WORLD

The Gauntlet

The Gauntlet is the one part of Ashen Throne you play directly rather than order. You drive your Crawler in real time through waves of enemies, steering and dodging yourself, and the fight resolves on screen rather than in a replay.

You enter it from a gate on the world map.

A stage

A stage runs its wave phase for about 5 minutes, then the stage boss arrives. Survive the boss and you move on; die and the run ends there.

The enemies, the weather and the ground change between stages. What does not change is that everything is happening live, so the usual levers of this game, squad composition and counter elements, matter less here than reading the screen and keeping moving.

What it pays

Clearing stages pays Prime Alloy, up to 3 per stage per day. That is a daily ceiling rather than a per-run one, so grinding the same early stage repeatedly stops paying.

The map is gone while you are in there

Entering the Gauntlet tears down the world map entirely and gives the whole graphics budget to the run. That is deliberate: on a phone the two cannot both be resident. Leaving rebuilds the map.