Game Modes

The Campaign is the Wondernauts' chartered expedition: the main story route through the fractured multiverse, biome by biome, from the Ancient Village outward to the Controllers who hold each world in malfunction.

One to four players travel together, and allies may join or leave mid-expedition through drop-in co-op. The party's progress is written to a chosen save slot, so each expedition has its own record of biomes resolved, badges recovered, and Controllers confronted.

Every level in the Campaign is built around a single idea taught, tested, and finally twisted. The critical path is always solo-safe — a lone Wondernaut can finish the story — while secrets, branches, and harder roads wait for those who look.

Standing rules

• Main story route through the biomes and their Controllers
• 1-4 player drop-in / drop-out local co-op
• Progress saved to a chosen save slot
• Critical path remains solo-safe; co-op never required to finish
• Secret exits unlock optional bonus levels on the overworld
• Badges earned in play shape the party's toolkit for later worlds

When the story is told, the multiverse still has more to say. Generated Levels mode sends the party into fresh procedural runs assembled by the same generation engine that builds the Campaign — no two expeditions alike.

The quartermaster's table offers real control: one biome or many. Single Biome deepens one world for the whole run, Series of Biomes walks a chosen sequence, and New Biome Per Level reshuffles the ground beneath every stage. Length, route shape, traversal focus, starting badges, bosses, and rifts may all be set by hand or surrendered to the dice.

Every run carries a seed, and a seed can be replayed or shared — a recorded constellation of worlds that will generate the same way again.

Standing rules

• Biome Mode: Single Biome, Series of Biomes, or New Biome Per Level
• Run length from 1 to 20 levels; per-level length Short, Medium, or Long
• Seed control: enter a seed manually or let the dice roll one
• Randomizable options: biome, length, route shape, traversal, badges, boosters, bosses, rifts, visual variant
• Challenge budget M=1-14 with optional Adaptive Assist that tunes difficulty in play
• Up to 3 AI companions may be added as an explicit party choice

Puzzle Biome mode trades the open road for the locked door. A run is a chain of puzzle rooms sampled from a single concept family — Jump, Bolt, Strike, Scan, Whistle, Shield, Inverter, Elemental, Collect, Automation, Stealth, Rhythm, Memory, Dash, Gravity, Grapple, Swim, or the biome's own native logic — ordered easy to hard.

Only the enclosed, interior biomes host puzzle runs: the Ancient Village, Data Archives, Foundry, Transit Hub, Fungal Grotto, Choral Caverns, and Hollowmere, whose sealed rooms suit riddle-work. The party chooses concept and room count; the biome and seed may be fixed or left to chance.

Difficulty is deliberately not a player dial here — the puzzle biome draws recipes from the whole concept family and arranges them from gentle to demanding on its own.

Standing rules

• One puzzle concept per run, chosen from 19 concept families (or the biome's native logic)
• Runs of 3, 5, 7, 10, or 14 puzzle rooms
• Seven indoor biomes eligible: Ancient Village, Data Archives, Foundry, Transit Hub, Fungal Grotto, Choral Caverns, Hollowmere
• Recipes sampled seeded from the concept family and ordered easy to hard
• Difficulty is not player-selectable; a fixed baseline goes downstream
• Biome and seed may be fixed or randomized

Field record: the surveyed puzzle rooms of the first two worlds and the shared module repertoire are filed under Puzzles.

The Arena is where Wondernauts test one another: a free-for-all elimination battle among the nineteen fighters of the roster, from Volt of the Foundry to Flamingo of Hollowmere. Empty seats may be filled by CPU opponents, each piloted by an honest bot that plays through the same controller a human holds — never writing to movement, health, energy, or damage state.

Every fighter keeps identical underlying rules; character identity lives in decision-making, and each fighter's first badge preference is their home-biome badge. Loadout modes set the terms of the duel: Basic Pickups with only Double Jump and Recharge, Competitive with two passive/action and two active badges apiece, or All Badges as the full mechanics lab.

Bot difficulty runs novice, adept, veteran, or an adaptive tier that reads recent human health and damage and adjusts gradually. PvP follows its own balance covenant: the co-op shield aura never heals nearby opponents, and seeded balance profiles may reshuffle action and badge parameters without ever touching campaign defaults.

Standing rules

• Free-for-all elimination among the 19-character roster
• CPU slots support thematic (authored personality) or seeded-random bot variants
• Difficulty tiers: novice, adept, veteran, adaptive — all honest behavior knobs with a 120 ms reaction floor
• Loadout modes: basic_pickups, competitive (2 passive/action + 2 active badges), all_badges
• PvP balance covenant: shield aura never heals opponents; campaign defaults never mutated
• Match seeds are replayable; deterministic evaluation and video capture tools exist for audit

Countersiege is the Wondernauts' answer to a full harmonic assault: a platform-action lane battle fought beside autonomous armies. Players do not command every unit — they move through the battlefield as champions, protecting friendly waves, breaking hostile formations, and turning momentary victories into structural progress.

Its flagship deployment is C2-7 Controller Counterpoint in Harmonic Manifold, a five-to-seven-minute curated set piece built from three aligned, max-sized generated rooms with two stacked lanes kept in view while the camera follows the battle. One to four humans fill the allied champion slots and companion AI fills every vacancy, facing the AI-controlled Prismatic Shadow Players drawn from the same Champion Bot policy as the Arena bots.

The design reaches further: Countersiege is the prototype for a possible separate game — a controller-first 4v4 platform MOBA with two lanes, automatic army waves, short online matches, bots, and differentiated versions of the nineteen Wondernauts.

Standing rules

• Lane battle: two stacked lanes, army waves, champion-scale player impact
• Campaign form: C2-7 Controller Counterpoint, Harmonic Manifold
• 1-4 humans as allied champions; companion AI fills vacant slots
• Opposing force: Prismatic Shadow Players on the shared Champion Bot policy
• Arena built by the normal room-logic pipeline plus a Siege post-pass that guarantees both lanes survive seed variation
• Long-form target: a separate 4v4 two-lane platform MOBA with online play

When a Controller falls and a biome's malfunction is resolved, the Wondernauts open a harder ledger: the co-op mini-campaign, a set of two to three short levels that only a true party can clear. Every level contains hard co-op gates — one player alone cannot walk the critical route.

Puzzle logic scales with the party: at 2p, 3p, and 4p the same core read expands into extra stations and roles, and each biome fields dedicated co-op enemy pressure including a new co-op enemy concept of its own — the Masonry Switch Sentry, the Graft Snare Pair, the Chord Arbiter, and their kin.

The rewards are the four co-op badges. Clearing Worlds 1 and 2 grants the Extra-Heal Shield Aegis Medic; clearing the Up, Across, and Down branches grants Relay Resuscitator, Tandem Overdrive, and Harmonic Triad respectively. A party holding all four earns the cosmetic Wondernaut Team Ribbon on each further biome clear.

Standing rules

• Unlocked per biome after that biome's Controller/climax is resolved
• 2-3 short levels per biome; 2-4 players required, not solo-safe by design
• Puzzle roles scale by player count (2p / 3p / 4p) with added stations at higher counts
• Each biome adds co-op enemy pressure and one new co-op enemy concept
• Difficulty arc: role onboarding, mixed-role pressure, then synthesis under revive tension
• Four co-op badges awarded by branch completion; all four unlock Team Ribbon replay rewards

Trials are the Wondernauts' formal ordeals: optional challenge levels set apart from the story road, each one a single discipline pressed to its limit. The roster includes the Roost Trial of Canopy Reach, the Green Line Trial, and the rail-cart and vehicle trials scattered through the Transit Hub, the wasteland canals, and beyond.

Nothing in a Trial gates the critical path — they exist for parties who want the pressure turned up. Where a campaign level teaches an idea and then sets it down, a Trial holds the grip and asks for mastery.

Every Trial's challenge is scored against the shared difficulty catalog: hazard, puzzle, and gizmo aspects combined into tiers — readable, pressured, and mastery — so the Guide can say precisely how steep each climb will be before the party steps in.

Standing rules

• Optional challenge levels; never required for the critical path
• Named trials include the Roost Trial, Green Line Trial, and multiple rail-cart / vehicle trials
• Each Trial drills one discipline — traversal, vehicle handling, or a biome verb — at high intensity
• Difficulty scored on shared tiers: readable, pressured, mastery
• Challenge aspects (hazard, puzzle, gizmo) combine under an explicit policy that blocks unfair combinations
• Higher tiers unlock as campaign progress advances

Not a mode but a phenomenon, and one the Guide must record: the Wonder Rift is the flagship Surprise of the expedition, a tear in the local rules of reality struck at the twist of a rift-flagged level. One appears per world, and it is always earned — triggered by the party's own activation of a Harmonic Summoner, so no Wondernaut is surprised by a change they did not call down.

What comes out of the rift is the true surprise. First-generation rifts ship enemy swaps and weapon mutations; the documented full surface reaches further, toward physics shifts, environment transforms, and player modifiers.

A rift may temporarily shuffle each player's equipped badges, drawing only from the party's unlocked set: active cast emphasis can change, but collected passive badge powers are never removed. Because a rift is a temporary reality rule, no level may require a specific shuffled result.

Standing rules

• In-level event, not a standalone mode; one per world at a rift-flagged level's twist
• Always player-triggered via a Harmonic Summoner object
• V1 mutations: enemy swaps and weapon mutations; wider reality shifts documented for later
• May shuffle equipped badges from the party's unlocked pool
• Badge shuffle can alter active cast emphasis but never removes passive badge powers
• Levels must foreshadow rifts and can never require a specific rift outcome