Corruption

*This is an article for the Corruption world event. If you were looking for the Corrupted challenge, click here.*

*Corruption*

*You can now see a giant spire only about 20 zones ahead of you. Menacing plumes of some sort of goopy gas boil out of the spire and appear to be tainting the land even further. It looks to you like the zones are permanently damaged, poor planet. You know that if you want to reach the spire, you'll have to deal with the goo.*

**Corruption** is the second anomaly in the game after planet break, and will continuously affect the world until the player uses the Portal. It begins after completing zone 180, and can be observed by distinctly purple cells appearing on the world zones.

As the player progresses through zones past zone 181, more and more corrupted cells start to appear, starting at the bottom of the world (i.e. at the beginning of each zone) slowly creeping up (forwards) with further zones. Corrupted cells contain much stronger versions of regular imps.

Each corrupted imp will also receive a random ability, similar to the way different Void maps give their imps various abilities.

## Story

Corruption is foreshadowed much earlier in the story, after the player spots a gigantic spire at zone 170 from the top of a large mountain.

*You reach the top of an incredibly large mountain. You can see at least 50 zones sprawled out before you. About 30 zones away, you can see a gigantic spire. It looks like architecture from your home world. You hope it's not a mirage...*

Further progression appears to hint that the spire does not have a positive effect on the environment.

*Something smells purple. That's probably not good.*

*Judging by changes in wind direction, the smells are coming from the spire. You still can't describe it other than purple.*

Can you even smell purple? Is the player supposed to be able to even smell a color? That's probably why it's not good.

*After clearing out the previous zone, you decide to take a day hike to the top of another gigantic mountain to try to find more info about the smell. As you reach the top, your jaw drops. Clear as day, a healthy amount of purple goo is pouring into the atmosphere from the top of the spire. You can see the zones in front of you beginning to change. This really can't be good.*

Having finally reached zone 180, the player finally gets to observe the spire in all of its glory. Bad news however, it appears that the structure is dropping large amounts of purple goo into the atmosphere, which will hinder further progress.

Looks like this is what you have to deal with in order to reach the Spire.

## Rules

Here's a condensed list of all the changes that come into play after reaching Corruption in a run. More detailed information can be found in further paragraphs.

* Corrupted cells begin to spawn, and contain stronger versions of enemy imps which drop **15% of the current zone's boss helium reward**.
* All further Improbabilities become stronger and give 2x more helium than normal.
* Void map enemies become stronger. Because of Improbabilities giving 2x more helium, Void maps will also give twice as much helium for the Improbability, and they will also start giving additional helium per each Corrupted cell in a zone, like so.

## Corrupted cells

### Spawn rate

Corrupted cells begin spawning at zone 181, with 2 of them in random locations on the bottom row.

An additional corrupted cell will spawn every three zones. Corrupted cells will start appearing in the higher row once there are 6, and will keep spreading to further rows every 6 cells. This does not mean that there will always be 6 corrupted cells in the bottom rows, just that the area they can be generated in is expanded.

Examples:

* Zone 181: 2 corrupted cells will spawn randomly on the bottom row.
* Zone 190: 5 corrupted cells will spawn randomly on the bottom row.
* Zone 197: 7 corrupted cells will spawn randomly on the bottom two rows.

The number of Corrupted cells that can appear at maximum is limited to 80.

### Enemy strength

All of the corrupted imps are fast. Every corrupted imp, even though they retain their original name, has their base health and attack multiplier reduced to 1x. From there, the following multipliers are applied to the base multiplier:

> A \* (1.05 ^ floor(([Current zone] - B) / 6))
>
>

Where:

* A equals 3 for attack and 10 for health.
* B equals 150 normally and 1 while the Corrupted challenge is active.

Improbabilities also receive the multiplier buff above on **top of their existing stats**, meaning that to get its health and attack the result of the above formula is to be additionally multiplied by 1.2 for attack and by 6 for health. Improbabilities aren't corrupted however, which means they do not get a special ability alongside their stat buff.

### Enemy abilities

Each corrupted imp will be randomly assigned one of the following abilities:

 Corrupted Precision
 Corrupted Sharpness
 Corrupted Strength
 Corrupted Toughness
 Corrupted Agility

## Void maps

While enemies in Void maps don't become corrupted, meaning they don't receive the abilities above, they receive an additional buff called Void Corruption, which increases the attack and health of each imp by -> the result of formula above divided by 2.

Entering the Magma increases Void Corruption to the same level as your current World Zone.

## Headstart

With the Headstart Mastery, Corruption starts earlier than 181. What this means for Corruption is:

* Corrupted cells begin spawning at zone 176, 166 and 151 respectively, depending on the player's Headstart level. Their spawn rate rises as normal, just changes its starting point.
* The Corruption **starts weaker**. The strength formula remains unaffected by Headstart, and it always determines Corruption strength multipliers starting at zone 150. This means that even if Corruption starts at 151, when you reach zone 181, the corrupted cells there will be as strong as if Corruption had started on 181.

Because Headstart makes more corrupted cells spawn, more corrupted cells appear in the Spire. This makes Spire more difficult. However, by the time the player gets Headstart II they most likely no longer have trouble with corrupted cells in that area. With Headstart, the Spire will contain 9, 12 and 17 corrupted cells respectively with each tier of Headstart, as opposed to default 7.

## Trivia

* In patch V4, Corrupted Precision was added. This buff was meant to exist since Corruption was added (and was also documented on the wiki) despite not actually being in the game due to a bug.
* Corruption was added in patch 3.3.