Find two canisters of fuel, then get to the crawler. It will not leave without them.
One ranked run a day. The first run you finish is the day's result and the only one that touches your streak; it saves after every turn, so you can close the tab and come back to it. After that the same district is yours to practise on as often as you like, and none of it counts. Archive opens every past day for practice — tomorrow's district does not exist yet, and no link will conjure it.
| Arrows / WASD | Move, melee, or just turn (a blocked move still turns you) |
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| F | Fire at the reticled target |
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| Space | Medpatch — heals you |
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| G | Thermal shot — sheds frostbite |
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| E | Class power |
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| Tab | Cycle guns |
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| . | Wait a turn |
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| M | District map |
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| R | Practice run (once the day is done) |
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The buttons under the board are the controls, on a phone and at a desk alike — and every one of them wears the key that does the same thing, so you never have to learn two schemes. Each shows what it will spend and what is left; greyed out means it would do nothing right now.
- The view follows you — eight tiles across, so a tile is big enough to read. The district map in the side panel is the whole zone: what you have seen, where the crawler is, and the amber box is what you are looking at.
- The bright dashed line is the edge of the district. There is nothing past it — you cannot leave that way.
- Guns reach further than the view does. When the thing you are about to shoot is off-screen, an amber arrow on the rim points at it.
- Reading the board — a gold glow is something you can take (the canisters glow brightest), a red glow is something that can kill you, cyan is something you can use, and anything unlit is scenery you cannot walk through.
- Rounds are shared across every gun. Out of ammo means melee, and melee means getting hit.
- Cover — stand beside a wreck, drum or snow berm on the shooter's side and half their shots hit it instead. It works for them too.
- The district is the enemy. Every turn outdoors puts 4 frostbite into you. The meter beside your HP starts empty and fills as the cold gets in; bare, you have about 25 turns before it is full, and full is dead. The run is one long question: where is the next fire?
- Watch the edges of the board. Frost creeps in from them at five blocks of frostbite and closes in at eight. If the whole screen has gone white you are one or two turns from freezing.
- Insulation is survival. Armour carries two numbers now: how much damage it soaks and how much of the cold it keeps out. A sealed thermal suit is worth more out here than a heavier vest.
- Fire is the only warm ground out here, and one turn on or beside it empties the meter completely. The snow around a fire is drawn warm so you can spot it across the board. That is the whole shape of the run: get to the next fire before the meter gets to you.
- Each survivor has one thing they do in a fight, and it is on E. The outrider steadies the rifle — past four tiles a snap shot does half, a steadied one crits. The flamekeeper sets a burn that scorches everything beside it every turn: stand in your own fire. The deepborn has a field kit. The rimekin vents banked cold into a burst that freezes what it hits for a turn. The salvager lifts mines for salvage and bolts down sentries with it.
- Crates have to be broken. Walk into one to stave it in, and whatever was inside lands on that tile — then step onto it to pick it up. Everything the dead drop works the same way: it lies where it fell, and going for it costs you turns and frostbite. That is the trade.
- Reading the board — a solid plate under something means blocked ground that also stops your shots; a dashed plate stops your feet but not your bullets. A gold pad is worth standing on, a red pad is a mine, cyan is the crawler.
- M opens the district map in the corner of the board.
- Sound is in the header. Everything you do and everything done to you has a noise — and your gun, a scrapper's gun and a sentry's are three different ones, so you can tell who just fired without looking away from where you are going.
- The whiteout closes in on turn 110: the cold gets worse and everyone loses two tiles of sight.
- Score = fuel + salvage + condition + XP — condition is how intact you walk out (max 30), XP is the total HP of everything you killed.