Choose Classic to clear three zones and the region’s legendary shrine. Choose Survival to set a time record against an endless, growing horde. Survival has no selectable Normal, Hard or Nightmare difficulty and no final victory. Defeating a Survival milestone boss lets the run continue; it does not complete the map as a Classic win.
Classic or Survival: which should you choose?
| Your goal | Choose | What counts as progress |
|---|---|---|
| Finish a region or unlock Rocky Desert | Classic | Defeat the three zone guardians, finish the shrine encounter and enter the final portal |
| Open Hard or Nightmare for a region | Classic | Win on the previous difficulty in that same region |
| Improve a fastest-clear time | Classic | Complete a victory; time records and medals are separate from KO records |
| See how long a build can last | Survival | Survived time; KOs break ties on the time leaderboard |
| Reach the timed Mew/Moltres/Mewtwo encounters | Survival | Continue through the scheduled milestones, without treating them as the end of the run |
Both modes use your starting League member, its evolving form, learned moves, items and permanent Lab upgrades. A longer mode does not bypass move requirements or grant a fourth move slot. Read the Lab slot comparison if you need more capacity before starting.
Prepare and start a run
- Open the original game in our player. Choose Play → The League, select a member you can already use, then continue to the region / Prepare run screen. Swap beside “Your Pokémon” returns to the League if you want another member.
- Select Viridian Forest or an unlocked Rocky Desert. Both modes use the currently open maps; Survival does not bypass the Desert lock. See maps and unlocks.
- Under Mode, select Classic or Survival. On Classic, choose an unlocked difficulty. On Survival, the difficulty controls are replaced by its records and “How to play” information.
- If you own eligible Bag boosts, you can select up to two. They are spent when starting; Survival filters out boosts that do not apply to it. No boost is required simply to choose a mode.
- Check the selected Pokémon, map and mode, then press Start!. On a phone, the player’s top Fullscreen button gives more room after you rotate to landscape; the outside controls remain the way to leave that view.
For a first region completion, Classic → Viridian Forest → Normal gives you a defined finish to work toward. This is a suggested learning goal, not a claim that a particular starter guarantees a clear. If your target is a timed encounter or endurance record, select Survival deliberately instead of looking for an “endless” option inside Classic’s difficulty cards.
Classic: three guardians, a shrine and the final portal
Classic follows Zone 1 → Zone 2 → Zone 3 → legendary shrine on both currently open maps. Each ordinary zone has a guardian altar. Build your kit and open useful item Poké Balls before waking the guardian with Interact (default E).
Defeating the guardian opens the next portal. Check the minimap for things left to collect, then use the portal to continue. Zone 3 leads to the region’s shrine: Mew in Viridian Forest or Moltres in Rocky Desert. After defeating that legendary, enter the final portal to complete the map. A guardian kill alone is not a region victory, and a shrine victory is not an automatic promise that its Pokémon has joined your League; member challenges and captures are a separate task.
The run timer continues across zone transitions, while the zone timer resets for the new zone. The ordinary zone’s 10:00 threshold starts an escalating Final Swarm if you remain there; it is not an automatic win, a fixed boss-spawn timer or a requirement to wait ten minutes before using the altar. The shrine is excluded from that ordinary-zone trigger. Your result can be a victory or a loss, with revives and the game’s end-of-run handling determining what happens when you faint.
Classic has separate reasons to keep playing: a higher KO record and a faster completed victory answer different goals. A long run with more KOs is not necessarily a faster clear. Compare the record for the same map and difficulty rather than treating all displayed times as one leaderboard.
Classic difficulties and how to unlock them
Hard unlocks by winning Normal in that region; Nightmare unlocks by winning Hard in that region. Winning Hard in Viridian Forest does not itself complete the difficulty chain for Rocky Desert.
The current runtime applies these difficulty multipliers before its other elapsed-time, zone and combat scaling:
| Difficulty | Enemy HP | Enemy damage | Enemy speed | Enemy amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Normal | ×1 | ×1 | ×1 | ×1 |
| Hard | ×1.40 | ×1.42 | ×1.08 | ×1.30 |
| Nightmare | ×1.90 | ×1.96 | ×1.16 | ×1.60 |
These are configuration multipliers, not final enemy stats or a measured percentage increase in the number of enemies you will see. The preparation cards also advertise ×1 / ×1.75 / ×2.5 Stardust for Normal / Hard / Nightmare. Your final reward still depends on the run; these are not fixed Stardust payouts or a verified fastest farming method.
The preparation cards summarize Hard as “enemies +70%” and Nightmare as “enemies +160%.” Those are the displayed difficulty summaries, not the runtime’s enemy-amount factors in the table. Do not read them as a guarantee of exactly 1.7 or 2.6 times as many visible enemies.
If a difficulty card is locked, finish a Classic run on the previous difficulty on the selected map and let the result save. If the expected result is missing, use the run-result checks before assuming a different mode or another purchase is required.
Why Survival has no Normal button
Survival uses its own elapsed-time scaling, phases, milestone bosses and accumulating pact curses. The preparation screen therefore does not offer Classic’s three difficulty cards. The runtime internally sets its base tier to zero, but that implementation detail does not make Survival a user-selected “Normal” run or give it Classic’s win condition.
The objective is time survived, with KOs as the tie-breaker. It has its own Survival records and clan leaderboard. A map’s personal time record and a Pokémon’s combined records are different views; starting with that member is what identifies its run even if it evolves later.
There is no fixed duration at which Survival awards a final victory. At 45 minutes, Endless Night begins and a Mewtwo milestone is due; defeating Mewtwo is an encounter objective, not an ending. The horde keeps scaling afterward.
Survival timing and milestone bosses
The nominal schedule is one milestone every 5 minutes. The next boss waits if a boss/Mewtwo encounter is already active or the game is not in active play; a delayed fight does not imply that the mode is broken. The following times are targets on the in-run timer, not guaranteed wall-clock arrival times.
| In-run time | Milestone | Boss source |
|---|---|---|
| 5:00 and 10:00 | 1 and 2 | A guardian from the selected map’s first-zone candidate pool |
| 15:00 | 3 | Mew |
| 20:00 and 25:00 | 4 and 5 | A guardian from the map’s second-zone pool |
| 30:00 | 6 | Moltres |
| 35:00 and 40:00 | 7 and 8 | A guardian from the map’s third-zone pool |
| 45:00 | 9 | Mewtwo; Survival continues after this encounter |
There are also time-based pressure changes between bosses:
- 12:00: phase 2 begins, bringing evolved Pokémon into the horde.
- 24:00: phase 3 begins, with final forms joining the hunt.
- 30:00: Deep Wounds starts; healing becomes less effective as the run grows longer.
- 45:00: Endless Night begins, with additional minute-by-minute enemy growth.
The phases are Survival scaling stages, not Classic zone clears. You do not need to find a Zone 2 portal at 12:00 to advance the phase. For the names in each map’s guardian pool, use the map reference.
All nine Survival pacts: power and a lasting cost
After a milestone boss is defeated, the game can offer up to three random pacts from those that have not reached their selection cap. You may decline. Accepting one applies its benefit and its cost for the current run; it is not a permanent Lab purchase. A capped pact leaves the eligible offer pool, so the same three cards are not guaranteed after every milestone.
| Pact | Benefit per choice | Cost per choice | Selection cap per run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Horde Pact | One Epic-or-better item | ×1.25 wild Pokémon amount | 2 |
| Iron Pact | One Legendary item | ×1.35 wild Pokémon HP | 2 |
| Fury Pact | +25% player damage | ×1.25 wild Pokémon damage | 2 |
| Wind Pact | +15% movement speed and one extra jump | ×1.12 wild Pokémon speed | 2 |
| Elite Pact | +30% experience and +20 luck | Twice the elite Pokémon factor | 2 |
| Moon Pact | Gain 3 levels immediately | Alpha interval becomes 90 seconds instead of 150 | 1 |
| Greedy Pact | 250 × current phase PokéDollars immediately, plus +30% PokéDollar gain | ×1.5 item Poké Ball price factor | 2 |
| Glass Pact | +40% crit-damage modifier and +10 percentage points crit chance | ×0.8 maximum HP | 2 |
| Thorny Pact | One extra vitamin slot | ×0.7 received healing | 1 |
Repeated choices also repeat their costs. For example, two Iron Pacts multiply the pact HP factor to 1.35 × 1.35 = 1.8225 before the other enemy scaling; that is not merely +35% once. Glass Pact’s crit chance remains subject to the game’s overall 100% crit-chance cap. A vitamin slot from Thorny Pact does not add a move slot.
Item rewards still use the eligible item pool. If everything available is already at its cap, the game can return PokéDollars instead of adding another item; a pact does not bypass item caps.
Choose against your current limitation. An extra jump can help movement while faster enemies add pressure; a vitamin slot can be useful while reduced healing weakens a recovery plan. These are trade-offs from the configuration, not measured best-pact rankings. If the offered cost undermines the run you are trying to sustain, declining is a valid action.
Migration, events and the 0.7 economy
Survival has no Classic three-zone portal chain, but it does have migration portals. The first is scheduled from 11:00, waits for active boss encounters to clear, and stays open for 90 seconds once spawned. Later opportunities are scheduled 11 minutes after the previous spawn. Entering one generates new terrain within the selected region while keeping the same run and its growing horde; it is not a map victory or a way to unlock a locked region. There is no need to enter it for the 12:00/24:00 phase changes.
Supply drops, comets, Meowth visits, regenerating altars, Ditto/Hypno encounters and hostile terrain give you things to do between milestones. Watch the actual prompt and event timer before diverting from your route. Meowth’s Survival visit lasts 45 seconds, so finding the shop is different from having unlimited time to buy from it. Remaining in a small area also triggers Survival’s siege pressure; standing still indefinitely is not a neutral way to wait out the clock.
The 0.7.0 economy change needs a mode boundary:
- In Classic, a standard paid item Poké Ball requests three item candidates, so you can normally choose among three when enough eligible items remain. Free/special balls and League capture throws are different paths.
- In Classic, repeated Meowth purchases without enough paid item-ball openings add extra purchase pressure to shop prices.
- In Survival, those two Classic-only branches do not apply. The regular item-ball path still requests one candidate, and the Classic extra shop-pressure factor stays at one. Survival still has its own time, reroll and pact-related pricing; this does not mean that every price remains fixed.
Read the item and vitamin guide to decide what to take, and updates for the version context. These distinctions prevent “three choices” or “buying raises prices” from becoming an inaccurate rule for every ball in both modes.
Sources and version scope
This is a source-derived guide to Beta 0.7.1, using the original game’s public runtime, configuration and update notes and English interface strings, collected on 19 October 2026 (Asia/Shanghai). The configuration defines the 300-second milestones and 12/24/45-minute thresholds; runtime methods implement pact selection, migration, Classic victory and the mode-specific economy. The 0.7.1 announcement changes two move-detail UI behaviors, rather than replacing these mode systems.
An older Survival help sentence says “no zones or portals.” Here that is interpreted as no Classic progression chain: the current migration implementation and its on-screen portal event take precedence for the actual portal feature. We have not recorded a completed Classic clear, a 45-minute Survival run or every pact outcome for this guide. The schedule and numerical effects above are read from the public code; they are not fabricated playtest results, winning tactics or final damage measurements.