bomb, or key — right back at the terminal.

The Surface

A desert town on an isometric sand table, viewed through a degrading transmission. Reach it with E on the title, once any water has ever banked.

Rank 1 of a perk structure is bought with scrap (≥50); ranks 2 and up are upgraded with water (≥10).

Civic — the town itself

Population

Population grows on run completion when food ≥ current population and you're under the well's capacity. Each new arrival drinks 1L of banked water. A run that banks 3L or more brings +2 settlers.

Making contact

What the uplink console shows depends on how many times you've reached her:

• Contacts 0–1 — garble and fragments, SIGNAL COLLAPSED. Your payload banks anyway.
• Contact 2 — the third transmission locks the carrier. Mara speaks, three typewritten pages.
• Contacts 3+ — a working console: iso postcard, a read-only SETTLEMENT LEDGER, payload and E — TRANSMIT, the B/K break lines, your banked total.

The signal meter climbs 6% → 33% → 66% → 100%. ESC steps away; the world holds.

Ceremonies: GATE SEAL plays on each gate ARCHON's first kill — static, zone stamp punch, postcard with the liters counting up, a line from Mara. The ENDING fires on finale wins, once per population tier: THE FIRST RAIN (pop under 10), THE GARDENS WAKE (under 20), THE OPEN WATER (20+, when the slab becomes an island).

Expeditions

Modded runs on procedurally offered data centers. Endgame content — and one attempt each.

Unlock requires both the SIGNAL TOWER built and the full 15-floor descent cleared once. Until then, title-ENTER starts a plain run.

Controls: A/D select · ENTER embark · H for HOME (a plain unmodified run) · R to reroll for 25 scrap · ESC title.

The mod pools

Facilities carrying the hard hazard sets — fortified, elite patrols, blackout — render as NIGHT OPS slabs. ARCHIVE rank 2 stamps INTEL on cards, rank 3 stamps DEEP. Boss specifics roll mid-run and can't be previewed.

The daily: D on the title runs today's seed (UTC date). Once the chart is unlocked, the daily's fixed facility mods apply automatically with no chart shown; before that it's today's unmodified game. The zone card stamps the facility name on sublevel 1.

Item registry

Every item the facility can drop — the whole pool, no procedural salvage. Rarity sets the size of the boost: one item, one stat, bigger numbers as the color climbs. Milestone salvage joins the pool as your deeds unlock it.

Controls

Every screen is fully operable by keyboard, mouse, gamepad and touch. Nothing is locked to one device.

Keyboard & mouse

Six action keys — Space E R O P C — can be rebound in SETTINGS and take effect immediately. Movement, aim, ESC and ENTER are fixed.

Gamepad

Left stick or D-pad move (the D-pad also navigates every menu) · right stick aims and fires · A/Cross confirms, and interacts in gameplay · B/Circle backs out, pauses, skips · Start/Options pauses. B and Start never restart — restart is always a deliberate, separate button.

Touch

The first touch turns the on-screen controls on — a twin-stick layout: left half a floating move stick, right half a floating aim-and-fire stick, PWR for the active, USE to interact, the II chip to pause and the ✕ chip to close any panel.

• Every panel is directly tappable — title rows, option sliders, mixer bars (tap to set, auto-previews), profile slots, the uplink BREAK lines, expedition cards.
• On the pause sheet, drag to scroll the item list; a clean tap resumes.
• A tap confirms in menus but never in gameplay — a fire-tap can't confirm. And tapping a key row in SETTINGS only selects it; a tap can never arm a remap capture.
• Touch controls hide automatically if you pick up a gamepad. In portrait you'll get a ROTATE FOR FULLSCREEN COMBAT prompt.

Reading the screen

Every cue means something specific. These are the ones worth learning early.

Floating text holds in proportion to how much there is to read — a boss banner lingers a few seconds while +1 scrap stays snappy. The death screen names your killer and, if you were carrying water, states how much spilled — once, as fiction. It is not a running guilt counter.