DELVERS: Dragon's Hoard

From the Devs

DELVERS: Dragon's Hoard is a run-based party autobattler incremental. You never control a hero in combat. You recruit them at the campfire, gear them, spend the gold from your last run on a sprawling zodiac skill tree — then send four of them marching into the depths and watch the formation fight without you. Every delver carries their own Vigor bar, healing is strictly rationed, and every depth costs more than the last. When the party falls the run is over — but the gold and the gear you hauled back are permanent, and they buy a party that reaches further next time.

THE DELVE
Your party walks down depth by depth, and the dark escalates as you go: the Greenfields give way to the Mire, the Wastes, Sporewood, the Catacombs, and finally The Deep, where the demons and eldritch things live. Dozens of kinds of foe hold the road, and past the ordinary ranks stand elites, minibosses, and apex foes — hand-built counters that come dressed in the gear meant to beat the class they hunt. Mid-run your one lever is momentum — a gold multiplier that climbs for every room cleared without taking a single hit. Everything else was decided back at the fire, and the end of every run lays the truth out in THE RECKONING: what every hero dealt, took, blocked and healed. When you're farming, arm auto-delve and the next run marches itself. Push one depth too far and you lose the run; turn back too early and you can't afford the next one. It's a game about attrition, greed, and knowing when to stop.



THE HOARD
Loot is the spine of the game. Every delver wears eight slots — weapon, offhand, helm, chest, gloves, boots, ring, amulet — and drops climb a four-step ladder: common, magic, rare, and legendary — plain gear rolls nothing, magic rolls a little, rare rolls the widest spread, and a legendary trades some of that spread for a power no other item has. The affix pool runs deep and spans six tiers, and it reads like the dungeon-crawlers it comes from: Jagged, Cruel, Swift, Keen, Brutal and Giantslaying on weapons; of Stone, of Warding, of the Prism, of Fortune, of Greed and of the Leech on everything else. Weapon bases are class-specific — the Lancer's spears, the Berserker's greathammer, the Necromancer's bone scepter, the Alchemist's alembic — and only the Lancer, Paladin and Cleric are built to carry a shield.

Most of what drops is smart loot, weighted toward the party you actually field — and nothing equips behind your back. The haul rides home in your satchel, THE SPOILS lays it out at camp, upgrades glow green, and one tap dons the best of it. The hoard becomes a build, never inventory homework. And it really is a build: amulets of the Sign roll extra ranks straight into skills on your tree, the four elemental brands (Ember, Rime, Storm, Acid) turn ordinary weapon hits into burns, chills, forks and corrode stacks, and Magic Find and Gold Find are stats you can chase at the cost of raw damage.

At the top sit the named legendaries — a chase piece for every class, each carrying a power the tree cannot grant. The Drakespur bites back: half of every blow the Lancer blocks returns to the one who swung it. Truefeather makes every fifth arrow a guaranteed headshot. The Moonchalice sends a tide through the party every forty seconds, mending the weariest first. Nightfang lets the thief skim gold off his own crits. Clear a difficulty tier's capstone for the first time and a legendary is guaranteed.



THE DRAGONS
Every tenth depth a dragon blocks the road, telegraphing a cone of fire your party has to walk out of. Kill it and it drops a Dragon Heart — the currency behind the tree's most dangerous keystones: a second wind, a drake companion, a dragon-slaying pact.

THE CAMPFIRE
Everything between runs happens at the fire, under the sky itself — one zodiac sign hangs overhead at a time, and turning the wheel brings the next sign, and the next delver, into view. Strangers walk up out of the dark to be recruited under their own constellation: the roster — Lancer, Berserker, Archer, Cleric, Wizard, Thief, Bard, Paladin, Necromancer, Warlock, Druid, Alchemist — each with its own range, attack cadence, and row in the formation. Only four march at once, so the party you take down is a real decision and not a checklist. The ones who stay by the fire keep what they earned: heroes bank experience permanently, class by class, levelling across four primary stats — Might, Grace, Vigor, Lore — and those levels survive everything, runs and prestige alike. Each hero fields only a few active skills at a time, so even a fully-built delver has to choose what to bring — but a skill's upgrades never cost a slot: slot the skill, and everything you bought for it rides along.

THE SKY
The skill tree IS the sky: twelve zodiac signs, each a constellation of minor stars, notables, and a keystone at its end. Stars reveal themselves as you buy toward them, skills rank up rather than simply switching on, signs unlock class paths, and fusions exist only where two branches meet. Nothing is locked behind a respec fee — the tree refunds what it reforges, so a build is something you keep rebuilding. The whole camp plays with mouse or keyboard alike.



THE LONG NIGHT
Clear the ladder and difficulty tiers reopen the whole descent, harder, with better gear waiting at the bottom. When a lifetime of runs stops paying, the Rekindling burns your tale for embers — a permanent currency that buys the back half of the roster and the tree's ember nodes, so the next era starts further along than the last one ended.

THE ROAD AHEAD
The free demo is the complete current build — try it first. The full game is where the road continues: new content lands here first, with Steam achievements and cloud saves.