HOW VERIFICATION WORKS

The game advances in fixed steps of exactly one sixtieth of a second. That step size never changes: not on a 144 Hz monitor, not on a laptop struggling at 30 fps, not on a phone. Drawing the frame and stepping the world are two separate jobs, and only the second one decides what happens.

This is the foundation for everything else. A simulation that advances by “however long the last frame took” produces a slightly different world on every machine, and no amount of seeding rescues it. A fixed step means the same inputs applied at the same tick numbers produce the same night, on any hardware. Pausing stops the clock entirely rather than slowing it, so a pause cannot be used to buy reaction time.

One number decides the night. It is published by /api/seedwhich anyone can open, and it rolls at 00:00 UTC. There are two ways we can derive it, they give different guarantees, and this page reads the live endpoint rather than telling you which one is running.

Open mode. The seed is HORDE-YYYY-MM-DD put through an FNV-1a hash and reduced to a value between 0 and 999,999. Nothing private goes into it, so you can compute tonight’s seed yourself and confirm the number we serve is the number the date produces. The weakness is the mirror image of that strength: anyone can compute any future night and practise it before staking on it. That is acceptable for free play and it is not acceptable for a wager, so staked tables do not open in this mode.

Committed mode. A server-side salt joins the date, so future nights are no longer guessable. On its own that would just move the trust to us, a hidden input means we could pick a night after seeing who turned up. So the salt is committed to in advance: we publish sha256(salt | day) for tomorrow, tonight, before anyone plays it. When a night is retired we release the salt, and anyone can recompute that hash and check it against what we published a day earlier. A commitment that matches proves we did not choose the night after seeing the field. This is the same shape a provably-fair casino game uses, and the chain is what does the work, not our word.

Either way there is no per-player seed, so there is no favoured player to hand a gentler night to.

A run can also be pointed at any seed with ?seed= in the URL, which is how a ghost challenge sends your rival the exact night you just died on.

The seed does not feed one generator. It feeds four independent ones, each started from the seed mixed with a different constant:

Why four and not one. A random stream is a sequence, and every draw moves it forward. If a single stream fed everything, then the number of times you swung your sword would change which skeletons spawned next, two players on the same seed would drift apart within seconds and “same seed” would be a slogan rather than a property.

Splitting them fixes the parts of the night that must be identical for a fair comparison. Spawns and the environment are driven by the clock, so they land at the same second of the night for every player on that seedno matter how either of you plays. Drafts stay in the same order but arrive when you level, so a faster killer sees the same cards sooner. Combat variance follows your own hits, where it belongs.

While you play, the game records what you did, not what happened. Every tick it builds a small number, a bitmask, out of the controls you are holding:

Delta-encoded means nothing is written on a tick where your input did not change. A pair of numbers, the tick, and the new mask, is appended only at the moment something changes. Holding right for three seconds costs two numbers rather than a hundred and eighty. A full fifteen-minute run is a few kilobytes.

The mobile joystick is quantised into the same eight directions before it reaches the mask, so a touch run and a keyboard run produce the same kind of log and are checked the same way.

Because the draft picks, rerolls, skips, banishes and the hero choice are recorded in the same stream as movement, the log is a complete account of every decision you made, in order, with exact timing. Nothing about the run is left to be reconstructed from memory or from a screenshot.

Put the three pieces together and a run stops being an opinion. A fixed step, a known seed and a complete input log mean the night is a function of two inputs:

Hand a server the seed and the log and it can play the run back with no player present, and it must arrive at the same survival time, the same kill count and the same level. If it does not, the claim is rejected. That is the whole design.

The useful part is what it does not require. There is no need to detect cheating, no heuristic guessing at suspicious mouse movement, no appeal to our judgement about who looked legitimate. A score the simulation cannot produce simply cannot be reproducedand a run that reproduces is paid whether or not anyone believes it.