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Spoilers ahead. Achievement entries describe build requirements and late-wave milestones. Guides contain solutions and may reveal encounters and progression.

Pyrewarden · Wiki

Stalwart

A full unrestricted run to wave 40, and the ledger that proves it.

Stalwart achievement emblem

Stalwart
Reach wave 40 in any mode.

No restriction on this one — build whatever you like. It is the writ that asks whether your defence can simply keep up, and by wave 40 the enemy health curve has been compounding for fifteen waves past its second ramp.

What you are actually racing

Enemy health multiplies by 1.09 every wave, and after wave 25 a second ramp of 1.16 per wave stacks on top of that. Gold per kill only rises by 1.06. The gap between the two is the whole difficulty of the game, and it is why a defence that looked comfortable at wave 25 collapses in the middle thirties.

What keeps pace is a full board early — many towers, each adding its own damage and its own adjacency bonuses — and upgrades once the board is built. The run below had all 292 of its towers standing by wave 35.

The run, in order

  1. Pick a map with room. Wayfarer's Crossroads is the obvious choice: 24×24, five routes, 504 buildable cells — more than twice what most maps offer — and it opens with 300 gold, the largest purse in the game.
  2. Spend on breadth before depth. A new 50-gold tower adds more than a fourth level of Damage on a tower you already own, because slot costs multiply by about 1.5 per level while a tower is always 50.
  3. Mix schools deliberately. Every different-school neighbour is a permanent adjacency bonus, and every pair that lands damage on one enemy within 1.5 seconds sets off its combo. The recorded run triggered 6,835 of them by the time wave 40 cleared, half of them after wave 35.
  4. Keep a Radiance tower on every route before wave 20. Stealthed enemies arrive then and nothing else in the game can target them.
  5. Build the board out early — the recorded run had all 292 of its towers up by wave 35 and spent everything after that on upgrades. Clear wave 40 and the writ is yours; the run below stops there.

The recorded run

The built-in AI plays a fresh-profile game on Wayfarer’s Crossroads through normal mouse and keyboard input, without restrictions. Your enemy draw will differ.

  • Result: no lives lost; all 292 towers built by wave 35. Wave 40 cleared at 12:55 game time with 876 kills and 6,835 combos.
  • Film: complete menu-to-ledger run. Gameplay plays at 4× with a visible badge; menus and ledger stay at normal speed. Original game music and effects.
Wayfarer's Crossroads after wave 35, towers of many schools packed along five routes
Wave 35 cleared: 292 towers already standing, 20 of 20 lives, 3,348 combos. Five routes means a tower at a junction covers several of them at once.
The in-game achievements screen showing Stalwart and Walking Compendium unlocked
The profile's ledger afterwards. Stalwart is lit — and so is Walking Compendium, because this run happened to place one of all 36 school-and-path combinations on the way.

What breaks it

  • Spending deep on a few towers before the board is built. The cost curve punishes it.
  • Building one school. The counter web means roughly a sixth of what arrives will be resistant to you, and a single school gives up combos entirely — see One True Path for how far that actually gets you.
  • Reaching wave 20 with no Radiance anywhere.