How to play

Controls, wave rules and survival tips for Riftspinner, the free browser survival game.

The goal

Riftspinner is a top-down wave survival game. You control a robotic spider inside a breach in the world. Each wave sends a mix of hosts at you. Clear the wave, collect what drops, spend ash, and take the next one. Your run ends when your health reaches zero. The campaign goal is wave 100, where a finale host guards the way out. After that you can extract and keep your ash, or choose Endless, which keeps going with harder monarchs every ten waves.

Controls

Riftspinner needs a keyboard and mouse. Touch controls are not available yet, so play it on a desktop or laptop. Auto-aim (C) helps if you want to focus on movement.

How a wave works

Waves start small, with about seven hosts, and grow steadily. New enemy types arrive as you climb: Spitters at wave 2, Flickers at 3, Marksmen at 4, Brutes and Aegis at 6, Cinders and Chanters at 7, Shards and Leeches at 8, and Ravens and Howlers at 9. From wave 6, every third wave adds a boss. The first time you meet a new host, the game pauses and shows a card explaining what it does. Read it, because every enemy has a job and a counter. The bestiary lists all of them.

Staying alive

• Never stand still. Most enemies are slower than you, and you have a dash. Keep moving in wide circles and shoot while you move.
• Kill the supports first. Chanters heal, Howlers haste. Removing them makes the rest of the group much easier.
• Respect the telegraphs. Marksmen warn before they fire. Dash across the line, not away from it.
• Mind explosions. Cinders blow up on death. Kill them at range.
• Charge the totems. Stand inside the glowing field of a totem for about six seconds and it pays out a gun. Leaving the field drains the charge slowly, so you can step out to fight and come back.
• Use the barrels. The small orange-ringed barrels on the map explode into a patch of fire when shot. Fire hurts you and hosts alike, so shoot them from a distance when enemies are clustered around them.
• Match gun to threat. Shotguns for swarms, lances and awls for lines of enemies, venom for shields.

Level-ups: field mutations

Killing hosts earns experience. Each level pauses the game and offers three random field mutations. Pick one. They last for the current run only, so choose what fixes the problem you are having right now.

Loot

Enemies drop weapons, armor and trinkets that match what they were. Press E near a drop to compare it with what you wear, then equip it, put it in your pack, or salvage it into ash. Press F to salvage without looking. The full system is explained in the loot guide.

The Ash Market: permanent upgrades

Ash is the currency you collect from kills and salvage. It is stored in your browser and spent on permanent ranks that carry into every future run. Open the market from the main menu, the pause screen or between waves.

There are also per-weapon ranks (for example Carbine Jig, Needle Clock and Cannon Breach) and power-up ranks that make pickups such as the magnet surge and Kinetic Fury last longer. Each rank costs roughly 55% more than the one before, so spread your ash across several upgrades rather than maxing one early.

Saving your progress

Everything is saved automatically in your browser's local storage on the device you play on: ash, shop ranks, unlocked rigs, bestiary entries and the Ledger. Clearing site data for riftspinner.com deletes the save. There are no accounts. You can optionally enter a name on the Boards screen to post your best wave and kill count to the public leaderboard.

Rigs are unlockable bodies with different starting guns and trade-offs. Try them all.