Night Runs: Sparks, Flames and the Lantern

From World 8, bosses drop Sparks. Forging Flames and the Lantern open at Awakening 5. Twenty Sparks of one aspect fuse into a Flame, and a Flame is not something you spend on power directly. You load it into your Lantern and carry it into a run, which turns that run into a Night Run: far harder, played by its own rules, and paying no loot. What you keep is a permanent bonus scaled to how far you got while carrying it.

How it works

• Sparks drop only from bosses, in World 8 and above.
• Twenty Sparks of the same aspect forge one Flame of that aspect.
• Once you have a Flame, START opens the Lantern: load Flames there, then start the run.
• Arming costs nothing. The Flames are only taken when the run actually begins.
• The further you get, the bigger the permanent bonus that aspect pays from then on.

The four aspects

• Flame of Damage: Night Wardens shield the enemies around them from damage based on max HP and control, and half again as many bodies arrive to feed the Tide. Pays damage.
• Flame of Life: enemies ignore a share of your slows and stuns and move faster, and the Tide tolerates fewer of them and rises on its own. Pays max health.
• Flame of the Shield: Rot takes a slice of your max health every few seconds, and healing pays that debt first. Pays max shield.
• Flame of the Slayer: a boss every second wave, immune to damage based on max HP, enraging if it stays within attack range, and an enraged boss burns lantern oil like a breach. Pays boss damage.

The Lantern

You get one Lantern slot at Awakening 5 and one more at each of 6, 7 and 8, for four in total. Awakening 9 and 10 do not add slots. The Lantern holds at most one Flame of each aspect: a second Flame of the same kind cannot be loaded.

Every night has the Tide: a meter that fills whenever too many enemies have entered your reach or lived 2 s. Each breach burns one of three charges of lantern oil, and a breach with no oil left ends the night. Every extra Flame doubles how fast enemies arrive, divides damage based on max HP by 2 once more (the Seal) and adds 30 s of Oath fatigue. In World 8 and above the night also adds Corruption: +3 with one Flame, +6 with two, +12 with three, +20 with four. Wardens, Rot and enrage stay the same. The difficulty multiplier itself does not grow with extra Flames.

Before a night you may add a coin offering in the Lantern: each step weakens that night's pressure by 5%, up to 25%, and is paid again for every night. A weakened night's record counts fully.

The bonus is your record

Each world pays each aspect up to its maximum in four quarters: one for your best wave with one Flame in the Lantern, one with two different Flames, one with three, one with four. Each quarter grows in a straight line with that best wave and is full at wave 6000, the same target on every world: the world's own difficulty is what makes it harder. Records never go down, and worlds add up. Bonuses apply to every run afterwards, ordinary ones included.