Campaign

Ten nights, played in order, each one a complete shift. The campaign is where the difficulty curve lives: the fleet grows, the pace rises, the grace window shrinks, and incidents start arriving together.

The ten nights

The curve is not smooth by accident. Nights 1–3 are single-incident, 4–5 introduce overlap, and from 6 onward incidents arrive compound — a second failure riding on the first.

What each night introduces

New server roles join on a schedule, and the fiction matches the mechanics exactly: load balancers on night 3, cache on night 4, workers on night 6. New incident types unlock alongside the roles they need. Nothing appears before the game has taught you how to see it.

Reputation

Winning a night grants reputation, scaled by grade — +15 for an S down to +3 for a C. Losing costs 5. It caps at 100.

Reputation converts automatically into next night's budget at $2 per point, up to a maximum bonus of $150. A good run compounds; a bad night makes the next one harder.

The finale

Night ten is different in kind, not just degree. Past the halfway point the pace surges by a further 1.35×, the mercy window drops from 45 seconds to 20, and the minimum interval between injections tightens. The design intent is that it stops being fair — holding the line to 08:00 is the whole achievement.

Difficulty

Difficulty applies on top of all of it. On easy, campaign mode is the only place pause works.