Morass GamesWikiAll game wikis
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 50, 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 from 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.

The only lever that keeps pace is more towers, each one adding its own damage and its own adjacency bonuses. The run below finished with 292.

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 15,640 of them — that is where a wave-40 defence's killing power actually comes from.
  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. Do not stop building. Clear wave 40 and the writ is yours; the run below carried on to 50.

The recorded run

One continuous game on a fresh profile, Wayfarer's Crossroads, no restrictions. It cleared wave 40 at about ten and a half minutes of game time and ran out of lives in wave 50, finishing with 292 towers and 15,640 synergy combos. Played back at 2× speed.

The middle of the run, towers of many schools packed along five routes
Mid-run. Five routes means a tower placed at a junction covers several of them at once.
Wave 49, 292 towers, 15,640 combos on the counter
Wave 49: 292 towers and 15,640 combos triggered. Open the image to read the counters.
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 a run this wide ends up placing one of all 36 school-and-path combinations on the way.

What breaks it