Strategy guide

How to survive longer in Riftspinner, from the first wave to the wave 100 finale.

The first five waves

Wave 1 sends about seven hosts, mostly Wretches and Skitters. The map is large and enemies spawn at least 620 pixels away, so you always have a few seconds before the first contact. Use that time to learn the movement: keep moving in wide arcs, fire while you move, and save the dash for when something is about to hit you. If you find aiming hard, press C for auto-aim.

Spitters arrive at wave 2, Flickers at wave 3 and Marksmen at wave 4. This is where the game stops being about reflexes and starts being about reading the enemy. Wave 4 is also the first monarch wave, with a Sovereign and an escort. It is survivable with the starting rig if you keep moving and use the walls to break line of sight.

Spend your first ash on the cheap permanent ranks in the Ash Market: Marrow Vat for health, Kinetic Hymn for damage and Loaded Dice for luck. Luck is the quiet winner, because it improves every drop for the rest of your career.

Kill priority

When several kinds of host are on screen, the order you kill them in matters more than your damage. A reliable order is:

1. Chanters and Howlers. They make everything around them stronger, healing or hasting it. Remove them first.
2. Cinders, at range. They explode when they die. Killing one far away costs nothing; killing one next to you costs health.
3. Leeches. Their tether drains you while it holds. Do not leave one alive in the background.
4. Marksmen and Spitters. They hurt from a distance. Close the gap or break line of sight behind a wall.
5. Everything else. Brutes are slow and harmless if you keep moving. Skitters and Wretches are what your splash is for.

Aegis hosts carry a shield on the front. Kinetic shots are heavily reduced from the front, so flank them, or use venom, which ignores the plate.

Using the map

• Walls block shots and slow packs. Run a loop around a wall and the pack stretches into a line that pierce shots punish.
• Crates break when shot and drop ash orbs, sometimes loot, and often a power-up.
• Barrels are the orange-ringed drums. Shoot one from range and it becomes a patch of fire that hurts hosts and you alike. Pull a pack past a barrel, move out of range, then fire.
• Shrines open about 30 seconds into a run. Stand in the glowing field for around six seconds and it pays out a gun. Completed shrines disappear 10 seconds later. You can fight inside the field while it charges, and stepping out only drains the charge slowly.

Power-ups

Glowing orbs sometimes appear on the map or drop from crates. Iris Surge widens your pickup range for a few seconds, Kinetic Fury boosts damage and fire rate, Stride makes you faster, Ward cuts the damage you take and gives a moment of invulnerability, and Marrow heals a chunk of health. Do not hoard them: they expire after about twenty seconds.

Choosing field mutations

Every level offers four mutations that last for the current run. A few principles:

• Early on, take damage or fire rate. Killing faster is the best defence in the first ten waves.
• From about wave 10, mix in survivability: Iron Hide for soak, Carapace for health, Second Wind for regeneration.
• Stack what you already have. Venom, lifesteal, crit chance and crit damage all scale with the number of hits, so a focused build beats a spread one.
• Blood Tithe is excellent in swarm waves, where you kill dozens of hosts a minute.

Picking a gun for the situation

No single gun wins every wave. The Breach Jack clears Skitters and Motes; the Glass Lance and Rift Awl handle lines of hosts and bosses; the Venom Quill and Seeker Thorn deal with shielded hosts and let you retreat while they work; the Hollow Cannon is slow but removes whole groups with splash. The Four Rig upgrade lets you carry up to four guns, so carry a close-range gun and a long-range gun and swap with 1 to 4 or Q.

Surviving monarch waves

Every fourth wave is a monarch wave, and waves 6, 9 and 15 add a monarch to an ordinary wave. A Sovereign or Archon brings an escort, hits hard, and always drops rare-or-better loot. Before the wave starts, spend your ash, heal up and decide where you will fight. During the fight, kill the support hosts in the escort first, dash through the monarch's telegraphed attacks rather than away from them, and remember that a monarch is slow: you can always outrun one.

Going the distance

Wave 100 ends the campaign with a finale host. After it you can finish the run and keep your ash, or continue into Endless, where a harder finale host returns every ten waves. The permanent ranks in the Ash Market carry between runs, so even a bad run builds toward a stronger next one. Check the rigs page for builds, and the bestiary for every enemy.