How Incursions Work · Starforge Pets

Faction signature perks

Every faction has one signature perk in addition to its gathering yield and speed. Read these before joining: the choice expresses how you want to play, and switching banners can lock you in for a while.

Faction	Signature perks
Crimson Syndicate	Risk & Reward: Start each Incursion with 1 extra Gold wild die.
Ironwood Pact	Resilience: Reduces how much of your unbanked haul is forfeited on an Incursion Fail, by 10 percentage points. Steel Reserve: Star-Steel banked in an Incursion is never forfeited, not on a Fail, a Retreat, or an Abandon: unconditional, and on top of Resilience.
Whispering Path	Starwise Scout: Expeditions get +15% rare-find weighting.

The loop

Pick a squad and a mode on the Incursions page, then launch.
Your squad's stats become a pool of dice for the floor.
Rooms flow top to bottom. Assign dice to a room's lock to attempt it. Clearing a room banks its reward and opens the rooms below it.
The bottom room is the boss. Clear it and you choose: Extract (bank everything, run over) or Descend (harder floor, better rewards, everything still at risk).
Run out of usable dice, lose the boss, or get walled off from it, and the run Fails: you keep only part of your haul.

Your pets are busy for the whole run. Unlike expeditions and breeding nests, an incursion has no wall-clock timer, so the squad stays committed until you Extract, Fail, or Abandon. The Incursions link in the sidebar is badged while a run is open so it can't be forgotten.

The two modes

Mode	How dice work	Feels like
🧭 Pathfinder	Every die is rolled when the floor starts. You can see each face before you place it, and one die goes on each slot. Pathfinder does not receive Echoing Locks while it has no stacked commitment rule.	A deterministic puzzle: the board tells you whether an attempt will clean-clear, force through, or fail before you commit.
🎲 Blind Incursion	Dice go down face-down, before the roll. You may stack several dice on one slot to hedge, and they're all rolled when you resolve the room. Echoing Locks is currently a Blind-only floor condition.	A gamble: the board shows live odds instead of certainties, and a stacked slot trades dice for a better chance.

Blind pays a risk premium. Every room generated on a Blind run is worth 20% more in currency and Star-Steel. It is applied when the floor is built, so each room card shows the real figure before you commit: the board never quietly pays more (or less) than it advertised. It stacks additively with a Void Flux reward bonus, so descending under Stardust Drizzle in Blind mode is a single combined bonus, not one multiplied by the other. Merchant capacity rewards are unaffected: a +1 die is worth the same in both modes.

You pick the mode at launch and it holds for the whole run.

Dice

Dice are six-sided. Faces 1–5 are plain numbers. Face 6 is a Star (★): a wildcard that satisfies any colour and any value.

Die	Where it comes from
🔴 Red	Stat-derived from your squad's combined Might
🟢 Green	Stat-derived from your squad's combined Grace
🔵 Blue	Stat-derived from your squad's combined Instinct
⭐ Gold	Not a stat: a permanent wildcard granted by Celestial-Marked squad members (1 each), some faction perks, and some Void Fluxes

For each colour, the pool gets floor(combined matching stat ÷ 10) dice: Might makes Red, Grace makes Green, and Instinct makes Blue. A squad whose combined stats forge zero dice can't launch at all.

Experienced pets add storage. For each deploying pet, add floor(pet level ÷ 10) plus one extra slot at level 25 to each Red, Green, and Blue refill capacity. This is a per-pet progression buffer, not Gold: Gold remains a separate wildcard source from Celestial markings, traits, faction perks, or Void Flux.

Between floors the pool refills to your current capacity: spent dice come back. Traps that cost you capacity, and merchants or safe rooms that grant it, carry forward for the rest of the run. Refill choices can be Red, Green, or Blue; Gold is kept as a separate wildcard source.

Locks and sacrificial passes

Every room has a lock made of one or more slots. A slot asks for a colour and a minimum value: for example "🔵 Blue, 4 or higher". Every slot must open, or the whole attempt fails.

What you place	Result
Right colour, value high enough (or a Star, or a Gold die)	Clean clear. The slot opens, no penalty.
Wrong colour, but value high enough	Sacrificial pass. The slot opens and the room clears: but the room's penalty hits anyway, usually Void Stress.
Value too low	Fail. The room is marked lost permanently, its penalty applies, and that path down is closed.

Pathfinder protects a doomed choice. If the known faces cannot open every slot, the board will not let you submit a losing assignment. You can choose Fail this room instead: the room is not retryable, its penalty applies, and the committed dice stay in your pool. Blind rooms still have live odds until they are rolled, so they resolve normally.

Echoing Locks is a Blind condition. When Blind receives it, the first die on each slot is consumed by the echo, so stacking is part of the intended gamble. Pathfinder currently does not generate this condition because Pathfinder commits one die per slot and cannot make a valid first-die-plus-winner commitment.

If every remaining path to the boss is sealed off, or no reachable room can be cleared with the pool, the run ends as a Fail before you spend dice on a doomed attempt.

Dice are physical. A die placed anywhere leaves the shared pool, so it can never be used twice, and every die committed to an attempt is spent, whether or not it was the one that opened the slot.

Extract · Descend · Retreat · Abandon

Choice	When it's available	What you keep	Void Sickness?
💰 Extract	After clearing a floor boss	100% of your banked haul. The run ends as a win.	Never adds a stack, and from Floor 2 down it removes one (see Sickness · this pet)
⬇ Descend	After clearing a floor boss	Nothing is banked yet: everything stays at risk on a harder floor, with richer rooms and more Void Resonance XP.	-
🏳 Retreat	Any time before the boss is cleared	The Fail share: you forfeit the current forfeiture % and bank the rest. This is the escape hatch when no room is playable any more.	Yes: a Retreat counts as a Fail
Abandon	Any time	Nothing. Everything unbanked is lost.	No

Retreat is almost always better than Abandon: it banks a real share of your haul, while Abandon banks none.

Abandoning is only "free" before you have played a room. Walk away before anything on the floor has resolved and nothing happens: no haul, no Void Sickness, as though the launch never happened. Abandon after clearing or losing a room and it counts as a Fail for Sickness, exactly like a Retreat: you simply also throw away the salvage a Retreat would have banked. This closes the old loophole where a run about to collapse could be erased by quitting it.

What a Fail costs. The base forfeiture is 50% of everything unbanked, plus 2% per point of Void Stress, capped at 90%. Some factions shave it. The board always shows the exact current number.

One Fail costs nothing. If a floor leaves you no legal move, because the only rooms you can reach cannot be opened by any die you hold, the run ends without forfeiting a share of the haul and without adding a Sickness stack. You are never charged for a room you could not attempt. A Retreat, a lost boss, and a dead end sealed by your own failed attempts all cost the normal amount: this covers only the case where there was nothing left to do.

🌀 Void Stress shown as “Stress · this run”

A running tally of how much the deeps have strained your squad on this descent. It starts at 0 on every launch and never carries between runs.

You gain it from hazard rooms, from failed attempts, and from every off-colour sacrificial pass you force through.
It raises the cost of pressing deeper: each point raises what a Fail forfeits by 2%, on top of the 50% base, up to a 90% ceiling.
It does not take dice away, weaken your squad, or follow you home under the current launch settings.

So Void Stress is really a bet-sizing mechanic: the more you force your way through, the more you lose if the run collapses, and the more attractive an early Extract becomes. The dice tray shows your current stress and the exact forfeiture it implies, at 0 as well as at 20.

🤒 Void Sickness shown as “Sickness · this pet”

A condition a pet catches from repeated failure, and shakes off with rest. Completely separate from Void Stress above: this one persists between runs, belongs to the individual pets that descended rather than to the run, and gates whether they can go back down.

That pet's consecutive Fails	It stays sick for
1st Fail	Nothing: no cooldown
2nd Fail in a row	10 minutes
3rd or later in a row	45 minutes

Every pet on a failed run catches a stack: not the squad. Re-arranging the same pets into a freshly-made squad changes nothing, and neither does deleting the squad they failed under.
A launch is only blocked when most of the party is sick. One sick pet among two healthy ones still descends; two sick out of three does not. Sick pets slow you down by shrinking who you can field, not by benching you outright.
Real time heals it: one Fail comes off a pet's streak every 12 hours without another one.
A real descent heals one stack too, with a cooldown. Extracting from Floor 2 or deeper removes one consecutive Fail from every pet that descended: never more than one per run, and never below zero. Extracting from Floor 1 removes nothing, so a quick shallow run cannot be used to scrub a favourite squad clean. Once a pet recovers a stack this way it cannot recover another until 4 hours pass, even across separate runs, so a chain of quick Extracts back to back cannot outrun real time either. Time is still the only route to a full reset without playing.
Sickness only bars the deeps. A sick pet can still be sent gathering on the Star Map, and can still breed.
A Retreat counts as a Fail. So does an Abandon once you have played a room; abandoning before that costs nothing at all. See Extract · Descend · Retreat · Abandon.

The launch screen and the run board both warn you before the Fail that would trigger a cooldown, so it should never arrive as a surprise.

📈 Void Resonance shown as “Resonance XP · depth”

The deeper you are, the more the Void resonates through your squad, and the more experience each pet earns from clearing a floor boss. This is the main reason to Descend rather than Extract at floor 1 every time.

Floor	XP per descending pet, on clearing its boss
Floor 1	115 XP
Floor 3	145 XP
Floor 5	175 XP
Floor 10	250 XP

The base is 100 XP, plus 15% of that base per floor of depth. XP goes to every pet in the frozen launch roster, whether or not it did any of the work. Reaching a new deepest floor also grants Captain XP.

Room rewards scale with depth too: see Going deeper. The board shows this floor's XP and the next floor's before you commit.

⛏️ Going deeper: what actually changes

Lock difficulty grows by 1 per Descend from the 2 baseline, but numeric growth stops at the d6 value cap of 5. Once a floor reaches that cap, deeper play gets harder through the baseline room-slot structure and authored room or boss variants, not by asking for an impossible face value.

Floor	Room rewards	Slots a lock may ask for
Floor 1	1x	up to 2
Floor 2	2x	up to 2
Floor 3	3x	up to 2
Floor 4	3.5x	up to 2
Floor 6	4.5x	up to 3
Floor 7	4.7x	up to 3
Floor 10	5x	up to 3
Floor 20	5x	up to 4

The table shows the floor's baseline structural cap. Floors 1–3 keep that cap exact while the system teaches the lock puzzle. From Floor 4 onward, an authored room or boss variant may add one advertised slot, making Break Formation, Deep Lode, or Mirror Warden ask for one more lock. That authored increase is an exception on the named variant, not a hidden increase to every room on the floor.

The reward curve rises fast at first and then tapers: the early floors are worth what they always were, and beyond that each Descend adds progressively less. A run can go as deep as you can survive; it just stops being a straight multiplication of the haul.

Deeper floors get structurally harder, not impossible. The further you descend, the more rooms a floor holds and the more rows you cross to reach the boss, so a long run genuinely thins your dice pool between refills. Deep floors also lean on the colour gate: more of their locks demand a specific colour (never the "any" wildcard) at a high value, so the squad that gets deep is the one whose stats actually supply those colours. Build for the colours you mean to spend, rather than spreading thin.

Floor modifiers. From Floor 5, every eligible floor carries one named condition. It is always named in the floor header, and there is never more than one at a time.

Modifier	What it does
Echoing Locks	The first die committed to each slot is consumed by the echo and cannot win that lock. Stack a second die when the first one is not enough.
Fractured Spectrum	One colour resonates badly on this floor: you descend with one fewer die of it. It returns on the next floor.
Void Undertow	The undertow drags hazards up through the floor: hazard rooms are much more common here, and every one of them is Void Stress.

🚪 The rooms

Each room type comes in a few authored shapes. They differ in what they ask and what they pay, and the board always shows the actual lock, reward and penalty before you commit: nothing below is hidden information.

Room	Shape	What it is
Battle	Break Formation	Their line is wide: one more lock to fill, but the cache behind it is worth it.
Battle	Hold the Line	A standing formation. Nothing clever, nothing hidden.
Battle	Void-Touched Pack	Something down here got to them first. Richer, and it bites back harder.
Faction Supply	Deep Lode	A rich Star-Steel seam continues beyond the first cut. Both approaches use the same lock; your choice changes the payout and the risk.
Faction Supply	Supply Seam	Raw Star-Steel, close enough to the surface to cut free.
Hazard Event	Charged Bloom	It opens as you pass, still holding charge. The lock is the same either way; the question is whether you spend a die to draw that charge off.
Hazard Event	Shearing Current	A current runs through the passage. A failed attempt or forced crossing cuts one die from your future refill capacity.
Merchant / Traveler	Salvager	A scavenger with a rack of spare dice and no particular loyalty.
Safe Room	Fracture Bivouac	The shelter is temporary, but the crew can make it count.
Safe Room	Quiet Starwell	A still pool of starlight gives the crew one calm breath between rooms.
Vault / Loot	Greedy Lock	Two seals bar the cache. Both must be handled; your choice changes the payout and the risk.
Vault / Loot	Sealed Cache	A plain supply cache, sealed and intact.

Capacity choices are explicit. A Salvager offers two of the three stat colours—Red, Green, or Blue—and you pick which +1 refill die to take before attempting the lock. The extra die is permanent for the rest of the run: every floor from there refills one additional die of that colour. Gold is a wildcard, not a refill choice, so it stays valuable as a separate source.

Decision rooms tell you their trade. Risk/reward rooms state what changes if you push for more; safe rooms let you reduce Void Stress or tune one RGB refill capacity. The selected option is recorded in the result and the debrief.

The floor's last room is always a boss, and bosses have names:

Boss	What to expect
The Fluxbound Sentinel	Bound to the flux above. What it guards changes with the weather.
The Hollow Cartographer	It has been mapping this floor since long before you arrived.
The Mirror Warden	It answers your route back at you: one more seal than the floor prepared you for.
The Starved Gate	It wants one colour, and a great deal of it.

📋 After the run: the field report

Every ending: Extract, Retreat, a collapse, or an Abandon: leads to the same debrief, and it stays readable forever from Past Incursions.

Earned, brought home, and lost are shown separately, so a Fail's forfeiture is a number you can see rather than infer.
The exact reason it ended: choosing to leave and being overwhelmed are different things, and the report says which.
Room by room: which rooms were cleared cleanly, which were forced through, which were lost, and how many dice each cost.
Your squad, exactly as it descended, with the XP each pet earned. It renders even if you have since disbanded the squad.

🌌 Void Flux shown as “Flux · weather”

The Void Flux is the frontier-wide condition shown on the Star Map and in the sidebar. It seals and boosts Fractures for gathering, and it reshapes the deeps too. The flux blowing when you launch is frozen onto that run, so a rotation mid-descent can never change a board you're already standing on.

Flux	What it does to an incursion
Stardust Drizzle	Stardust settles into the deeps; every room pays 15% more.
Aurora Veil	The veil opens hidden trails; you descend with 1 extra Gold wild die.
Void Fog	The fog thickens below; hazard rooms are far more common on every floor.
Comet Shower	Comet-fall salts the seams; Faction Supply rooms yield 25% more Star-Steel.
Clear Skies	The Void is quiet. The deeps behave exactly as they should.

Void Fog is the one flux that's genuinely hostile in both pillars: above, it seals exposed Fractures shut; below, it thickens the deeps with hazard rooms: which means more Void Stress, which means a costlier Fail. It's also the only flux that opens a Fracture: Void Fog Hollow can only be reached while the fog is thick.

☄️ Void Surge shown as “Surge · frontier event”

A Void Surge is a scheduled frontier threat, separate from the ordinary Void Flux weather and the Meteor Launch Event. While one is live, any faction can launch a run under it. Clearing a floor boss adds that floor number to the shared counter, so deeper successful runs help the whole frontier break the Surge faster.

The event is attached to your run when you launch. If the launch window closes while you are still descending, your current run remains credited to that event. When the shared target is reached, its staff-authored Stardust and Glimmer pool is divided proportionally among contributing Captains and paid once through the normal currency ledger.

Tactical Incursions: How They Work