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This wiki describes Pyrewarden 0.1.1. The version is printed in the bottom-right corner of the main menu; if yours is newer, treat the exact numbers here as the ones that shipped with 0.1.1.

Pyrewarden is a tower defence game about pairing schools of magic. Towers are cheap and identical until you give them a school; what makes a defence work is which schools you put where, and which pairs you let hit the same enemy.

Gameplay & controlsThe run, the build flow, the HUD, every key. SettingsEvery option on the settings screen.

From launch into a mission

1. The main menu offers Start Game Space, Multiplayer M, Achievements T, Controls K, Settings O and Quit Esc — every item has its own key, printed beside it. A Discord link sits at the bottom.
2. Start Game opens map select. Every one of the 27 maps is shown as its real layout — green marks a spawn, red the goal, tan the route the enemies walk. Each tile also carries the board size, the route count where there is more than one, and your best wave on that map. The tile marked * STARTER is Wanderer's Waypoint. A Random tile picks for you.
3. Click a map, or arrow-key to it and press Enter, and the game begins. There is no difficulty select and no loadout screen — the map is the difficulty setting.
4. Nothing moves until you start a wave. Press Space to send the next one, or wait: a wave launches itself after 60 seconds.

Your records

The menu's Achievements entry opens a four-tab record screen and lands on Lifetime — total runs, highest wave ever, enemies slain, synergy combos triggered, gold earned and longest run. Per-Map Bests is the tab that matters for World Tour, since that writ reads exactly those numbers. Top Towers ranks what your individual towers did, and Achievements is the roster itself — all nineteen visible, none hidden.

What you are trying to do

Enemies walk from a spawn to the goal. Every one that reaches the goal costs you a life; you start with 20. There is no final wave — the game ends when your lives do, and how far you got is the score.

Killing enemies pays gold, and so does clearing a wave. Gold buys towers and upgrade levels, and that is the whole economy: there is nothing to save for and nothing carried between runs except your recorded best wave on each map.

The one idea to take in first

A tower on its own is a tower. Two towers of different schools that both damage the same enemy within a second and a half set off that pair's synergy combo — a burst of extra effects on top of the damage. There are 66 pairs, one for every combination of the twelve schools, and they are where most of a late defence's killing power comes from.

A separate, quieter bonus applies when two different-school towers sit orthogonally next to each other: a permanent damage, attack-speed or range boost for that pair. Both are laid out in Codex → Synergies.