HORDE · Docs: rules and how the night works

01The run

A run is fifteen minutes. You start alone with one weapon and the dead start walking. Survive to dawn and you win; die and the run ends where it ended. There is no checkpoint, no continue and no way to pause your way out of a bad corner, the pause menu stops the simulation, it does not rescue it.

Everyone plays the same night. One seed is drawn per day at 00:00 UTC and every run that day uses it, so the same spawns, the same drops and the same weather arrive in the same order for everybody. That is what makes two scores comparable. You can also point a run at any seed with ?seed= in the URL, which is how a challenge link sends someone the exact night you just died on.

The simulation runs at a fixed 60 steps per second regardless of your frame rate, so a faster machine does not make you faster. Every input you make is recorded as a compact log for replay verification. How that is checked.

02Controls

Action	Keyboard	Touch	Notes
Move	`WASD` or arrows	Left stick	You face the way you move
Strike	`JEnter` or click	STRIKE	A real arc, you can miss
Dash	`Space`	DASH	Brief invulnerability, 2.2s cooldown
Ability	`R`	DAWN	Charges from kills; one per hero
Pause	`Esc`	PAUSE	Stops the simulation

Auto-strike is available in the pause menu for players who cannot hold a click. It swings for you on cooldown. It is an accessibility feature and it is also a mechanical advantage, so a run using it is marked unranked, once, quietly, with no nagging.

03The five heroes

Every hero is free from the first run. None is stronger than the others; they are shaped differently, and their signature ability is where that shows most.

Hero	Shape	Signature ability	What it actually does
KNIGHT	Tougher: 150 health instead of 120	BULWARK	The only ability that answers being hit rather than dealing one. Two seconds of immunity, a heavy shove, and a fifth of your health back. The right moment to press it is the worst moment.
BARBARIAN	Half again the damage, wider reach, heavy knockback	WHIRLWIND	Not a blast but a state. Three seconds of a moving grinder, so the payoff is in where you walk it.
ROGUE	Faster, 25% critical chance, less damage per hit	SHADOWSTEP	Relocation, not destruction. Blinks to the emptiest ground nearby, cuts everything on the path, and lands untouchable for a moment.
RANGER	Fights at range; arrows pierce	ARROWFALL	Three seconds of arrows on the thickest part of the horde. Rewards reading the field rather than being surrounded by it.
WITCH	Starts holding Holy Nova; stronger abilities	RIMEBLOOM	Takes the horde's turn instead of its health. A long freeze over a wide radius plus modest damage, a different kind of save entirely.

The ability bar fills from killsnot from time, so it cannot recharge itself while you hide.

03bThe long dark

Dawn arrives fifteen minutes in. The sky turns gold, holds for a breath, and goes out. Reaching it is still an achievement and still counts, but it is not the end of the run. What follows cannot be survived, and it is not meant to be.

Past dawn everything escalates on a doubling curve. Enemy health doubles roughly every fifty seconds, contact damage every forty, spawn cadence every seventy five. Every enemy becomes an elite within about three minutes, the ceiling on live enemies lifts from 220 toward 320, and shrines stop burning entirely, so your health stops being renewable exactly as the damage starts doubling.

This is deliberate and it is measured. Damage taken grows about one hundred and thirty times over four minutes, so a health pool many times larger than any reachable build empties in a fraction of a second. In practice a run ends somewhere in the four to five minutes past dawn, and there is no cutoff anywhere in the code that makes that happen. It falls out of the arithmetic: your power is bounded, and the curve is not.

Why the game is built this way. A wagered ladder needs two things at once that a fixed fifteen minutes cannot provide. It needs a score with no ceiling, or every competent player ties at the same number and the pot gets decided by who farmed more kills rather than who survived longer. And it needs every run to actually end, or a pool can never pay out. Making dawn the beginning of the endless phase gives both.

Your score is how long you held, counted to the second. That is the whole ranking.

04Weapons and evolutions

Fifteen weapons you can draft, plus the sword you begin with. You keep every one you take, they all fire on their own timers, and six of them evolve when their line is fully levelled. Several are deliberately weak somewhere, because a pick that is simply better than the last one is not a choice.

Weapon	Behaviour
Sword	Your strike. A real arc in front of you, swung across an active window, enemies that walk into it mid-swing are hit.
Throwing axes	Seek the nearest skull and return.
Holy nova	A ring that clears everything close.
Bone spears	A piercing volley in a line.
Orbiting blades	Circle you constantly. The highest hit-rate source in the game.
Ember trail	Burns the ground where you have walked.
Stormcall	Strikes distant enemies from above.
Rimeguard	A slowing pulse in a ring around you.
Soulfire (wisps)	A hunting light that picks its own targets.
Chain lightning	Leaps from one skull to the next. Useless on a lone target, devastating in a press.
Blood sigil	A rune left where you stood, pulsing on its own timer. The one weapon that pays for holding ground.
Spectral hounds	They choose their own fights and do not return until it is finished.
Culling bell	Rings across the entire field and finishes anything already dying, at any distance. It has no effect whatsoever on an elite or on the Colossus, so it answers a swarm and nothing else. Strongest early, and it quietly stops working in the long dark.
The tether	A burning line from you to the nearest skull, hitting everything the line crosses and retargeting when that skull dies. It does nothing in the open. It is the only weapon that pays for running into the horde rather than away.
Gravebloom	The dead leave spores. A spore bursts after a beat, and a burst that kills can seed one more, to a limited depth. It rewards fighting where the bodies already are.
Mirror knight	A phantom swings where you stood a moment ago. Stand still and it covers ground you already hold; circle, and it guards the arc behind you.

05Levelling and the draft

Killing drops bone dust. Collect enough and the night stops for a moment and offers you three cards: a new weapon, a level on one you hold, or a stat. What you are offered depends on the seed, your level, and what you already carry, so two players at the same level with different builds do not see the same three cards.

You get one rerollone banish (which removes a card from the rest of the run) and you may skip entirely. Higher Darkness rungs take these away one at a time, and that is felt far more than any of the rungs that simply raise a number.

06The horde

Kind	Arrives	Behaviour
Minion	From the first second	Walks straight at you. Never faster than you are.
Charger	~1:40	Winds up, then closes hard in a straight line.
Grave warrior	~2:30	Bigger, slower, far more health.
Bone caster	~3:30	Keeps its distance and throws bolts.
Exploder	~5:00	Bursts on death and damages whatever is close, including other skeletons.
Shieldbearer	~6:00	Slow, and eats half of everything from the front.
Elite	Any of the above	Amber-lit, more than double health. Grows more common all night.
THE COLOSSUS	14:00	Three phases, telegraphed slams, and it summons. Killing it is worth more than anything else in the run.

Nothing that chases you is ever faster than you are. Every chasing enemy is capped at 94% of your speed, so being surrounded is always a mistake you made and never one the game made for you. There are also hard limits on how many of each kind can be alive at once, and on the total.

07Weather

The night changes its weather every 80 to 140 seconds. Each system changes a rulenot just the colour of the screen, and the weather is drawn from the day's seed so everyone gets the same nights in the same order.

System	What changes
GRAVEMIST	You can barely see. Sight becomes the resource, you have to move to find the horde instead of waiting for it.
BLOODRAIN	The dead give up more and arrive faster. Dust stops being lost, which pays for the extra pressure.
DEEPFROST	Everything slows, yours included. Neither a gift nor a punishment, it stretches every distance.
EMBERFALL	The ground burns. Standing still costs you health, so the safest habit in the game stops working.

08The Darkness ladder

Fifteen rungs of difficulty, cumulativeeach keeps everything below it, and each unlocked by clearing the one before. Free play only.

Most rungs raise a number. Four of them take a choice away insteadand those are the ones you will feel: no rerolls at 4, two cards per draft instead of three at 7, no banishing at 10, no skipping at 14. Losing the reroll changes how you read every draft for the rest of the run; more enemy health changes no decision at all.

Ranked runs are always Darkness 0. A pot is only comparable if everyone in it faced the same night, so nothing you unlock can change a staked run.

09Free play and ranked

Free play needs nothing. No wallet, no account, no signature. Open the page and fight. Your run lands on the practice ladder under whatever name you like.

Ranked is the wagered table. It asks for a Solana wallet so a run can be attributed to someone, and it will not open until server-side replay verification and a committed seed are both live. The verification page lists exactly what is proven today and what is not, including the parts that are still unchecked.

Progress that is worth keeping is tied to a connected wallet. Without one, a refresh starts you clean. Anything an account unlocks is a choice or a cosmeticnever power. A veteran and a newcomer entering the same pot bring the same numbers, and that is a rule the code is tested against, not a promise.

No funds move today. There is no treasury, no pot and no payout yet. Every stake control on the site is a preview of a table that is not open.

10$HORDE

The game's token is $HORDEand it will be created on pump.fun on Solana at launch, a fair launch on pump.fun's own defaults, with no pre-sale, no team allocation and no vesting schedule to trust us on, because there is nothing allocated to vest.

It has not launched yet. There is nothing to buy today. The official mint address will be published on this site and on the official accounts in the same hour it is created. Any address circulating before then is a fakeand anyone showing you one is trying to take your money.

The game does not need the token. Free play is the whole game, and it stays free, the wagered table is one mode, not the product.

11Fair play

The daily seed, the five independent random streams, the fixed-step simulation and the recorded input log all exist so that a run can be checked rather than believed. The verification page sets out how, and it also lists what is not yet proven, including that today's practice ladder takes scores from the browser without re-simulating them. Read that list before you trust any number on this site.

If you find a way to fake a run, tell us. That is worth more to this project than a clean-looking leaderboard.