How Fleetbreakers Handles Difficulty
Fleetbreakers has two core ways to play, Story Mode and Free Play, and each one asks different things of our difficulty systems. Both modes share the same missions, enemies, and rewards, but the shape of a run is very different. That means we've had to build tools that scale challenge in a way that feels fair, surprising, and replayable no matter how you play.
Story Mode: A Roguelite Campaign
Story Mode is our take on a campaign, just… a roguelite one.
You won't see every story beat in a single run, and the ones you do see depend on your choices. Visit Melvin Wright's vendor more often and you'll naturally uncover more of his backstory. Skip him, and you'll learn about someone else instead.
A Story run is one sector per chapter, with the chapter's narrative framing the big beats while the missions and sector map are fully procedural. A successful run usually takes 30–45 minutes. Less successful ones… well, they wrap up faster.
Free Play: The Long‑Form Mode
Free Play unlocks after Chapter 1 and is our long‑term, high‑variation mode. In many ways, it's the closest to our original vision for Fleetbreakers.
You'll play through three chapters, each with a different boss. Free Play leans even harder on procedural generation - boss order changes, mission mixes shift, and the run can swing wildly depending on how aggressively you rush or how much you boom.
As you progress through story runs, you’ll also unlock free colony zones. These act as little jolts forward, giving players more strategic options and helping story progression feel closer to the flexibility of Free Play.
A full Free Play run typically lasts 60-90 minutes.
The Challenge: Shared Content, Different Scales
Because Story and Free Play share missions, we can't just tune difficulty once and call it done. A mission that appears early in a Story run might show up late in a Free Play run. And since Free Play is roughly 3× longer, we can't rely on a single progression curve without making one mode feel too easy or the other too punishing.
So we built a few systems that adapt dynamically to the mode, the run, and your choices.
How We Tune Difficulty During a Run
1. Complexity (Our Mission‑Level Difficulty Dial)
Every mission has a target Complexity - our internal measure of how spicy we intend that mission to be. Complexity rises as you progress, but:
It increases faster in Story Mode
It increases slower in Free Play (because the run is longer)
This lets both modes feel like they escalate without one outpacing the other.
2. Rewards That Scale With Your Progress
Post‑mission rewards and vendor inventories scale based on:
Your overall game progression
The run's current Complexity
What you've unlocked in persistent progression
We want your 50th run to surface cooler, weirder, more synergistic stuff than your 4th run, without overwhelming new players. The loot tables are… let's say "enthusiastically complicated," but they get the job done.
3. Synergies (The System That Helps Your Build Take Shape)
Fleetbreakers has:
11 playable ships
160+ ship enhancements
100+ relics
At around 50 relics, we hit a problem: players would pick something interesting but never see anything that played well with it. Too much content meant too much randomness.
So we added a behind‑the‑scenes synergy system.
Everything, ships, relics, enhancements, has tags. As you make choices, we track a subset of tags that define your emerging build. Every so often, we guarantee a reward that leans into those tags so your run can actually cohere into something intentional.
It still takes a ton of tuning, and we're not calling it perfect yet, but it's getting better every update.
Where We're Headed
Our goal is simple: every run should feel like a fresh strategic puzzle, whether you're chasing story beats or diving into a long Free Play session. These systems let us scale challenge, reward, and build expression in ways that stay fair and fun across both modes.