Difficulty Formulas

Difficulty formulas

Creatures and bosses grow stronger with each world. The design defines three multipliers relative to world 1; this page shows them, how the code applies them and the player gear meant to keep up.

Formulas

• Health: base x 1.35^(n - 1)
• Damage: base x 1.20^(n - 1)
• Attack speed: base x (1 + 0.06 x (n - 1))

where n is the world number (1 to 10). The Surface (Block Guardian) uses no multiplier.

Values per world

The reference creature has 20 health and 5 damage before multipliers; the reference boss has 500 health and 12 damage for a strong hit.

World	Health	Damage	Attack speed	Melee interval	Reference mob health	Reference mob damage	Reference boss health	Reference boss damage
1	x1.00	x1.00	x1.00	20 ticks	20	5.0	500	12.0
2	x1.35	x1.20	x1.06	18 ticks	27	6.0	675	14.4
3	x1.82	x1.44	x1.12	17 ticks	36	7.2	911	17.3
4	x2.46	x1.73	x1.18	16 ticks	49	8.6	1230	20.7
5	x3.32	x2.07	x1.24	16 ticks	66	10.4	1661	24.9
6	x4.48	x2.49	x1.30	15 ticks	90	12.4	2242	29.9
7	x6.05	x2.99	x1.36	14 ticks	121	14.9	3027	35.8
8	x8.17	x3.58	x1.42	14 ticks	163	17.9	4086	43.0
9	x11.03	x4.30	x1.48	13 ticks	221	21.5	5516	51.6
10	x14.89	x5.16	x1.54	12 ticks	298	25.8	7447	61.9

The final boss uses a base of 1000 health: 1000 x 1.35^9 = 14894 health spread over ten shells.

How the code applies them

• Health and damage are baked into the values in tools/content.py (the bestiary lists the values at the default settings). The config multipliers and the difficulty mode scale them at runtime: see Configuration.
• Attack speed is applied at runtime to regular creatures: their melee interval is max(6, 20 / multiplier) ticks.
• Bosses do not use the attack-speed multiplier. Their pace comes from the tier windows (telegraph 30 / 20 / 15 ticks, opening 60 / 50 / 40 ticks for worlds 1-3 / 4-6 / 7-9) and from cooldowns that shrink with each phase. See Bosses.
• Multiplayer: boss health x (1 + 0.6 x (players - 1)), boss attack speed x (1 + 0.05 x (players - 1)).
• World variant: creature and boss health and damage x 0.85 (calm), x 1.25 (wild), x 1 (hallowed), x 1.4 (cursed), and the rule's strength x 0.75, 1.25, 0.8 or 1.3. See World variants.
• Cycle: creature and boss health x (1 + 0.5 x c) and damage x (1 + 0.25 x c), where c is the number of New Cycles begun (cycle 2: x1.5 and x1.25). See Endings and the New Cycle.

Tiers

Worlds	Tier	Expectation
1 to 3	Learning	One main danger, long attack warnings, forgiving deaths
4 to 6	Mastery	Two dangers at once, creatures in groups, faster bosses
7 to 9	Expertise	Long fights, changing arenas, costly mistakes
10	Final exam	Every skill learned during the game

Player gear

Each world's gear is meant to compensate for the multipliers; classes add a specialization bonus on top.

World	Weapon damage	Armor	Toughness	Bonus health	Max class bonus
1	7	16	1	0	0%
2	9	17	2	0	0%
3	11	18	3	2	+10%
4	13	19	4	4	+10%
5	16	20	6	6	+20%
6	19	22	8	8	+20%
7	23	24	10	12	+35%
8	28	26	12	16	+35%
9	33	28	14	20	+50%
10	40	30	16	24	+50%

The class column is the cap a player has on arrival: it is reached after the previous world's boss, so level 2 (+10%) applies from World 3, level 3 from World 5, level 4 from World 7 and level 5 from World 9, as in the design. A Berserker weapon adds 8% of its damage plus this bonus (see Equipment classes); the Balance report checks the result against the design's hits to kill. With this table the design estimates about 3 hits to kill a reference creature in World 1, 3.5 in World 5 and 5 in World 10, while a boss strong hit takes 2 to 3.3 hits to kill a fully geared player.