Past the Fence

THE GATEThe gate you earn

Past the Fence is a toggle on the danger-select screen. It stays locked until you have held the yard once — your first win opens it. With the toggle on, your run may extend beyond wave 12, and there are indicators in the shop and pause menu to remind you. Past the Fence can’t be combined with a Boss Challenge — it’s one or the other.

THE CROSSINGWave 12, and the grass beyond

Beat the twelfth-wave boss with the gate open and the victory banks immediately — your win is stamped before the wild grass sends a single thing over the fence. Then, where an ordinary run would roll to the game-over screen, the coins hoover to the bank, the music re-rolls deep and low, and the world slides forward:

“The gate swings shut behind you. Wild grass ahead.”

THE BELLSThe rhythm of the epilogue

Past the fence there are no wave ceremonies — no field-clear, no victory breath. Instead, every 70 seconds the yard pauses and the shop visits — the same shop you already know, arriving on a clock now instead of between waves. Level-ups, loot sacks, and the shelf all happen in that pause, and everything a wave’s end normally does still happens quietly — interest, banking, replanting, a checkpoint. Then a quick 3…2…1 — and on GO a burst of coins rings out across the grass while a grace-pulse shoves nearby pests back, so nothing kills you on the unpause. That coin-ring is why players call these moments bells. Bookkeeping survives; ceremony does not.

THE CLOCKThe doomsday harvest

Each bell raises the ambient Altered by one, and mushrooms begin to fruit across the yard — sparse at first, then constant. As the ordinary pests dry toward an income floor, the mushrooms become the yard’s paycheck — and harvesting them deepens the Altered further. Every harvest is a bargain with the doomsday clock, and cures buy the clock back. Power now, or minutes later — that is the question at every single bell.

THE PACTAltered, and the three postures

Altered makes every enemy stronger and richer at once, and past the fence it only ever rises. Cures stay on the shelf at a flat price to the very last bell — never rationed, never priced out of reach. How hard the Altered squeezes is yours to choose, and that choice sorts every run into one of three postures:

Dedicating to the Altered is how a run reaches the end at strength — see the Bestiary for what comes to meet the dedicated.

THE PROCESSIONThe Warped

From Altered 15 the fence begins to let them through. The Warped — cats' own folklore, a procession of cryptids from every corner of the world's tall tales — mix into the horde in a small share at first, rising as the Altered deepens, the full tide by 20. They hit far harder than any yard pest and drop two to three times the materials, because depth pays. Until you have died to one, its codex face stays a silhouette and its name reads ??? — the meeting writes the entry. Their full dossier, and the real folklore behind each, lives in the Bestiary.

THE NEEDLEPaying your way to the Thing

The deep yard runs on a tightening economy. Ordinary pests pay less and less the farther out you hold, while shelf prices keep climbing — money gets scarcer exactly as gear gets dearer. What keeps a purse alive out there is everything the Altered brings: the mushrooms are the yard’s paycheck, and the Warped pay two to three times what any pest does. The money and the danger climb the same rope.

That is the needle. Hold the Altered too low and the purse starves alongside the pests — thin gear, and the tide eventually wins. Let it run away and the Warped arrive faster than your build can answer. The run that reaches the Thing keeps the dial climbing at the pace its build can hold, spends cures like brakes — every cure bought is power not bought — and turns coins into power as they come. And near the very end, even the Warped pay leaner: the last pickets are fought on what you built, not on what you can still buy.

THE RECKONINGNo yard holds forever

Out in the deep pickets the tide only rises — every picket sends more than the last, and it never stops climbing. A Cautious run, the Altered kept at arm’s length, will sooner or later meet a wave it cannot hold — and that fall is a true ending, an honorable one. A run that leans into the Altered grows alongside the deep instead, and arrives at the final picket strong enough for what waits there. Either way the fence gets its answer: nobody stands still out there forever.

THE THINGThe Thing Past the Fence

The last picket is wave 22. One bell of silence — the field clears, the coins hoover, the yard holds its breath — and then it arrives, the Warped streaming in as its tide.

It is colossal, it cannot be knocked back, and it enrages — more damage and more speed every thirty seconds — so that however the fight goes, it always concludes the run. The Thing is genuinely fightable — it is simply inevitable. The card above shows its base numbers; the one that rises comes far stronger, grown by everything the epilogue built on the way.

THE ENDINGSFour ways it ends