Waves & Progression
A run is 100 waves. Everything in the game is scheduled off the wave number — enemy HP, boss identity, band votes, rewards and revive costs all read it directly.
Wave structure
Waves come in five-wave bands, and the position within the band decides what happens:
| Wave ends in | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 or 6 (from wave 6) | A band-buff vote opens before the wave spawns. Nothing spawns and the wave cannot advance while the vote is open. |
| 0 or 5 | A boss, plus assist-ball rain for the whole fight. |
| Even (not 10) | A Chompy joins the spawn. |
| Odd | A Mama Spider joins the spawn — plus every wave 30 and 50. |
| Any | Once per band a Goldie appears; twice per band above 10, a Wizzle; once per 10-wave band, a Lash. |
Each wave starts with a banner that fades in over half a second, holds for 1.5 s and fades out over 0.7 s. The wave’s bosses and special enemies spawn after that banner, so the first couple of seconds are quiet.
Where a run starts
Every run starts at wave 1. There is no wave selector and no way to buy a head start — you press Start in the Room and the run begins from the top, whatever your record is.
Older builds had a wave stepper in Expedition Setup that let you start at any wave you had already reached, for (wave − 1) × 20 gold. That screen and the skip are both gone. A run always opens on wave 1, which is a band start, so you never miss an early band-buff vote any more.
The wave you save is the wave you completed, not the one you were on.
Wave progress is still tracked separately for Sand, Ice and Magma. Reaching wave 60 on Sand leaves your Magma record untouched — each front keeps its own. “New record” is judged per planet too; only the daily bonus reads your best across all three.
Clearing a wave
- The wave advances when the arena is empty. Anything in the enemy group blocks it — including Goldies, which deal no damage, and Wizzles and Lashes, which have no lifetime.
- A Goldie will eventually vanish on its own after
wave × 15seconds, but it pays nothing if it does. - Every 10 cleared waves is a cloud checkpoint: your progress is saved and your Galactic War kills are reported.
- Gold from kills is banked at the next wave-clear checkpoint rather than instantly.
Death and revive
Hitting 0 HP does not immediately end the run. Your ship enters a dead state — visible, red, collision disabled, no longer firing — and the session keeps running.
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| You die in single player | A 10-second revive window opens. Every enemy freezes and nothing spawns or advances. Revive within it or the run ends. |
| One player dies in co-op | The session keeps going — waves keep spawning and advancing, even if the host is the one who died. A living teammate can revive you by tapping the red button on your HP bar. |
| Everyone dies in co-op | The same 10-second window opens for the whole party. Any revive cancels it — one living player means no game over. |
Reviving costs wave × 10 gold, paid from your own wallet. Repeated revives come back weaker: the first restores 100% HP, each subsequent one 10% less, floored at 10%. Because it is a percentage of your effective max HP, it scales with your Health upgrades.
Team heals, heal orbs, the Healer class and a Health upgrade bought while dead all skip a downed player. Nothing brings you back except an actual revive.
While the revive prompt is up, a Hold to Give Up button appears lower-right. Holding it for a second backs the run up to the cloud and returns you to the start screen. In co-op the host ending this way ends the session for everyone; a client just leaves.
Wave events
From wave 6, any non-boss wave has a 20% chance of rolling an event, which is announced by a banner as the wave starts.
| Event | Enemies | Coins | Feel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold Rush | Normal count, 35% health | ×3 | A payday. Everything melts and pays triple. |
| Swarm | 1.6× the count, 60% health | ×1 | A wall of weak enemies — chaotic, good for area damage. |
Boss waves never roll an event. The host picks it and tells the room, so a co-op party always sees the same wave.
Challenge modifiers
Single-player only. A Challenge cycler in Settings trades difficulty for gold, applied for the whole run:
| Challenge | What changes | Reward |
|---|---|---|
| None | The default run | — |
| Swift Enemies | Everything moves 1.4× faster | +40% gold |
| Elite Hunt | Far more elites, and double Stardust chances | +25% gold |
The +25% gold is the smaller half of it. Doubling the boss drop to 10% and the elite drop to 4%, on a run stuffed with extra elites, is the only deliberate way to chase Stardust.
Ending a run
- Game Over offers Upgrade, Restart and Main Menu. In co-op, Restart is host-only and restarts the whole session at wave 1.
- End Game from Settings tears the run down and saves. It uploads to the cloud only if you advanced at least 5 waves from where the run started — so a wave-33 start needs to reach 38.
- Any gold ball still bouncing when a run ends is collected automatically, so its value lands in the run total and the Game Over readout.
- The band-buff stack stays visible on the Game Over screen so you can see what you ran.
Victory at wave 100
Clearing wave 100 ends the run in victory rather than advancing — the Game Over screen shows “Thank You!” and “You cleared all 100 waves!”. Defeating the finale boss also unlocks its ship, with a one-time toast over the victory screen, for every player who took part.
Which boss and which ship depends on the planet you were flying: Sand, Ice or Magma. To collect all three reward ships you have to beat wave 100 on all three planets.
Endless mode
The victory screen is no longer the end of the run. Beside Restart there is now a Continue button that resumes from wave 101, and from there waves keep advancing until you die — there is no second victory check.
- You keep the victory and the ship unlock. Continuing does not take them back, so there is no reason not to press it.
- Bosses cycle the whole roster again rather than stopping at the finale, and enemy scaling keeps climbing on the same
2000 × wavecurve. - Continue full-heals you in single-player. In co-op the host revives the entire party — a teammate can be dead but un-revived at the moment the 100 clear lands, and they come back too.
- In co-op it is host-only, like Restart, and broadcast to the room — the host’s press takes everyone into endless together.
The debrief
However a run ends, the Game Over screen now opens with a debrief — what that run actually did, rather than just the wave you died on:
- Kills, bosses, best combo, gold earned
- Defeated By — what actually killed you, tracked at every point damage can reach you, so a death to contact damage reads differently from a death to a boss volley
- Time survived
- Stardust collected, if any
- The active ship’s mastery rank
Any line that beat your previous best is tagged NEW BEST!, and each one pays a bonus of 200 × the wave you reached in gold. Beating four records on a wave-60 run is therefore 48,000 gold on top of everything else the run earned.
There are five trackable records — wave, kills, bosses, gold and best combo — and the bonus scales with how deep the run got. A short run that sets a combo record pays far less than a deep one that sets the same record.