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TOWER INCREMENTAL key art CRT-03
● RECCH-03
PLAYABLE IDLETOWER DEFENSE

TOWER INCREMENTAL

Hold the tower. Aim the LANCE. Die into a talent tree.

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ABOUT THIS GAME

A tower-defense incremental. An auto-firing tower at screen center holds back escalating enemy waves while you manually aim the LANCE. When you die — and you will — the run's currency banks into a large branching talent tree, and boss first-kills drop tokens that unseal gated regions of it.

CURRENT RELEASE

v0.10

2026-08-13
  • Choose where your run starts. Every boss you reach unlocks a checkpoint just past it, and you can drop straight in there instead of re-walking the waves you've already beaten. Runs stay short as the ladder gets long — and starting from wave 1 is always still on the table.
  • REDEPLOY now opens a deploy screen: your loadout, what your build does, and the checkpoint picker, all in one last look before you launch. It only shows you what you've got — editing stays in the tree, one step back. Pressing R on the death screen still throws you straight back in, no screens in the way.
  • A settings panel, reachable from the gear on the HUD, the death screen and the tree. Screen shake and flashes each dial down to LOW or off entirely — and off really means off, including the death whiteout and the low-health pulse.
  • Your save, as text you can keep. Copy it, download it, or paste one back in. An import is checked as carefully as your real save is, so a bad paste is turned away and nothing you have is touched. Losing progress to a cleared browser is no longer a thing that can happen to you.
  • The death screen now tells you why you lost. Which weapon did what share of the damage, in its own colour; what destroyed you and how; and your biggest single hit of the run.
  • Waves cleared now counts the waves you actually survived, rather than counting from wave 1 when you didn't start there.

ROADMAP

NEXT UP

  • A late-run escalation so runs end decisively instead of grinding down into a slow finish.
  • Hover a distant talent and see the cheapest route to it, with the total cost to get there.
  • See what a wave is made of before it arrives, so targeting and loadout choices have something to read.
  • A first-run pass that teaches the lance's firing rhythm and what death actually banks, without a tutorial.

LATER

  • A statistics screen: runs, bests, kills by weapon and family, elites slain.
  • Damage numbers over the fight, for when you want to read the maths instead of the light.
  • Clearer tower durability in the HUD — integrity, shell and armour told apart at a glance.
  • Share a build as a short string, so you can hand someone your tree.

MAYBE

  • Sound — the visual escalation ladder maps straight onto it.
  • Milestone badges, with no rewards attached.
  • Catch-up progress for time spent away.

Plans, not promises — no dates, and any of it can change.

RELEASE NOTES

v0.9

2026-08-11
  • A seventh weapon: the MORTAR. It fires itself, aims at the thickest part of the crowd, and lobs a shell over everything to land in the middle of it. Against one enemy it is the weakest thing you can carry. Against a wave standing shoulder to shoulder it is the best.
  • The shell takes time to arrive, and it commits the moment it leaves the tube — it lands where the crowd was, not where the crowd went. Quick enemies walk out from under it. That is the price of the blast.
  • Everything the blast touches catches fire, and the fire keeps burning long after the tube has gone quiet. It is a different burn from the lance's afterglow, and one enemy can carry both at once.
  • A new branch to grow it in: THERM BLOC. Three feeders — heavier shells, hotter fire, faster loading — and all three have to reach the breech before the gate opens. On the way there, CONTAGION makes burning enemies set light to their neighbours, and STICKY PROPELLANT leaves every impact smouldering on the ground so anything walking through catches too.
  • Two keystones past that gate. ACCELERANT stops fire from merely refreshing and lets it pile up instead, so a saturated crowd burns far harder than a single hit ever could. DETONATOR — which used to sit off in an unfinished corner of the tree — has moved in properly: kills leave a rune that explodes a moment later.
  • Three slots and seven weapons now. Two of them answer crowds and they do not answer them the same way: the CONDUIT wants enemies strung close enough to leap between, the MORTAR wants them piled up. What you leave behind matters more than ever.

v0.8

2026-08-09
  • Every weapon that picks a target now picks its own. The autocannon, the gravity well, the lightning conduit and the gold designator each carry their own targeting mode, so a loadout is a set of jobs rather than one shared setting — the well anchoring the crowd while the autocannon executes the wounded and the conduit sweeps up what's left.
  • Each weapon has a mode it was born with and keeps for free, forever. The autocannon starts on nearest, the well and the conduit go for the thickest knot of enemies, and the designator hunts the fattest purse on the field — that last one is a mode nothing else can have, because marking the richest target is the whole reason that weapon exists.
  • You choose a weapon's mode where the weapon lives: click its loadout socket and the picker now lists every mode it can use, with its built-in one marked and the ones you haven't unlocked yet naming the talent that grants them. The choice sticks to the weapon, so it follows that weapon between slots.
  • Mid-run, click a weapon's readout on the HUD to switch it on the fly — only that weapon changes. A readout only becomes clickable once that weapon actually has a second mode to switch to. The old T key is gone; there was never a sensible key for four weapons at once.
  • The targeting talents moved out of the autocannon's branch and onto the tower itself, in a new TARGETING ARRAY. Buying a mode there unlocks it for every weapon at once, and none of it switches off when you unslot the autocannon. The ballistics branch closed up the gap it left behind.
  • Old saves are cleared by this release — the targeting talents live at new addresses and a stale purchase would have refunded nothing.

v0.7

2026-08-07
  • A sixth weapon: the CONDUIT. It fires itself, picks the thickest part of the crowd, and throws a bolt of lightning that leaps from body to body — each jump a little weaker than the last. Against one enemy it is the worst gun you own. Against twelve it is the best.
  • Hit something enough times and it locks up. Every arc banks static charge, and when the meter fills the target freezes solid — it stops walking, stops shooting, stops everything — then gets a moment's immunity so you can never simply hold one enemy down forever.
  • Bosses refuse to be frozen. They soak up the charge instead and take it back all at once as a burst of damage, so the CONDUIT is still worth firing at them — it just cannot take a boss fight away from you.
  • A new branch to grow it in: ARC GRID, wired like a substation. Three feeders — one for more jumps and longer reach, one for raw speed and damage, one for faster stuns — and all three have to reach the busbar before the gate opens.
  • Two keystones past that gate. DISCHARGE makes a freezing enemy dump its charge into everything around it. GROUND FAULT turns damage the tower takes into stored power, earthing it out as a shockwave — the harder the waves hit you, the more often it fires back.
  • Deeper in, SHOCK LATTICE leaves stunned enemies taking more damage from everything you own, not just from the lightning. Three slots and six weapons now, so what you leave behind matters more than ever.

v0.6

2026-08-06
  • Balance is now tuned from data instead of from feel. This release adds a harness that plays the game itself — thousands of complete runs, headless, in about twelve seconds — and reports how far each build actually got.
  • It sweeps 144 combinations: every way of fitting five weapons into three slots, crossed with builds ranging from an empty talent tree to a fully bought one, ten runs each. For every combination it records the wave reached, the gold and prestige earned per minute, and which weapon actually did the damage.
  • The first thing it found: the ASSAYER's payoff grows as your tree fills. Slotting it is worth roughly 30% more prestige on a young tree, but around six times more on a complete one — for about nine waves of survival. That is now measured rather than guessed, and it will inform tuning before anything changes.
  • Under the hood, every run now tracks damage per weapon. Nothing shows it yet — it is the groundwork for a death screen that tells you which weapon carried the run and what actually killed you.
  • Nothing about how the game plays has changed in this release. It is a tools release: the point is that the next balance pass will be based on evidence.

v0.5

2026-08-05
  • A fifth weapon: the ASSAYER. It picks the most valuable enemy in range and marks it in gold — and when anything else you own kills a marked enemy, it pays far more. It is cheap, it unlocks early, and it deals no damage at all.
  • That makes your loadout a real decision. Three slots, five weapons, and one of them buys income instead of killing power: take the ASSAYER and you kill slower but bank more, leave it out and you push deeper. Neither is the right answer.
  • A whole new branch to grow it in — THE EXCHANGE, laid out as a set of balance scales. One pan rewards patience: marks that last longer and appreciate the longer their target survives. The other rewards aggression: faster marking, marks that splash onto everything near a marked corpse, and permission to appraise bosses.
  • Two keystones at the fulcrum. COMPOUND INTEREST sharpens every appraisal for the rest of the run, each marked kill making the next one worth more. GREED TRADE makes marked enemies 40% tougher and pays double for killing them anyway.
  • The death screen now tells you exactly what the marks earned you, so you can see whether the slot was worth it.
  • Gold talents are sprinkled across other branches too, so a build without the ASSAYER still has somewhere to invest in income.

v0.4

2026-08-04
  • Find any talent instantly. Press / and start typing — the tree lights every match and everything else fades back. It searches names, descriptions and what a node actually does, so typing "chain" finds the chain-lightning keystone even though the word never appears in its title.
  • Matches on other branches aren't hidden from you: each tab shows how many it holds, and Enter hops between them one at a time, jumping to the right tab and centring on the node.
  • Talents locked behind a sealed gate still show up in your results, ringed in gate amber — so you can see what a clearance token would buy you and plan for it.
  • The panel on the left now tells you what your build actually does before you deploy: estimated damage per second for each weapon you have slotted, your effective health, armour, and every keystone that's live.
  • It only counts what will really fire. Take a weapon out of your loadout and its whole branch drops out of the numbers, exactly as it will in the run.
  • Expand STATS for the full list of everything your purchases have changed, so you can check a node you just bought is really doing something.

v0.3

2026-08-04
  • NULLFIELD, the fourth weapon: a hole in space tears open over the thickest part of the wave, drags everything caught inside toward its centre, then collapses and crushes what it gathered. No aiming, no clicks.
  • Three weapon slots, four weapons — the loadout is finally a real decision. What you leave out matters as much as what you take, and respeccing is still free.
  • A whole new talent branch to walk: 31 nodes that orbit an empty hole in the middle of the map. Twin wells, a longer grip, a re-collapsing echo, and a well that reaches enemies burrowed underground.
  • Buy SINGULARITY and kills inside a well implode — the death particles run backwards, inward, and the well pays out what it ate when it collapses. It's the only effect in the game that runs in reverse.
  • Bosses plant their feet and refuse to be pulled, but still take the full crush without moving. NULLFIELD is deliberately the worst boss weapon in the game — its job is crowds.
  • Heads up: the save format changed, so this update starts you from a clean slate.

v0.2

2026-08-03
  • In-game help codex: press H (or the ? chip) to look anything up mid-run — the game pauses while it's open, so reading never costs you a run.
  • Every entry plays a live demo of the real thing, running the actual game renderer over a sandboxed fight — what you see in the codex is exactly what you'll see in the arena.
  • 39 entries covering all 13 enemy archetypes, elite promotion and its six affixes, boss tiers 1-5, every weapon and tower defence, the status effects, and the field indicators.
  • The codex only documents what you've actually met: enemies, elites and bosses appear once you've faced them, weapons and statuses once you've bought them. Category counts show how many are left to find without naming them.
  • Arrow keys walk the entries and categories; Escape or H drops you straight back into the fight, exactly where you left it.

v0.1

2026-08-02
  • Weapon slots: the tower starts with one hardpoint holding the LANCE and can grow to three — your arsenal is now a loadout decision, not an accumulating pile.
  • The talent screen is now tabbed: TOWER plus one tab per unlocked weapon, with an in-tree loadout panel and weapon picker.
  • Weapon unlocks moved into a new core cluster: BALLISTIC MOUNT (autocannon), the token-gated ORBITAL MOUNT (plague orbit), and the PLAGUE NEXUS keystone.
  • Slotted = live: an unslotted weapon's whole tab contributes nothing — including the lance's beam interception and kill-gold economy. Choose wisely.
  • First release published to mindlessquest.com — everything before it (three weapons, 12 enemy archetypes, ranged attackers, elite affixes, five boss tiers, CRYO tower durability) is in.