1. Welcome to the Dark
You lead a warren of monsters hiding from a world that wants you dead. Humans in nearby settlements will find you, muster fighters, and send waves against your Home Nest. If the nest falls, the run ends.
You survive — and eventually win — by doing three things in parallel:
- Growing your Nest — more monsters, more food, better buildings.
- Expanding your territory — claim or corrupt hexes to encircle settlements.
- Sending out raids — cull settlements before they can mount a serious wave.
The final page of this guide spells out exactly how a run is won. Use the dots below or Next/Prev to move through the guide.
2. The Nest: Burrows & Food
Your Home Nest hosts your buildings. Two are the backbone of every run:
- Goblin Burrow — spawns goblins and produces raw Meat and Bones. Goblins are your workforce: they staff every other building and go on raids. Upgrading a Burrow increases its per-cycle output; buying more Burrows (up to the cap) is what actually scales your population.
- Tavern — cooks raw meat into Grilled Meat, roughly 1.5× the satiation per unit of raw. If you feed monsters raw meat you're leaving hunger on the table.
Every monster gets hungry over time. A hungry monster fights worse; a starving one dies. Watch the fullness bars in the population panel on the left — if they're trending red, you need more Burrows, more Tavern throughput, or fewer mouths.
Later buildings (Bonekery, Graveyard, Vampire Nest, Radiant Grotto) plug into the same loop: bodies from raids and combat become bone cakes, blood for vampires, ghouls, and fungi.
3. Corruption & Territory
The world map is a grid of hex tiles. You start owning one: the Home Nest at the center. All territory growth happens in a fixed two-step sequence — you corrupt first, then upgrade to a full nest hex.
- Corrupt Area (step 1) — seed a Corruption Growth on an empty hex touching any hex you already control (owned or corrupted). It ripens over about a minute into a corrupted tile. Corrupted hexes count as yours for the purposes of surrounding settlements and act as launch pads for further corruption, letting you creep across the map. They cost bones and fungi.
- Expand Nest (step 2) — promote an already-corrupted hex into a full nest expansion. You cannot expand onto raw empty ground; the hex must be corrupted first. Costs bones and goblins, and the price ramps by 40% for each expansion you've already made. Full nest hexes are what actually raise your building caps and act as launch points for raids.
Why corrupt at all? Corruption is your cheap, fast-spreading footprint — you don't get building slots or raid launches from a corrupted hex, but you extend your reach and encircle nearby villages. This is your path to victory: a fully surrounded settlement — no route to open ground except through your territory — becomes a Larder. Once every settlement on the map is a Larder, you win the run. You'll finish most maps with far more corrupted hexes than expansion hexes.
When to promote: upgrade a corrupted hex to a nest expansion when you specifically need the higher building caps or a closer raid launch — not by default. Every promotion costs a big pile of bones and goblins.
The catch: Every owned or corrupted hex draws more enemy attention than an empty one — humans notice you spreading. Expand deliberately, not compulsively.
4. Threat & Waves
Two separate numbers drive the humans' response — don't confuse them:
- Wave timer — a fixed countdown (~230s) shown in the Slayer Activity panel on the right. When it hits zero, a wave arrives at your nest. No random delays, no early attacks. Every raid you finish, every building you place, happens against this clock.
- Threat level (0–100) — a separate meter that rises when settlements are near your territory, when your monsters starve, when raids provoke reprisals, and slowly decays over time. Higher threat gives the humans more reach, pulling in more distant settlements to contribute to the next wave.
When the wave fires, its size and composition are computed from a strength budget:
- Every hex in reach contributes — empty hexes a little, owned/corrupted hexes twice as much, plus a share of each settlement's fighters.
- The highest-tier settlement in reach unlocks stronger enemy types (knights → archers → mages).
Practical read: the longer you sit still on a big footprint next to a strong settlement, the uglier the next wave. Between waves, spend the time to reduce threat (raid down a village's fighters, feed your monsters, or thin its population) rather than just stockpiling.
5. Raiding
Raids are how you go on the offensive. From the world map or the Raids panel, pick a settlement, choose a squad of monsters, and send them out. The squad walks to the target, fights, loots, and walks back.
Why raid? Three reasons, in roughly this order:
- Weaken the next wave. Fighters you kill on a raid are fighters that won't be in the human muster when the timer runs out. A single well-timed raid can turn a wave from unwinnable into trivial.
- Loot. Raids bring back humanoid meat (cooks at a premium 3× ratio in the Tavern) and bodies, which the Graveyard turns into ghouls, blood for vampires, and bones.
- Long-term suppression. Repeated raids grind a settlement's population down, which drops its tier and lowers its future contribution to waves.
Costs and risks: Raiding monsters aren't at home — they're not defending the nest if a wave lands mid-raid. Travel time is real; don't send your whole army to the far corner of the map just before a wave. Underpowered squads die and you lose the bodies and the monsters.
6. How You Win
Read this as a strategy directive, not a bonus objective. Waves and raids matter — but the whole game is really a race to encircle the map before the humans grind you down. Every corruption and every expansion is direct progress toward victory; a raid that doesn't ultimately clear the path for encirclement is just buying time.
Practical checklist:
- Identify the settlement you're going to Larder next — usually the closest, weakest one.
- Corrupt the empty hexes around it. Use rocks and other settlements as "free walls" — you only need to plug the gaps.
- The instant the last escape route seals, it flips to Larder and stops fighting you forever.
- Move on to the next settlement. Repeat until all are Larders.
Close this dialog and press Enter the Dark when you're ready.