Hull Rupture Guide: First 20 Waves, Build Order & Tips

You survive the first twenty waves by spending almost nothing on defence and almost everything on production. That is not a trick or a speedrun route — it is what the developer recommends, and it is why a run that stalls in the middle is usually a run that skipped it.

Classic Mode is twenty waves, and the ship never stops moving while they happen. Everything below assumes that mode, because it is the one every player starts with.

Twenty waves is a clock, not a level count

Despot needs exactly twenty days to fully decode the Galactic Union network, which is why the wave counter and the story clock are the same number. You are not clearing stages, you are buying days, and the run ends when the count does.

The same design decision explains why the ship is described as a factory under attack. Modules keep producing during a breach, workers keep staffing them, and turrets keep firing while aliens walk through the hole they just tore. Nothing pauses for combat, so a wave costs you only what the aliens break.

The build order that survives

The developer's own summary of the optimal strategy is to put the bare minimum into survival and funnel everything else into economy growth. The interesting question is what "bare minimum" means on your ship, and the answer is always smaller than a new player expects.

Start with production. A module that produces a resource keeps paying for the rest of the run, while a turret that kills two aliens pays once and then has to be fed again.

Then make the route longer before you make it deadlier. Hull blocks decide which way attackers walk, so a corridor that adds ten seconds to every alien's trip is worth more than a second turret on a short path.

Only after both of those should you buy coverage. Turret slots sit along the route the aliens take, and putting them on a path you did not choose wastes both the slot and the kit.

Hull blocks decide where the fight happens

Hull Construction gives you fifteen block shapes per run, drawn at random without repeats until the pool runs out. None of them rotate, none of them can block the airlock or the engines, and once a block is placed it cannot be destroyed.

That combination is the whole tactical layer. You cannot fix a bad corridor by deleting it, and you cannot rotate a shape to fit a gap you left, so every placement is a commitment about where aliens will walk for the rest of the run.

At launch you can build on any empty module slot on the ship. That is a change from the demo, where a slot only opened up next to a finished module, and it is the rule returning players get wrong first.

Turrets, ranges and what the weapons actually do

Alien drop pods land on different parts of the upper and lower hull, and the creatures inside walk toward the airlock. Corridors, turrets and choke points change how that walk plays out, which is why the route matters more than the damage number on the gun.

Turret slots hold a weapon you can upgrade or replace with a higher tier one later. The two families behave differently: ranged weapons punch through a line of attackers, while close-range weapons hit harder and can ricochet into whatever is standing next to the target.

Weapons also carry effects rather than raw damage alone — slowing what they hit, making it take more damage, or poisoning it over time. A cheap gun with the right effect on a long corridor usually beats an expensive gun on a short one.

Humans are a resource with three exits

The crew is not a cast of characters, it is throughput. A human can operate a module, fight, or be processed into fuel, and the bioreactor is the thing that turns population into propulsion.

That makes every staffing decision a trade. A worker on a production module is a fighter you do not have at the airlock, and a fighter at the airlock is production you are not running.

Treat population as the resource that decides whether a run accelerates or stalls. A ship that is losing people can still be speeding up if those people are going into the fuel chain instead of into a losing fight.

What the launch build changed, and how the demo fits in

The playtest opened on 23 April and closed on 15 May with more than 30,000 participants, averaging three hours thirty-eight minutes each and a median session of one hour thirty-six. The Next Fest demo followed on 15 June with one starting ship, two modes and a twenty-wave run ending in a boss, and 25,389 people played it at an average of two hours thirty-three minutes with a 93% positive rating.

September brought two updates that matter for the order above: Hull Construction itself, plus a reworked post-battle shop that sells themed boxes — one for modules, one for turrets — and a demo patch that added the Rat Turret and improved kit randomisation. Neither the playtest nor the demo is downloadable now, so the only way to run these waves is the retail build.

Three rules changed between the demo and release. Endless Mode is now separate from Classic instead of continuing automatically, any empty module slot is buildable, and artifact icons and names were reassigned, so an icon you remember may belong to something else now.

Where runs actually end

A run rarely ends at the last wave. More often it stalls in the middle, when the ship has grown faster than its power and the player keeps buying capacity instead of generation.

The second common ending is a route you did not choose: turrets placed on whatever path the blocks happened to make, rather than blocks placed to make the path the turrets need.

The third is kits spent on slots you cannot power or staff. A module you cannot run is not an asset, it is weight, and every module you add makes the ship heavier.

Quick answers

Do I need the demo to practise? No, it is gone. The retail build starts with one ship and Classic Mode, which is the same twenty-wave structure the demo used.

Which mode should I learn first? Classic. Trade Mode drops combat and keeps the economy, which is useful for learning production chains but teaches nothing about route design.

How many difficulties are there? Four. They change the pressure rather than the rules, so the build order above holds on all of them.