Active Trial — the tap dungeon
The Active Trial is the game’s deliberately separate play mode for when you want to play with your thumbs, not your feet. It lives behind the dungeon gate in the town and gives one thing only: a small, capped bonus to your walking damage.
Trial Gearling
depths 1, 4, 7, …
Trial Warden
depths 2, 5, 8, …
Trial Forge Beast
depths 3, 6, 9, …
Rules
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Attacks | One intentional tap = one trial hit. Animation is feedback only and can never deal an extra hit. |
| Tap damage | Fixed 1, overkill wasted. It never scales with main-game progress, so the trial can never become a progress accelerator. |
| Enemy health | Depth 1: 10 HP; each further depth +5 — depth 5: 30 HP, depth 25: 130 HP. |
| Progression | Each defeated trial enemy advances to a harder depth. Depth, enemy health and clears persist forever — offline, after process death, across sync restores. Nothing ever resets the trial, including ascension. |
| Rewards | No gold, no hero upgrades, no area or quest progress — from taps, ever. |
| No limits | No stamina, no timeouts, no forced waits, no lifetime tap cap. |
The walking bonus — the only cross-mode reward
Every 5 completed depths grants one permanent +1% to the damage of future approved-step attacks, capped at +5% (25 clears):
bonus = floor((base damage + renown bonus) × min(clears ÷ 5, 5)%)- The percentage applies to one attack’s damage with deterministic integer math — it never creates extra attacks.
- Because it floors, an early +1% on a small base can add zero whole damage on a hit; the game discloses the percentage instead of promising an extra damage point.
- The 5-depth interval and 5% cap are provisional tuning values.
Isolation guarantees
- 100 taps with zero new steps change only trial state (and at most the earned bonus) — main attacks, steps, gold, areas and quests stay fixed.
- 100 imported approved steps with zero taps yield exactly 100 walking attacks, even while the trial screen is open.
- Steps arriving mid-trial still resolve on the trail once; the trial never auto-clicks and clicks never trigger the walking reducer.
Accessibility
The trial is one fixed, non-scrolling encounter with a large accessible attack target, enemy health, depth, next reward and current bonus always readable. Reduced-motion players get clear static hit/defeat/reward states; one-finger and TalkBack play are supported.