Hull Rupture ships with three starting ships, six modes and four difficulty settings. A new save begins with one ship, Classic Mode and the first difficulty tier; the rest unlock by playing, which means the launch screen shows a much smaller game than the one you bought.
The structure is deliberately flat: the differences between hulls are in layout, starting systems and how much loss a run tolerates before it collapses, not in a straight upgrade path.
The three ships
Each hull is a different starting layout, and layout decides almost everything downstream: which module slots exist on turn one, how far the airlock is from the hull edge, and therefore how long the alien route can be made before the first wave arrives.
The developer's own framing is that the ships differ in "layouts, systems, and loss thresholds" — how much punishment the run absorbs before the mission stops being viable. A hull with a generous threshold forgives a bad early build; a tighter one converts the same mistake into a lost run.
Which ship you unlock first is not documented in any announcement, so treat the order as something you discover rather than a fixed ladder.
Official media · SteamThe six modes, and the four that get named
Four of the six appear by name in the game's own store copy and patch notes:
| Mode | What it is |
|---|---|
| Classic | The default run. Twenty alien waves, one ship, no modifiers. |
| Endless | Survival without a wave cap. Separate from Classic since launch. |
| Conquest | A mode with its own economy rules; patch 1.0.15 fixed a turret-kit discount bug here. |
| Trade | A mode unlocked by playing, and the one demo players may already have. |
The other two exist — the count is the developer's — but they are not described in any published material, so there is nothing worth writing about them beyond the number.
Classic is the mode every guide assumes: twenty waves, one ship, and a run that ends when the counter does.
Endless used to start on its own
Before launch, finishing a Classic run rolled straight into Endless Mode. That is no longer true. Endless is now a separate mode with its own settings, which the developer says is what allows it to be balanced and optimised on its own terms.
The practical consequence: a run that ends at wave 20 now ends. If you want to keep going, you choose Endless before you start, and you accept that its difficulty curve was balanced separately.
The wave 40 line
Endless is where the late-run performance problem lives. The developer traced slowdowns past wave 40 to Endless scaling rather than to graphics, and split the mode out partly so it could be tuned without touching Classic.
Four difficulties, and the November 7 change
The game has four difficulty tiers. Until patch 1.0.15 they unlocked per mode: beating Normal in Classic opened Hard in Classic and nowhere else, so a player who wanted Hard in Endless had to earn it twice.
1.0.15 changed that. Difficulty is now account-wide across modes — beat Normal in Classic and Hard becomes selectable everywhere. Achievements and mode unlocks are unaffected; only the difficulty picker changed.
That single line is the most consequential balance change since launch, because it decides what a returning player can select on their first Endless run.
The same patch nerfed the wave 10 boss. If a guide tells you the wave 10 fight is a wall, it was written against the pre-November 7 build.
Official media · SteamWhich mode to start with
Classic, and not because it is first in the list. Classic is the mode the balance was built around: twenty waves is a finite run, the ship grows at a pace the economy can absorb, and the loss condition arrives while the build is still comprehensible.
Endless asks you to solve the same economy without a finish line. The developer has said its balance missed the mark more than once, and the mode is now separate partly so that can be corrected without disturbing Classic. Starting there means learning the game against its least settled numbers.
The four difficulty tiers
Two of the four are named in the game's own patch notes — Normal and Hard — and the patch that named them is also the one that changed how they unlock. The remaining two tiers exist but are not described in any published material, so there is nothing reliable to say about what they change.
What is documented is the unlock rule. Difficulty is account-wide across modes since 1.0.15: beat Normal in Classic and Hard becomes available in Endless, Conquest and everything else. Before that patch, each mode kept its own ladder.
What the modes share
Every mode runs on the same four layers: hull blocks create space, modules occupy it, humans and power make the modules run, and defence keeps the first three alive. Modes change the rules around those layers, not the layers themselves.
They also share the loss condition. Aliens that reach the Despot's Chamber, or reduce Despot to zero HP, end the run regardless of mode. There is no mode where the ship survives that.
A note on the universe
Hull Rupture is set in the same universe as Despotism 3k, Despot's Game and Slime 3K, and the Despot is the same character. Playing the earlier games is not required, and nothing in the mode structure depends on them — but the tone, and the joke about humans as a renewable resource, lands differently if you have met him before.