Endless mode is where Emberward stops being a puzzle you solve and becomes a system you maintain. There is no final wave — the question is how long your maze keeps working after the game stops being fair.
How the mode is structured
Endless mode runs the same core loop as a region run — blocks, path, towers, relics — without a finish line. Waves keep coming, and scaling does the work that a new region would normally do in adventure mode. Two consequences matter immediately:
- Your economy becomes a survival stat. In a region run, a greedy maze only has to hold out until the last wave. In endless, the same greed eventually meets a wave it cannot pay for.
- Fixed-damage setups expire. Anything that adds a flat amount — a relic that grants a bonus, a tower that only gets stronger through purchases — has a ceiling. Anything that scales with wave count or with the number of enemies on screen does not.
What endless mode unlocks
Endless mode feeds back into the main game through cosmetics and progression rather than currency: main menu backgrounds unlock by clearing areas in adventure mode or by reaching wave milestones on an Endless Mode map. If you want the full background set, endless is not optional — it is the only source for its own entries.
The build that lasts: shape before damage
The endless meta in the 1.0 build is the same bet every deep-run write-up makes: build a corridor long enough that your towers get many passes at every enemy, then scale damage into that corridor.
| Priority | What to do | Why it holds in endless |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Make the route as long as physically possible | Every extra tile is more uptime for every tower you own |
| 2 | Put slow effects on the entry of the corridor | Control multiplies the value of everything downstream |
| 3 | Concentrate damage at the folds | A folded corridor lets one tower cover two or three passes |
| 4 | Add scaling damage, not flat damage | Flat bonuses expire; scaling does not |
| 5 | Only then widen the maze | Extra lanes dilute your kill zones |
Towers that survive the scaling
The 1x1 family is the backbone of long runs, not because it is strong but because it is expendable and stackable — where a 3x3 tower fails, six 1x1 towers can be repositioned. Two specific notes from the 1.0 build:
- Scrap Towers are destroyed when they run out of ammo. In endless this will happen at the worst possible moment unless the Scrap Master relics are in play — the Note takes a Scrap Tower from 30 shots to 45.
- The long-range 2x2 pieces (Sniper, Missile) work best at a fold. The Sniper Tower now carries a 50% base critical chance in 1.0, which makes crit support unusually efficient on it, and the Missile Tower trades lower base numbers for coverage of three elements at once.
Relics for deep runs
The relic pool that matters in endless is the scaling pool rather than the burst pool: Tome of Endless is named for the mode, and anything that grows with waves, with kills or with maze size beats a flat stat. Economy relics — Wealth Vault, Golden Roulette, Microtransactions — behave differently here too: in a region run they are a tempo buy, in endless they are how you afford the next thousand waves.
Character picks
The endless meta is built around Tana the Sorcerer, whose buff and debuff mechanics scale by wave rather than by purchase. The community's deepest endless write-ups are Tana builds — including a dedicated Dark Grip helper and an enhancement/buffs guide that assumes a fully leveled Infernal Shard at level 24. If you are pushing for a personal best rather than a clear, that is the starting point.
The wall waves
Every deep run hits walls — waves where the composition changes faster than your damage curve. The 1.0 patch notes describe exactly the kind of thing that ends a good run: a Shard of Nightmares level 2 fix removed cases where werebeasts and frost elementals spawned as large monsters from other worlds, which previously could stack large-area malfunction effects and end a run through an unlucky roll rather than a bad maze. That is the shape of an endless wall: not a stronger enemy, but a combination your setup has no answer for.
Honest limits
Endless scaling numbers, wave-by-wave composition and the exact ceiling of the current build are not published by the developer, and we do not publish a number we could not reproduce in the live build. What is verifiable today: backgrounds unlock from wave milestones, Tome of Endless and the scaling relics matter more than they look, and the maze-shape advice above is the same advice that holds in the first region — it just stops being forgiving.