Thanatide, field manual

What a build is made of

Two weapons, one frame, one doctrine tree, one field ability. There are no classes here and no choice that closes another one off. All of it swaps between runs, and most of it probably should.

Weapons

Seventeen chassis across seven classes. The heavier ones only start dropping at higher threat, so the toybox opens up further down.

Chassis	Class	Drops from	What it is
KR-7 Kestrel	Rifle	T1	Standard service rifle. Boring and reliable.
Wasp SD	SMG	T1	Suppressed, light, and very fast.
Breacher 10	Shotgun	T1	Pump-action. Point it at the problem.
VX Hammerhead	Rifle	T2	Fires slower, hits about twice as hard.
Lancer AR-9	Rifle	T2	Three-round burst, whether the moment called for one or not.
Longshot M4	Marksman	T2	Semi-auto. Rewards a steady hand.
Ripsaw-12	SMG	T3	Empties a fifty-round drum in under three seconds. Bring spares.
Auto-Sweep	Shotgun	T3	Full-auto buckshot. Good for doorways.
Sentinel LMG	Heavy	T3	A hundred rounds a belt. The reload takes forever.
Arc Emitter	Energy	T3	Arcs between nearby hostiles. The tighter the crowd, the better it works.
Coilbore	Shotgun	T4	Magnetic slug thrower. Goes through more than one of them.
Fusion Lance	Energy	T4	Continuous beam. Hold the trigger and sweep.
Thumper GL	Launcher	T4	Grenades that bounce once before they go off.
Voidlance	Marksman	T5	The round goes through bodies. Walls stop it, usually.
Nova Coil	Energy	T5	Hold to charge, release to clear the room.
Choir Rotary	Heavy	T6	Six barrels. Takes a second to spin up.
HAVOC RL	Launcher	T7	Lock on and let go. It finds them.

Frames

Six of them, and they change how an operator moves and not only how much it soaks.

Frame	Drops from	What it does
Line Carapace	T1	Health, a bit of shield, a bit of damage reduction. Nothing special, and hard to go wrong with.
Skirmish Weave	T1	Faster on foot, shorter dash cooldown, wider pickup range. Thin armor, so don't get hit.
Siege Plate	T3	A big health pool and blast resistance, at walking pace. It was never built to move.
Warden Halo	T4	Less health, but a large shield that recharges quickly.
Reclaimer Rig	T5	Regenerates on its own and revives much faster. The co-op pick.
Spinecoat	T6	Health and thorns, grown from the same spore that started all this. Nobody signed off on it.

Doctrine and abilities

Twenty-two skills across Gunnery, Endurance and Fieldcraft. Four tiers, each costing more than the last, so the points go to the bottom of one branch or spread across all three. One field ability sits on top of that:

Adrenal Surge · heal and go faster
Concussive Pulse · push everything back
Aegis Field · shields for the squad
Incendiary Charge · set the doorway on fire
Overclock · seven seconds of free ammunition

Rarity, and what it buys

Six tiers. Each step up multiplies the chassis's base numbers and adds another affix slot. Every affix rolls its own value inside a range, and the item card gives that roll as a percentage. It is why a well-rolled Superior beats a bad Exotic, and why the next drop is always worth reading.

Standard No affixes. Salvage fodder, mostly. ×1.00

Enhanced One affix. ×1.10

Superior Two affixes. The workhorse tier. ×1.24

Exotic Three affixes. Worth stopping to read. ×1.42

Mythic Four affixes. Changes how a run goes. ×1.66

Blackline Five affixes, double base stats. Most players will see a handful, ever. ×2.00

The actual drop rates

Sampled from 400,000 drops per tier, not estimated. Threat is the dial that matters:

Threat	Standard	Enhanced	Superior	Exotic	Mythic	Blackline
1	62.34%	26.18%	8.19%	2.86%	0.42%	0.013%
5	28.55%	31.98%	25.37%	11.73%	2.31%	0.058%
15	0.26%	3.42%	27.25%	48.99%	19.64%	0.43%

Blackline is 1 in 9,091 drops at Threat 1, and 1 in 249 at Threat 15. Those numbers are supposed to sting.

Signal takes some of the edge off. It's a pity counter that ticks up every time a drop comes back ordinary, nudging the odds a little further each time, and 250 dry drops forces an Exotic or better. The longest unlucky streak in testing at Threat 1 was 163, so the guarantee catches a bad night. It cannot be farmed.

What to do with a drop

The arsenal screen: an Exotic assault rifle compared stat by stat against the equipped SMG, with three rolled affixes, three mod sockets, and buttons for upgrade, reforge, protect and salvage. — Everything is compared against the equipped item, before anything is spent.

Keep it

Upgrade and socket

Items level up to 30 and open mod sockets along the way. An old favorite keeps up for a long time on a steady diet of materials.

Fix it

Reforge

Rerolls the value on one chosen affix, and keeps the affix. The new roll can be worse. What an item is stays what it dropped as, so an almost-perfect drop is worth working on and a bad one is worth breaking down.

Push it

Upgrade

Levels cost money, and past level 7 they can fail. Deep pushes take a level back when they do, though nothing drops below 15 and nothing is ever destroyed. A Core spent up front holds the level through a failure.

Bin it

Salvage

Everything left over breaks down into alloy, catalyst and cores, and that is what pays for all of the above. Nothing is wasted, even when 62% of what drops is Standard.

Mastery runs under all of it. Using a weapon class earns permanent bonuses for that class, so sticking with something pays off even when the drops don't.

Threat, and making it harder on purpose

Five tiers handle the raw numbers. Enemies get more health and hit harder, better chassis start dropping, and the whole rarity table shifts up. A campaign mission adds its own baseline on top, so Terminal in Act IV is nothing like Terminal in Act I.

Tier	Threat
Containment	1	The line holds. Standard issue is enough.
Escalation	4	It stops being a patrol. Bring something that reloads fast.
Breach	7	Containment has broken somewhere further in.
Overrun	11	Nobody owns the room now. The corners are the problem.
Terminal	15	It's called Terminal for a reason. Clear it anyway.

Every story mission remembers the highest tier it has been finished on and wears the medal for it. Twenty missions, five metals, and the campaign screen keeps score either way.

Mutators

The other half of the difficulty. A mutator does not scale a number, it takes a rule away, and each one pays more for the trouble. In endless they stack, and working out which combination pays best is most of the game up there.

Mutator	What it removes	Payout
No Second Chances	A downed operator dies. Nobody is picking anyone up.	+50%
Hard Extract	The operation gets called at a fixed time. Run out the clock and the run ends where it stands.	+40%
Dry Supply	Half the ammunition and half the medical supplies on the floor.	+35%
Rotten Steel	Bulkheads come off their rails in a third of the time.	+20%

The campaign has exactly one, and it is armed or it is not: Last Rites. No revives, half the supply, 1.85× the payout. It can be armed at any tier for practice, but the mark only goes on the board for a Terminal clear.

One fixed pair instead of a menu, on purpose. A badge that every player assembles differently does not tell anybody anything.

What comes up the corridor

Hostile	Shows up	The problem it poses
Drone	wave 1	Walks in a straight line. Dies. Brings friends.
Courier	wave 2	Fragile and quick. Closes a gap that looked safe.
Seeder	wave 3	Shoots from well outside the fight. Deal with it first.
Cyst	wave 4	Walks into the squad and detonates. Kill it early or kill it far away.
Bulwark	wave 5	Armored, heavy, hits like a truck. Move instead of trading shots.
Shroud	wave 7	Faster than an operator on foot. Outrunning it is not an option.
Chorus	wave 9	Buffs everything around it from range. The reason a wave suddenly stops dying.

Any of them can also turn up as an elite with a modifier attached: Armored, Swift, Volatile, Regenerating, Warded or Sundering. Better drops come off the worse ones. There are four bosses with their own phases and their own specials: The Anchor, The Brood, The Interred and The Remnant.

Four status effects roll on gear going the other way. Incendiary burns over time, Cryo slows, Shock stuns for a moment, and Corrosive strips armor, which is the answer to a Bulwark.

Co-op, and the controls

Lobby

Five characters, no accounts

One player hosts and reads out a five-character code. The ambiguous letters are left out of the alphabet, because these get read aloud and nobody should lose a lobby to an O that turned out to be a zero. Four to a squad, campaign or endless.

Loot

Every drop is instanced

Every player rolls their own drops and only sees their own. A Mythic is never a race and nobody has to call dibs, so the argument that ends co-op sessions never comes up.

Netcode

Built for a bad connection

The host runs the real simulation and everyone else runs ahead of it, rewinding and replaying when the host disagrees. Tested against 350 ms of lag and 25% packet loss, which is worse than most connections will ever be.

Input

Whatever is plugged in

Keyboard and mouse, gamepad or touch, all of it rebindable. The prompts name the buttons on the pad actually connected instead of assuming an Xbox controller.

Play the demo See the campaign