Contents
Guide / Progression
Offline progress and unattended play
Offline progress is the point of Deskrawl: it is built to run as a strip along the bottom of the desktop while you do something else. This page covers what the build actually defines about that, and says plainly where it defines nothing.
The window is the game
The game is designed to sit as a slim, borderless window pinned along the bottom edge of the desktop, layered over whatever else you are working on. It is not a launcher that gets out of the way, and it is not a minimised window you forget about: the strip is the surface you watch, and the only surface the game has.
That shape is what makes the genre readable here. Combat resolves without input, so the strip does not need your hands — it needs the decisions you made earlier: which zone the heroes farm, which gear is worth keeping, which talents the run is built around, and what the carriage is allowed to pick up on the way back.
Verified from the build
Borderless and transparent display is a supported mode, and the official patch notes describe it as the mechanism that lets the strip sit on the desktop over other work.
What a long run has to pay for
Nothing in the loop needs your hands, but four systems decide how far an unattended run gets: how experience arrives, how fast the enemies grow, how much gold the upgrades demand, and how the carriage is configured. Each has a real number in the build, and those four numbers are what you are actually tuning when you leave the game alone.
Experience arrives in flurries, not in a curve
The build counts levelling in mob kills: two kills put you at level 1, ten put you at level 5, and two hundred put you at level 15. The last stretch to the maximum level of 99 takes about two thousand kills. The early levels are nearly free; from level 15 onwards the curve is where an unattended run earns its keep.
Level checkpoints
Mob kills counted from level 0.
| Level reached | Mob kills | Kills per level so far |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | 2 | 2.0 |
| Level 5 | 10 | 2.0 |
| Level 15 | 200 | 13.3 |
| Level 99 (maximum) | 2,000 | 20.2 |
Enemies grow faster than the early curve
Enemy health rises by twelve percent per level and enemy damage by ten percent. Elites start at three times a normal enemy’s health and deal one and a half times its damage, and their own scaling is steeper again. Experience drops off a cliff instead: an enemy eight levels below the hero awards nothing at all, which is what caps how long a zone can be farmed before it stops paying.
Scaling per level
| Value | Per level | Where it bites |
|---|---|---|
| Enemy health | +12% | Time to clear a stage |
| Enemy damage | +10% | Whether the hero survives to the end |
| Elite health | ×3 of normal, then +10% per level | Whether a stage is worth farming at all |
| Elite damage | ×1.5 of normal | Health potion consumption |
| Experience from an enemy | +10%, zero below an 8-level gap | When a zone stops paying |
The three costs a long run has to fund
Gold and materials are the run’s only income, and three systems take them: equipment upgrades stop at plus ten, an ability levels to ten starting at fifty experience for its first level and two more for every level after it, and a refunded talent point costs eight. The upgrade ceiling and the refund price are the two numbers that decide whether a build can be corrected later or has to be re-farmed from scratch.
Costs and ceilings
| System | Value | What it means for a long run |
|---|---|---|
| Equipment upgrade cap | +10 | A finished piece is finished; the run moves to the next slot |
| Ability levels | Maximum 10 | Ability experience competes with character levels for the same kills |
| Ability experience curve | 50 for level 1, +2 per level after | Front-loaded: the first levels are the cheap ones |
| Talent refund | 8 per point spent | Rebuilding a talent tree is a real cost, not a free respec |
Handing the run to the carriage
Life skills are the non-combat tree, and the carriage sits at the centre of it: filtering decides which equipment is picked up at all, and auto-sell converts the rest into gold when the carriage reaches town. Both are switches you set once and then live with, which is exactly why they matter in an unattended run — a wide filter fills the carriage with gear nobody will ever equip, and a narrow one leaves gold on the ground.
- Auto Recovery Automatically recover to full health when returning to town.
- Auto Refill Automatically refill potion charges after returning to town or being revived from death.
- Auto-Fill Inventory When Carriage is full, automatically fill your inventory from the Carriage.
- Capacity I Increase Carriage Capacity by —
- Combat Potion Auto-Use Slot Unlock a slot for a combat potion, which is used automatically during combat whenever its buff is not active.
- Equipment Auto-Filter Enable Carriage Equipment Auto-Filter, so that it can collect equipment matching the selected rarities and leaves the rest on the ground.
- Equipment Auto-Sell Enable Carriage Equipment Auto-Selling, which will automatically sell equipment of the selected rarities from your carriage and inventory when returning to town.
- Gold Find I Increase Gold Find by —
- Magic Find I Increase Magic Find by —
- Material Find I Increase Material Find by —
- Potion Charge I Increase Potion Charges by —
- Potion Find I Increase Potion Find by —
- Revive Cooldown Reduction Decrease Auto Revive cooldown by 1 second.
- Storage Page Unlock an additional storage page.
- XP Gain I Increase XP Gain by —
The build defines 92 life-skill entries; 15 of them carry a published name and are the ones listed here. The rest have no name in either language yet, so they are left out rather than described from a guess.
Confirmed, contested, and still open
A reference that answers everything is usually guessing somewhere. This page separates the three cases on purpose. Anything the build states is treated as a fact; anything players disagree about is reported as a disagreement; and anything that only looks absent is left open, because not finding a system is not the same as proving it is not there.
Status of the open questions
The status column describes the claim, not the player asking about it.
| Question | Status | What we can say today |
|---|---|---|
| Does progress continue while the game is closed? | Pending verification | Official copy describes the loop as running while you do something else, but says nothing about a closed client. We will not conclude either way without a test. |
| How is progress saved? | Verified | Progress is saved against a server, and a save is triggered on returning to town. Official hotfix notes discuss disconnection risk from excessive saving and from reviving in town. |
| Can the demo’s final boss heal be interrupted? | Contested | Players report both that the heal must simply be out-damaged and that a specific set-up interrupts or out-builds it. No value in the build settles which is right, so treat it as an untested claim. |
| What level can the demo actually reach? | Pending verification | Store copy and player reports disagree, and the demo was updated during its own window. Read every demo number on this site as attached to the build named in the footer. |
What this page does not claim
- It does not claim the game stops or continues when the client is closed. That is listed above as pending, and it stays pending until someone tests it.
- It does not put a number on the demo’s level cap, because the sources disagree and the demo changed during its own window.
- It does not settle the final boss fight. The community answers contradict each other and neither is proven.
- Every number on this page belongs to the demo build named in the footer. A different build may differ, and the full release will.