Incidents at a glance
How incidents are chosen, when they arrive, and how many can run at once.
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There are seven incident types, plus one variant. Each has three parts: a log signature that identifies it, an impact curve describing what happens if you do nothing, and a resolution space — which is the part this wiki leaves for you to find.
The catalogue
| Incident | Earliest night | Weight | Needs a role |
|---|---|---|---|
| DDoS flood | 1 | 100 | web |
| Memory leak | 2 | 100 | web |
| Disk full | 2 | 100 | web |
| Database lock pile-up | 3 | 80 | db |
| Overheating | 3 | 70 | web |
| Runaway scheduled job | 4 | 85 | db |
| Certificate expiry | 4 | 55 | lb |
Weight is relative likelihood when several are eligible — a flood is roughly twice as likely to be picked as a certificate expiry. Earliest night and the role requirement are gates: an incident that needs a load balancer cannot appear before night three, because that is when load balancers join the rack.
Each type also caps itself at one instance at a time. Two floods never run together; a flood and a leak very much can.
When they arrive
The first injection waits 120 steps — thirty seconds of quiet to read the opening state. After that the scheduler picks an interval around a base of 420 steps with up to 90 steps of jitter, never closer together than 90 steps.
That interval is divided by the night's pace multiplier, which is why late nights feel relentless: the same scheduler, 2.7× faster.
| Night | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pace | 1.00 | 1.10 | 1.25 | 1.40 | 1.55 | 1.75 | 1.95 | 2.35 | 2.60 | 2.70 |
| At once | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 |
Difficulty multiplies that pace again — 0.7× on easy, 1.4× on hard.
The mercy window
If uptime drops below 70%, new injections are held back for 45 seconds. It is a genuine reprieve, not a hidden difficulty drop: the incidents already running keep running, and the clock keeps moving.
On the tenth night the window shrinks to 20 seconds, and past the halfway point the pace surges by another 1.35×. The finale is designed to stop being fair.