Difficulty
What easy, normal and hard actually change — and what they deliberately do not.
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Three levels, and each one changes a small number of specific things rather than applying a vague multiplier to everything.
| Easy | Normal | Hard | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Incident pace | ×0.7 | ×1.0 | ×1.4 |
| Budget | full | full | ×0.75 |
pause available | campaign only | no | no |
hint available | yes | yes | no |
Pace
The pace multiplier scales the interval between injections, and it stacks with the night's own multiplier. Hard on night ten is 1.4 × 2.7 — incidents arriving almost four times faster than night one on normal, before the finale's late surge.
Budget
Hard cuts the allocation to 75%. On night one that is $375 instead of $500, which is enough to change which permanent fixes are affordable and turns several decisions that were comfortable into genuine trade-offs.
What does not change
The shift is always ten real minutes. Thresholds, impact curves, the scoring formula and the grade boundaries are identical at every level. A hard S and an easy S are the same 1500 points — hard is harder to reach, not scored differently.
Choosing one
Easy exists so the campaign is learnable: slower arrivals and, on campaign
easy, a working pause mean you can stop and actually read a rack you do not
yet know how to read.
Hard removes the two supports at once — no hints and a quarter less money — so it is really a test of whether the log signatures are memorised. Balance measurement puts the intended struggle band at hard, nights nine and ten.