How the night works

The night 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.

The night runs in six rounds. A level earned mid-round does not stop the fight; it banks. At each round boundary the horde recoils and a muster opens, and the muster is where banked levels are spent, one card at a time, until you sound the horn and the next round comes. The clock only runs while you fight, so a muster costs you no score. Past dawn the dark keeps its own count of rounds, and its own musters.

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.

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

Each hero also carries a signature rule: a passive that is always on, needs no button and never charges. The ability is the moment you choose; the rule is how the hero fights the whole night.

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, contact damage and spawn pressure all climb without a ceiling, elites crowd out the ordinary dead, and shrines stop burning, so your health stops being renewable exactly as the damage starts to climb. The dark keeps the round cadence too. It falls in rounds with musters of their own, and it keeps its own count. A boundary comes every two and a half minutes, and each one opens a muster where banked levels are spent, the same rule as before dawn.

This is deliberate. Your power is bounded: finite weapons, capped stats, a capped level. The curve is not, so it crosses any reachable build eventually, and there is no cutoff anywhere in the code that makes that happen; it falls out of the arithmetic. The curves are tuned so that holding the dark becomes nearly impossible around the thirty minute mark of the night, which is roughly forty minutes of wall clock once the musters are counted. The dark takes everyone; the best runs die latest.

The dark is not only a clock running out. A second Colossus wakes deep in the dark, and every Colossus felled, the first or the second, leaves a relic behind where it fell. There is still something out there worth crossing the field for.

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.

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.

Rare treasures that stand on the field under a shaft of light. The first is a fallen star that arrives with round four, and past that every Colossus felled leaves one behind. At most two ever stand at once, and a relic is never on a timer: it waits until claimed. Picking one up stops the world for a breath. Which relic falls is drawn from the seed, so rivals on the same night find the same treasures.

Some nights leave things standing in the ground that you can use. Walk to one and press E, or the USE button on a phone. Where they stand is drawn from the seed, so everyone on the same night finds them in the same three places.

A weapon also falls in the ground on the even rounds, and it is gone in forty five seconds if nobody takes it. Walk over it and you wield it automatically for thirty seconds, on top of your own attacks: THE EMBERMAW breathes a cone of fire along your gaze, THE REAPER SCYTHE sweeps a full circle, and THE STORM SPEARS pour bolts at the nearest skull.

Killing drops bone dust. Collect enough and you level, and the level banks: the number goes up at once, the fight does not stop, and the choice waits for the muster at the end of the round. There each banked level 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 reroll, one 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.

The night changes its weather every 80 to 140 seconds. Each system changes a rule, not 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.

Fifteen rungs of difficulty, cumulative: each 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 instead, and 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.

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 cosmetic, never 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.

Nothing in this section is in force. The staked tables are closed, no pool exists, there is no treasury and nothing here moves money. The tables stay closed while a client could rewrite its own clock and while tomorrow's seed can be computed by anyone: a committed seed, a server-attested run clock and a published custody wallet all come first. The rules are written down now anyway, because a player needs to understand the deal before there is any money to put into it, and if a rule changes before launch, it changes on this page first.

One stake enters every open pool. There are four pools, and a single buy-in enters your run in every window that is open at the moment you enter. You pay once. Not four buy-ins. The reasoning is plain: at a small player base four separate pots split a thin crowd four ways and every pot looks dead, while one stake feeding all four means every entrant grows the same headline number, and the week pot is worth looking at even on a quiet day. It is also simply friendlier, and the game is free either way; the stake is opt-in. A duel is the separate head-to-head format covered in the FAQ, where the better of two runs takes the winner's share.

Why the long pools rank a single run, and not a total. Everyone plays the identical seed per day. A 6 or 12 hour window sits inside one day, so every entrant in it fought the same night and the comparison is exact. A 48 hour or week-long window spans several different nights, and ranking a summed or averaged score across them would compare runs fought on different seeds, which destroys the one promise the whole game rests on: same night, nothing to compare except how you played. So the long pools rank your best individual run, every one of them fought on a fair same-seed night against everyone else who played that day. You are never compared across seeds. You are compared on “the best night you had this week”, which is a fair question with an exact answer. The alternative, freezing one seed for a whole week, was rejected: it turns a week-long pool into a single night everyone can grind and memorise, which rewards repetition instead of skill.

A run in flight when the window closes still counts. Entry time is what counts: if you bought in before the window closed, your run belongs to that pool even if it finishes after. The stake bought your seat, not your finishing time, and nobody is turned away at 13:58 for a 14:00 close.

Settlement runs after a 50 minute grace past close, and never later. The grace exists because a run entered just before close can legitimately still be in flight: a run tops out around thirty minutes of night, roughly forty minutes of wall clock once the musters are counted, and a slow device can stretch that further. Settling earlier would settle a pool while a paid entrant was still alive in it, which is the single worst thing a wager arena can do. The grace is also a hard stop: any run still open when the grace expires is scored at its survival time at that instant, so no single entrant can hold a pool open, and if the run-length ceiling ever moves, the grace moves with it. Before anything pays, every submitted run is checked again; full re-simulation from the input log is the standard a paying pool requires, it is not built yet, and no pool opens without it.

What decides the winner is survival time, to the second. Dawn is at 15:00 and does not end the run; the long dark follows and cannot be survived, so every run terminates and the score has no ceiling. Two runs level on the same second are separated in a fixed order, the same order the ladder sorts by today: a run that reached dawn ranks above one that did not, then the longer hold, then the run that felled the Colossus, then the higher kill count. Ranked is pinned to Darkness 0 and the control is visibly locked, so every entrant faced the identical night; that pin is enforced in the code and guarded by a test, not remembered.

The rake is the same everywhere on this site: 95% of every pool goes to the winners, 2% streams to $HORDE stakers, 2% goes to the treasury and 1% is burned. How the winners' share splits across placements is the one number not printed yet; it goes on this page before any pool opens.

What voids a staked run. These are not waiting on launch. They are in the code today, and a staked table inherits them on day one:

The game's token is $HORDE, and 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 fake, and 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.

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.