The old run had a single exit. You dropped in, you climbed, and the extraction opened on the top floor at minute 20 of a 20-minute match. Everything before that was a commitment. That's a clean rule, and it produced exactly one decision: keep going, or die trying. There was no moment where a squad could look at what they were carrying and choose. The loot you found at minute 4 was worth nothing until minute 20, and worth nothing at all if the run went wrong at minute 19.
01WHAT CHANGED
The run is now 35 minutes, and there are ten extraction points across four types. You can leave at any second of the match. The first exit is live early. Three goals sit behind this. Shorter queues: when your squad is wiped early, emergency redeployment protocol (ERP) drops you back into the same match, so the session is spent playing, not waiting in a lobby for a new one. More chances: the exits work from the first few seconds, so when you find something good you decide on the spot whether to bank it or push on. Dynamic but readable: the danger moves through the tower on a fixed schedule, so the map keeps changing and you can still plan around it. And every exit has a price, so leaving early is a real choice, not a free escape. The other half of the rework is the Dark Floor. That is the sweep of lethal security that climbs the Citadel during a match. It used to sit on a couple of marked floors. Now it is a wave: it moves up the tower one floor at a time, two minutes per floor, from the basement to the top.
There are ten ways out. The quick ones make you leave loot behind. To take everything you found, you have to reach the top of the building after minute thirty, and by then most of the floors below you are dark.
02The Dark Floor, restated
Every floor gets a warning and then a deadline. Security is on every floor from the start, but on a normal floor it has to find you first. You get spotted, you get marked, and then the turrets and patrols engage. Break the mark and you are clear again. On a dark floor that step is gone. Everything is hostile on sight and stays hostile. Turrets track and fire without needing detection, patrols do not lose you. When the two minutes run out the floor is dark for the rest of the match. It does not reset. So the decision is: finish the room and leave, or keep looting and fight on a safe floor. The lights turn dark from bottom to t. The basement is gone three minutes in. Half the tower is dark by minute twenty. By minute thirty only the top three floors are left. Your playable space keeps shrinking, and the way you came in closes behind you.
Floors inside a section go dark back-to-back. All of the slack sits in the 150-second gaps between sections, which gives the run a heartbeat: a block of continuous escalation, then a beat of quiet where you decide whether to climb or leave.
| SECTION | FLOORS | ANNOUNCED TO DF |
|---|---|---|
| S0 Sub-Levels | F-2, F-1 | 00:30 → 02:30 |
| S1 Lower | F0 to F3 | 05:00 → 13:00 |
| S2 Mid | F4 to F6 | 15:30 → 21:30 |
| S3 Upper | F7 to F9 | 24:00 → 30:00 |
| S4 Extraction Deck | F10 to F12 | NA |
03The four types
C.A.C.H.E., Compressed Asset Consignment & Hoist Egress. F2, F5, F8. This extraction point sends gear out and you stay in. Ship out the content of your loot compressor only. This is the pressure valve: bank the good find, keep hunting, accept that you are still in the building. HARDLINE. F-1 and F4. A fixed extraction line that is open the whole match, no window and no clock. It costs you one thing: your Loot Compressor does not come with you, everything else is safe. INTERIM EXFIL. On F1, F3 and F6. Each one opens for 90 seconds. It shuts 30 seconds before that floor goes dark. You leave with one item out of your Loot Compressor. FINAL EXTRACTION. F10 and F11, from 30:00 to the final. The Extraction Deck never goes dark, and it is the only exit that takes you and your full compressor out together. Everything below it discounts the haul.
04Getting back in
If your squad is wiped, you can get back into the same match. You used to get one redeployment and nothing after minute 20. Now it is available any time up to minute 30 thanks to the ERP: Emergency Reinsertion Protocol. You do not respawn where you started, because the sub-levels are already dark. You drop onto the lowest floor that is still clear. Early on that is F0, and as the building goes dark the drop point moves up with it, always switching to the next floor about 30 seconds before your current one goe Dark. You never get dropped onto a dark floor. The drop point stops at F9. It does not go higher because we are not putting a respawn on the extraction floors, it is important to respect players who put in the work. At minute 30 it shuts off completely, which is also when F9 goes dark and the Extraction Deck opens. After that, no one else is coming in.
We also properly implement the HOT DROP, allowing a brand new squad joins a match that is already running. It is available from minute 11 to minute 30, and it opens as soon as one squad has been wiped out, so it fills a seat that has already emptied rather than adding another squad to a full match. The catch is what you are walking into. You do not pick the moment. You could land with twenty minutes left, or you could land at minute 29 with the building mostly dark and everyone else already heading for the Extraction Deck. Everyone else has been in there learning the map since minute zero.
05What we're watching
- Is it too easy to leave? An exit is always on the board now, and that could take the tension out of a run. Our bet is that the cost of using one keeps going up as the building goes dark, so the decision stays live. If people just cash out early, the first thing we cut is the number of HARDLINEs.
- Your spawn exit only lasts 3 minutes. There is a HARDLINE on F-1, and on paper it is open all match. In practice the floor goes dark at 2:30, so you get one short window to use it. Losing your way in that fast might be exactly the right pressure, or it might just feel like a wasted exit.
- Dying between minute 28 and 30 is rough. F9 is the ERP drop floor and it is also about to go dark, so you can come back and immediately be on a floor that dies. We left it in. We will see how it feels.
