THE DEEP

The daily crawl: the same dungeon for everybody, one Egg at the bottom, and no way back out.

One dungeon a day

The date picks the biome, the floors and the five starters, and it picks the same ones for everybody. Two players opening The Deep at the same moment are looking at the same dungeon and choosing from the same five, wherever in the world either of them is sitting.

A new dungeon every day at 10pm Brazil time, which is 01:00 UTC. It is one instant rather than one local midnight, so nobody gets tomorrow early by moving their clock, and the block on the homepage counts down to it rather than naming an hour that would be wrong for most of the people reading it.

Runs are unlimited. What is limited is the Egg: the first time you reach the bottom on a given day it pays a Drift Egg, and after that the day has paid out and everything below is still yours to keep. A Guest can go down. A Guest just has no Daycare on the other side to put anything in.

Stopping is fine. What you pulled out of the chests on a run is yours whether or not that run reached the bottom, and it is yours from the moment you pick it up rather than when you come back up: a held item goes to the same bag your PvP items live in and an Egg goes to the Incubator. There is still no Escape Orb and no walking out mid floor: with unlimited runs there was nothing for leaving early to buy.

Runs are unlimited, so what the chests pay in a day is not. A day gives at most 10 held items and 10 ordinary Eggs, which is about five full clears' worth of luck and more than a day of real play will ever reach, and past that a chest still fills your bag for the rest of that run but stops following you home. Held items are one economy however you earned them, so these share the same daily ceiling the PvP drops count against.

The Drift Egg for clearing the den is the one thing in the game that ignores a full Incubator. Everywhere else a full basket turns a drop away and you get the roll back on the next fight; there is no next one here, so it goes in over the limit and the basket sits above its ceiling until you hatch something.

The five on the table

The five are drawn one from each fifth of the day's ranking, out of 372 that qualify. Drawn blind instead, five out of 372 come back near identical about one day in seven, which is a day with no decision in it. Drawn a fifth at a time it is under one in a hundred, and the spread is the decision: the green end is the obvious answer and the red end is a gamble.

What decides a run is not which type is strong here, it is whether you get to attack with it. A Vaporeon carrying Ice Beam into a biome that Ice answers well still hits softer than an Eevee using Swift, because Swift is the one getting the same-type bonus.

The biomes

7 of them, the same table the Safari draws from. Each one holds 30 wilds and 8 possible bosses of its own.

Getting to the bottom

Eight floors, and under the last one a den: a closed room with the boss in it, no chest and nothing else alive. Killing it ends the run. It drops 25 Dust 10% of the time.

From floor 4 a floor can hold a Monster House, one at most, never on the floor's stairs. What was sleeping in that room hunts you across the whole floor once it opens.

Your partner levels as it fights, and evolves the moment it reaches the level for it: 10 for a first evolution and 15 for a second. A run tops out near the second one, so a three stage line fully evolved is the top of what the mode pays rather than something that happens on the way past floor four. Evolving refills the bar, adds the new form's own HP, and brings that form's moves; anything taken off a wild comes along, up to the four a Pokemon can hold. A line that branches asks which way first, and 13 of the 372 do: the sheet puts every shape side by side with its typing, its two moves, what it does to your max HP and how much of the biome it answers. An Eevee is eight of them and a Rockruff is three. The sheet is the only thing that decides it, so there are no stones to carry and no waiting for dark.

Food

You walk in with 32 rations and every step costs. Somewhere between floor 2 and floor 4 there is a cache of 60 more, scattered on the floor like any other find and never sitting on the stairs. Leave the floor without it and it turns up on the next one, and the one after, until you pick it up.

Nothing tells you the cache is there. Finding it is the difficulty.

The shop at the door

Your own Kibble, spent before you go down, the same Kibble the Daycare's Care Store spends. There is no allowance and no purse for the run: what the shelf shows is what the account holds, so a Guest sees nothing to buy and somebody who has been feeding the yard all week can take the lot. One pack of rations plus what you carry is 82 meals, which is the run. The pack is capped at one, so anything left goes on the light and the berry rather than on more food.

Fighting down there

PP is the decision

Every move spends PP and the stairs give it back. Run all four dry and you are left with Struggle, 6 power, no type, and 1/4 of your own bar every time you swing it.

A wild hits softer than you do

The same move does about 35 per cent as much in a wild's mouth as it does in yours, which is what makes eight floors survivable on one Pokemon with no party behind it. It is also why the thing in the den is a different problem: it is the one fight standing on the stairs, so it is the one you cannot walk around.

Moves come off what you beat

Beat a Pokemon and it will often offer you what it knew, minus anything you already have: a bit over half the time, and more like five in six once the torch is low. Four is the ceiling, so a full set means choosing which of yours gets pushed out. A grafted move comes along through an evolution.

Status wears off by walking

Poison, burn and the rest clear after 5 steps, counted in steps and not in turns, and it works the same way for whatever is chasing you.

Healing is a reason to keep moving

You take back 1 HP every 2 steps, and only with nothing within 2 squares of you. Standing next to something and waiting does not heal you, which is what keeps HP a resource instead of a timer. Two harder stops on top of that: nothing heals in the den at all, and nothing heals anywhere on a floor while a wild that a Monster House woke is still hunting you.

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