FAQ
What is real, what is a mock-up, and what has to happen before anyone stakes a token. Where the honest answer is uncomfortable, the uncomfortable one is printed.
01Playing tonight
The part that works right now.
Can I play free, without a wallet?
Yes. Open the game and you are fighting within a few seconds. No install, no account, no email, no wallet, no cost, and nothing you can do tonight costs money, because there is nothing to spend it on yet.
WASD or the arrow keys to move, SPACE to dash, R for the ultimate, ESC to pause. On a phone you get a floating joystick and two buttons. The wallet button in the corner exists only to put a name on a run; you never need it.
What do I need to run it?
A modern browser with WebGL, Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, desktop or mobile. There is no download, no extension and no launcher. The whole simulation runs on your own machine.
What happens if I disconnect, refresh, or my browser crashes?
The run ends and nothing is saved. The entire game lives in your browser tab: there is no server session, no autosave and no checkpoint. Close the tab and the run is gone, with no resume and no partial credit. ESC pauses, and the simulation clock stops while paused.
Nothing is at stake today, so a lost run costs you fifteen minutes and nothing else. Before any staked table opens we will publish a written disconnect rulewhat counts as a completed run, and what happens to a stake when a client dies mid-fight. That rule does not exist yet and we are not going to pretend it does.
How long is a run, and can I pause?
Fifteen minutes from dusk to dawn, with a boss at minute fourteen. Pausing freezes the simulation, so pausing is not a way to buy thinking time against another player, you both still have to survive the same fifteen minutes of night.
02The seed
The one number the whole night hangs on.
What is the daily seed?
A single number that decides the night. It is derived from the UTC date, the string HORDE-YYYY-MM-DD run through an FNV-1a hash and reduced to a value between 0 and 999,999, and served by the public endpoint /api/seed. It rolls over at 00:00 UTC, and everyone who plays that day fights the same one.
The seed is printed in the corner of the screen while you play. You can also fight a specific night by adding ?seed=123456 to the game URL, which is exactly what the CHALLENGE BY LINK button hands your rival.
What does “same seed” actually mean?
Every random decision in the game is drawn from the seed instead of from your clock or your machine. There are five separate random streams, and they behave differently on purpose:
Spawns and environment are scheduled off the simulation clockso the waves, the bone eruptions and the shrines land at the same second of the night for everyone on that seed. Draft cards come from their own streamso the upgrades you are offered arrive in the same order, though they reach you when you level up, which depends on how fast you kill. Combat variance is a third streamconsumed hit by hit, so it follows what you actually do.
So: you and your rival get the same night, not the same video. Nobody is handed an easier horde. The full mechanism is on the verify page.
Can I replay an older night?
Yes, pass any seed value in the URL. That is how ghost challenges work: your friend gets a link to the exact night you died on, and can see for themselves whether they would have done better.
03Stakes, pots and the rake
None of this is live. Here is what it will be, and what the screens in the game are doing today.
How do staked duels work?
The intended shape is simple: two players, one tier, the same seed. Your stake sits in the match pot while you fight, both runs are re-simulated from their input logs, and the better verified run takes 95% of the pot.
Right now that flow is a mock-up. The stake screen in the game shows the tiers and the rake split and will not move a token. Connecting a wallet only reads your public address. The optional “sign” step signs a plain-text message that proves a run is yours, it is not a transfer approval, and the game never requests one, because there is nothing to transfer into.
When do prizes open?
We are not giving you a date, because a date would be a guess dressed as a promise. Staked duels are Phase 2, and every one of these has to ship first: server-side replay verification, a published custody wallet, a written dispute process, and 18+ and regional gating.
Phase 1 is free play plus a bounty ladder. When a real prize wallet exists, its address goes on this site and its balance is readable on-chain by anyone who wants to check it.
What is the 5% rake, exactly?
Of every pot, 95% goes to the winner. The remaining 5% is split three ways, in the open: 2% streams to $HORDE stakers2% goes to the treasury that pays for servers and development, and 1% is burned forever.
There are no other cuts: no entry fee on top, no withdrawal fee, no house player sitting at the tables. And it applies only once staked play exists, today there is no pot, so there is no rake.
Is there a $HORDE token I can buy?
Not yet. The token has not launched. When it does it will be created on pump.fun, and the official mint address will be published here and on the official accounts in the same hour.
Any address circulating before then is a fake. There is nothing to buy today, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to take your money.
04Trust, cheating and the ladder
The section a wagering product is judged on.
Is the ladder verified?
No, and the API says so itself. Today’s ladder is a practice board. At the end of a run your browser reports its own time, kills and level, and the server stores that number. The server never receives your input log and cannot re-run your night, so somebody determined, with developer tools open, can post a score they did not earn.
There is exactly one crude guard, a run cannot claim more than roughly four kills per second, and that is the whole of it. The endpoint returns verified: false with a note saying the same thing. It becomes a real board the day server-side re-simulation ships. See how verification will work.
What stops someone botting the game?
Today, very little on the free ladder, and we would rather say that than imply a protection we have not built.
The plan is not heuristics that guess at cheating, it is proof. A staked run gets paid only after the server re-runs it from the seed and the input log and arrives at the same result. A score the simulation cannot produce is simply rejected; there is nothing to argue about. Automation, macros and modified clients are prohibited by the terms and will void a staked run.
Is the game open source or audited?
The game is client-side JavaScript, so every line of it is readable with view-source: the seed derivation, the five random streams and the input log are all right there in the page.
There has been no third-party security audit. What exists is several rounds of internal adversarial review. The thing that will genuinely need outside eyes is the verification service, and when that ships we will say who reviewed it.
What does the wallet signature prove?
That whoever submitted a run controls that address, nothing more. It does not prove the run happened, and we do not claim it does. Proof of the run is re-simulation, which is not live yet.
05Wallets, age and where you can play
Read this one before you connect anything.
Which wallets are supported?
Phantom, Solflare and Backpack. The game looks for those providers in your browser, and falls back to any standard Solana provider that injects itself.
Connecting is identity only: it reads your public address so a run can carry a name. We never ask for a seed phrase or a private key, we never request spending approval, and no page on this site is able to move funds out of your wallet. If a site claiming to be HORDE asks you to approve a transaction today, it is not us.
Are there age restrictions?
Free play is a video game with nothing at stake and no wagering.
Staked play is different, and when it opens it will be 18+or the higher local age where one applies, with acceptance of the staked-play terms required before a table is joinable.
Are there regional restrictions?
Yes, for staked play. It will not be available where real-money skill gaming or wagering is prohibited, or where it requires a licence we do not hold. We may geo-block and may require age verification.
We would rather block a region than run an unlicensed table in it. The current position is written out in the terms.
How do I report a bug, or a cheat?
Until the official channels open at launch, use the contact address on the terms pageit is a placeholder and is labelled as one. Include the seed, roughly when it happened, and what you saw.
If you find a way to break the determinism or the verification design, tell us. Before there is money on it is exactly when we want to hear about it.