Enemies
Four machines still running the station, and the thing waiting at the
end of every deck.
You have 100 health before armour. Every machine on this page
winds up before it fires, and the wind-up is the number that matters
most: it is how long you have to get out of the line once you know a shot is coming.
All four rank-and-file machines take one and a half times damage on a weak
point. Figures below are for Normal difficulty.
At a glance
"Shot" is shots per burst × damage each. Damage per second counts the whole cycle: wind-up, firing and recovery.
A trilobite, an eye drone and a quad shell firing at once put out 21.9 damage a
second between them: standing still in front of that with no armour kills you in 4.6 seconds.
Deck 1 holds fifteen to twenty machines on Normal, so three at once is not the bad
case. None of them is dangerous alone, and the deck is built so they are not alone.
Trilobite
75 health · no armour · 5 coins · 10 % chance of an artefact
Low, fast and always coming. It moves at 3.1 m/s — faster than you walk — so backing
away from one is not a plan; turning to face it is. It opens up at 14 metres with a
fan of four slow pellets and keeps closing to about ten, which means it is shooting
at you for the whole approach.
Individually the pellets are almost nothing, 1.5 damage each. The fan is the point:
it is visible in the air, it comes from a direction, and it tells you something is
already inside your range. It hears you from 24 metres and watches across 160° — this
is the one that comes looking, not the one that guards a room.
Eye Drone
70 health · flies · 6 coins · 20 % chance of an artefact
It hangs in the air and spends your attention. The weakest thing on the station at
4.9 damage a second, and nobody gives you more warning: seven tenths of a second of
wind-up before a burst of three discharges, and it flips back after firing. If it hits
you, you had time.
Two hundred degrees of view — it has one eye and no back to sneak up on — and it is
the one that ignores your cover, because it does not use the floor. Small and
airborne: 0.35 metres across, and the reason to deal with it is that it never stops
while something bigger walks in.
Quad Shell
160 health · takes 15 % off every hit · 8 coins ·
15 % chance of an artefact
The wall. Twice the health of anything else and the only machine with armour, so
every shot you land is worth 15 % less than the number on your gun. It fills a
corridor — 0.6 metres of body — and it hits hardest, two discharges of 8 with only
six tenths of a second of warning.
It is also the slowest to turn: 180° a second against the trilobite's 360. You cannot
outrun it in a straight line and you do not need to. Go around it. Its lunge covers
what is in front of it, which is why the six tenths of a second is time to move
sideways, not backwards.
Servitor
115 health · no armour · 9 coins · 25 % chance of an artefact
The one that starts the fight. It sees furthest — 22 metres — and fires furthest,
opening at 17, so on an open deck it usually notices you before you have picked a
target. Five discharges of 3 in a burst, and it is the longest burst anyone throws:
walking through the whole thing costs 15.
Its cycle is also the slowest, 2.3 seconds end to end, and the gap after a burst is
deliberate — it is the window you are meant to use, to close the distance or to
break line of sight. It carries the best artefact chance on the deck, one in four,
so it is worth the trouble.
Warden of the Deep
900 health · one per deck · 120, 150 or 200 coins depending on
the deck
It holds the last room and the portal home does not open until it stops. It notices
you at 23 metres, prefers to fight at about nine, and it will follow you a little way
into the corridor — but only while it can still see you. It is three times harder to
stagger than anything else: interrupting it is not a tactic.
The fight has three phases and they are read off its health, not a timer.
The beams are weak on purpose — three damage each. Eight of them make you move; one big one would only make you hide.
Phase two is where it stops being a duel: the reinforcements are called early enough
to actually arrive, which they were not when they were called in phase three. Phase
three is a wall of fire rather than a faster phase two — the damage per beam never
goes up, the number of beams does.
Difficulty
The setting changes four things about the machines at once, and it is honest about all
four: on Hard there are more of them, they last longer, they hit harder and they notice
you sooner.
Hard pays 60 % more coins because its machines have more health and there are more of them — without it, the harder setting would earn less per minute.
Your first descent is quieter than the rest whatever you picked: on Easy and Normal
only three out of five of the planned machines are actually there. On Hard they all
are, because choosing Hard is a choice, and softening it quietly would be a lie.