FAQ

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.

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.

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 the minutes you put into it and nothing else. Before any staked table opens we will publish a written disconnect rule: what 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.

Fifteen minutes from dusk to dawn, with a boss at minute fourteen, and dawn is not the end: the long dark follows and takes everyone, the best around the thirty minute mark. The night falls in six rounds with a muster between them, where banked level-ups are spent; the clock stops in the muster, so it costs no score. Pausing freezes the simulation the same way, so pausing is not a way to buy thinking time against another player, you both still have to survive the same night.

Rare treasures that stand on the field under a shaft of light: at most two at once, and they wait until claimed. The first is a fallen star that arrives with round four; after that, every Colossus felled leaves one behind, and picking one up stops the world for a breath. There are four, from a dawnburst fired on the spot to an extra card choice in every later muster, and all four are listed in the docs.

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.

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 clock, so 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 stream, so the upgrades you are offered arrive in the same order, though you pick them in the muster between rounds, and how many levels you have banked by then depends on how fast you kill. Combat variance is a third stream, consumed 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.

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.

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.

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.

No pool is open today; these are the rules the tables will open under, not a live schedule. There are four pools on four windows: the 6 hour pool runs four times a day, the 12 hour pool twice a day, the 48 hour pool rolls across two days, and the week pool runs Monday to Sunday. One stake is one buy-in, and it enters your run in every window open at that moment, not four separate tickets. Entry stays open to the last second of a window; a run still in flight at close counts by its entry time.

The full rulebook, what each window ranks, the settlement grace and what voids a run, is written out in the docs. It is published before any money exists, so the deal can be read while reading it costs nothing.

Entry time counts. If you bought in before the window closed, your run counts for that pool even if it finishes after the close. 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. 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. The grace exists because a run tops out around thirty minutes of night, roughly forty minutes of wall clock with the musters counted, so a last-second entrant can still be fighting after the close, and settling earlier would settle a pool while a paid entrant was still alive in it. None of this is live, and no pool opens before server-side re-simulation ships.

By survival time, to the second. Dawn does not end a run; the long dark follows and cannot be survived, so every run terminates and the score has no ceiling. In the 6 and 12 hour pools your run is compared against every other run on the same seed. The 48 hour and week pools rank your best single run, because they span several different nights, and summing scores across different seeds would compare runs fought on different nights, which breaks the promise the whole game rests on. Two runs level on the same second are separated in a fixed order, the same one the ladder sorts by today: dawn reached beats not reached, then the longer hold, then the Colossus kill, then more kills.

Of every pool, 95% goes to the winners; 2% streams to $HORDE stakers, 2% to the treasury, 1% is burned. How the winners' share splits across placements is published on the docs page before any pool opens. A run in slow motion or fast forward, a ranked run using auto-strike, or a run whose input log overflows is voided; those checks are in the code already. None of this is live: no pool exists and no funds have ever moved.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.