All 7 Game Modes and How Each One Unlocks

The modes

Boss Rush, the 1.0 mode

This is the headline addition and the one most worth understanding, because it inverts how the game normally works.

In this mode you start your run as usual, but you’re actually racing the clock to get as powerful as you can before the 10’th minute mark, at which point the Final Boss spawns!

Everything else in the game is about surviving pressure that scales forever. Boss Rush gives you a fixed ten-minute build window and then measures you against a single target. The studio’s framing is that these are “REAL boss fights” — as opposed to the elite-swarm encounters that stood in for bosses before 1.0.

Two consequences for how you play it:

• Build speed matters more than build ceiling. A build that comes online at minute fifteen is worthless here. This favours survivors and weapon lines that front-load.
• Single-target damage suddenly matters. For most of the game, area damage against a horde is the whole point. In Boss Rush, Huntress and other single-target kits get their best showing.

Your placement on the leaderboards for each arena and difficulty is set by how fast you kill the boss, not how long you survive. And a warning from patch 1.0.0c: game speeds below 100% automatically disable the leaderboards, so if you have bound the speed-down hotkey, your Boss Rush times will not post.

Bio Lab’s Boss Rush final boss had a bug at launch, fixed in the 1.0.0c2 sub-hotfix on 28 August.

Difficulty levels

Separate from mode, there are numbered difficulty levels. Two have achievements: Don’t Hurt Me (complete a run on difficulty II) and Bring ‘Em On! (difficulty III). Version 1.0 tuned the upper ones — “Difficulty 2 & 3: Horde stats modifiers increased slightly” — alongside a set of global changes that shifted the balance of what you face:

• Basic zombie spawn intensity slightly reduced
• Elite enemy spawn chance slightly increased
• Boss enemy base HP increased by one quarter

Read together, 1.0 made runs less about volume and more about elites and bosses. That is a meaningful shift if you last played during Early Access: builds that shredded crowds but stalled on single tough targets got quietly worse.

Extermination

Wave-based rather than time-based, and it has the most interesting achievement conditions in the game:

• Decide Their Fate — finish a wave in anywhere from a microsecond to 20 seconds
• Come With Me If You Want To Live — recruit your first survivor only after completing at least 10 waves, meaning you run solo through ten waves first
• The Terminator — complete an Extermination run with just the team leader
• Per-arena wipes: Hasta La Vista, Baby · Waves In The Sand · Blood Makes The Grass Grow · No Hard Feelings · and Final Destination for 20 waves in Dead Terminal

Note the naming convention — Extermination’s achievements are almost entirely Terminator references.

Restriction runs

Not a mode, but a category of challenge the game explicitly rewards, and the reason many players stay after finishing the story:

Torments

Separate from all of the above, and separate from achievements entirely — see the Torments guide. Version 1.0 added 28 of them. They are optional, they are not part of 100% completion, and the studio is upfront that they offer nothing but bragging rights.