Hard mode guide

Is day 100 on hard possible?

“Yes, it is, if you dedicate enough time into achieving it. It can be done.” (16:15)

- Corrupt X

**Tired of all the grinding just to get to day 100? Say no more! with this strategy, you can fast forward past round 120 and up!**

If you have watched Corrupt X's video and have not the slightest idea how he did it, this is the article for you. This is an in-depth guide about the hard difficulty in Yorg.io that will help you achieve much higher rounds. Hard is the most fun gamemode in yorg once you know how to play it. Trust me.

Jokes aside, his 100 on hard video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crmIb7AfMj8 is the basis of this strategy. ***(you can get to round 400 with it!)*** It covers all the basics of it like, stalling with walls, base at the corner, lightnings only, extend transporters outside of the base, and many more. I highly recommend you to watch this first, if you haven't already.

Hard mode is much different from easy and regular, as they just involve very basic strategies to maximize crystal production and saving crystals along the way. Hard mode has a variety of unique strategies to survive higher rounds that you don't see in easy and regular, and is much more complicated overall in terms of technicality. This guide covers all of the techniques and strategies you need to know to get high rounds in hard mode.

"Lightning towers are very strong, and with enough levels and production, deal a lot of damage through chains." (2:21) Corrupt X used this in his video, but more is required to get to higher rounds.

"Knowing where the zombies attack the most helps a lot." (3:09) This strategy uses some specific base locations to manipulate zombie spawning to make it easier to get higher rounds.

**Early game: Until level 9 base is reached**

Whoa there! Before you recklessly place your base anywhere and start placing your crystal mines, iron mines, and cannons, let's talk about base position. Your base position is extremely important in hard mode, as Corrupt X has already showed you. But, there is more behind base position than what the video tells you.

The video tells you to put your base in the corner. While this is very useful because it limits zombies to come in less angles, therefore needing much less crystals to get defenses, Corrupt X's base position wasn't exactly optimal.

His base was in the center of his entire structure, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Zombies tend to go towards the base. And the more middle the base goes into the structure, the more points the zombies will come from, therefore needing more defenses. But if the base is more toward the corner, all the zombies will concentrate at one single point because the zombies will all toward the corner of your structure. 'But how is this useful? Isn't this just more pressure for the walls and your base?' You might ask. Remember how Corrupt X said lightnings **deal a lot of damage through chains**? Yes, this is very important because it eliminates need for much more defenses anywhere else in the base, and with all the lightnings targeting one spot, the zombies will die extremely quickly.

So where exactly do we put the base? We want to put the base as close to 30 blocks diagonal from the corner as possible, to make more room for other buildings. \*not what you think it is\* Anywhere more than 30 blocks diagonal, the zombies will scatter instead of forming organized lines when going to attack the base, which is very inconvenient for mid game play, when you want to place crystal mines outside of the base's immediate range.

With the general location of the base in comparison to the map, and to the shape of the structure done, there's still the location in comparison to your other buildings. Of course, you would want to put your walls outside of the base, but other than that, you shouldn't put crystal mines or other miners and factories in close range of the base, to make room for more defenses.

Finally, in your structure range you should have a bunch of crystals and a couple uraniums. Yes, getting higher rounds on hard is very map layout picky.

Whew! The most important part of the run is done. You place your base at a good spot... and now what to do?

Instead of the traditional crystal mine -> iron mine -> cannon ball factory -> cannon -> wait -> base level up -> repeat, we can take three steps out of that process making it crystal mine -> wait -> base level up. But unlike on easy where you can level up your base before the first night starts, you have to endure the first zombie wave with level 1. Sounds easy... until you fast forward round 1, purely beacuse you are lazy. Whoops, didn't think zombies would be that strong.

What if you found a good map layout but screwed up and died? Wouldn't you have to find another good one? Oh, how time consuming. Never fear, because you can always create a new save file on round 2 after you placed your base (reason stated at the end), so you can always start again on a good map every time you wanna start a new run or screw up. Manually download the save file, and then drag the .bin file back into yorg.io via the 'import' button.

Anyways, the zombies don't deal more damage than from regular, they just have 4x more health. A wall or two in front of the zombies will solve the problem, as zombies from round 1-12 barely deal any damage to walls. **(Pro tip: to save more resources try to use transporters to stall out the zombies for the first couple rounds because walls take 45 crystals to build. You can hold your mouse down on the place you want to replace the transporter and once it breaks, it will automatically replace itself. This only works for once placement though, so after you place it once, you will have to click on the icon again before you can do the trick again.)** Yes, the zombies take much longer to die.

Round 5. Why is round 5 so special? You may ask. Round 5 is special because you start to get skill points there. Many many players forget they have skill points and just ignore them. Skill points are absolutely essential to getting higher rounds in hard, if you haven't noticed already. To get the base to level up faster, I would recommend do full on mining, only stopping before the 25 point upgrade. Afterwards do the zombies walk over transporters one, because that is about when you have to start extending your crystal transporters outside your base. After that, do factories all the way up the branch. It is up to the player's preference for what is best for them though, as some would like the factory upgrades earlier because their defenses run out of ammo. The defenses' ammo doesn't really matter that much, in my opinion, as long as they don't have none.

A good way of remembering whether you have skill points is always look for the green bar that says 'your savegame has been updated!'. That signifies you have gained a skill point. It is also green, like the skill points on the game interface. (don't judge me that's the method that I use)

Now, you might be tempted to put defenses, because... well, that's what people usually do, right? Yes, but defenses this early in hard mode is just a waste of resources. You might argue that Corrupt X uses cannons in the first few rounds, but this is unnecessary. Defenses before base level 6 is a complete waste of crystals that could be used for upgrading the base. You can easily use walls to stall out the zombies before round 13. \*the reason will be stated later\* Remember, if one of your walls get close to dying, you can always sell and replace it using the ***pro tip*** or just upgrade it. It should look something like this -->

If your walls ever get to low health, try to see whether you can wait until the next day comes, because you will get a skill point, and if you buy a skill in the skill tree, there's a bug that instantly heals all buildings, similar to the wall stall trick where you upgrade walls and they get back to full health. (Don't buy skills you don't need just for the sake of healing your buildings!)

Round 10. Bosses are scary, right? Well, it is not that scary since now you have level 5 walls to work with. That is, assuming you have followed the tips to get level 5 before night 10. It might not be easy, but level 4 is just fine as well. You can stall the boss easily with level 4 or 5 walls. If you want to save more money, use level 1 and 2 walls and replace them.

"**Burn, boss, BURN!!!"** Well, it's just the same for every other zombie.

Round 13. This is when the difficulty of hard actually shows itself. The difficulty spike is unlike any other round in the game. So, better beware of it, and not let many zombies get onto the same wall. Try to split the zombies by placing walls between them as they come for your base, like Corrupt X says, "Splitting up zombies by placing walls helps, especially since Lightning Tower's chain can spread further away and can still deal damage." (4:41)

After you get your base to level 6, which is most likely going to be somewhere around round 14, you can put some tier 1 lightnings to slightly reduce the amount of stress of the zombies. This might actually help a bit in decreasing costs of building or upgrading walls because they kill the zombies faster than daylight does.

At times like these you need to try to focus on every single wall that is being attacked, and take care of the ones that drop to low health.

You can put some lightnings to reduce the stress on your walls like this. Don't be fooled though, it still needs a lot of focus.

Round 20. By this point you should have a level 7 base, and 8 mining skills. You might notice the boss does significantly more damage, but this trend will not stay for long. You shouldn't let the boss get into your lightnings' range, because the boss will exhaust all the lightnings' ammo. This is a good habit to have even though it doesn't matter that much at this point.

Base level 8. You should be at round 23 at the very fastest, and anything within day 30 is fine. A 4 tier 4 lightning setup can kill all zombies in a solid 20 seconds. That is, until round 27 hits, and a new tier of zombies come to attack.

How a round should look like --> Having zombies clumped up together to encourage more chaining. And since zombies move slower when it gets near the base it is very easy to sell and replace walls when they are about to break. I sell and replace the walls before they get to max level just because I want to save money instead of upgrading them all the way to max. Might not be the most efficient method though.

And yes, you do have to pay attention to your outsides as well. Upgrade the walls enough so they don't break into the crystal mines or the transporters when you are busy minding about the main attacking zone. Words cannot describe how frustrating it is to suddenly realize you have a main transporter destroyed and you only just knew about. This usually causes resets, although you can keep going because you should be less sensitive to these minor setbacks.

Level 9 base. You should be getting this somewhere at round 30. Now I know y'all are all excited for the **shield towers**, but hear me out. They cost a whole lot. If you wanna save some money to get higher base levels faster it's best not to get them yet. If you really want to you can, but for me it uses up a lot of money that I would rather get them when my crystal production gets even higher later on. They are also going to be very important later on, only partly for the main base, but it's main use comes in soon. \*the reason will be stated later\*

**Mid game: Until lightnings can't do all the damage fast enough for you anymore**

Round 30. You should have gotten your last mining skill to heal up all of your buildings once again. If you used your skill points on anything else, you won't be getting base levels as fast, sorry. And in my case, I have level 9 base. You should be seeing the boss waves getting comparatively easier, and also that stopping the boss before it gets into your lightnings' range is getting more difficult. **yes, unconventional thing to do, right**

"Wave 31 and beyond is when it starts to get a lot harder, and needing to focus more on stalling and focusing in general in order for the zombies to stay away from the base." (4:05) For this strategy's case, round 31 and beyond is where it gets a lot **easier** and needing to focus **way less** on stalling and focusing in general. You heard me right, easier. Assuming you have tier 9, you can build up a good defense without needing many crystals compared to your production that can kill all zombies fairly quickly without much problems. Tier 9 is where the stress of zombies generally ends, at least in my case, until the very high rounds.

Right now at round 32 with 5 tier 6 lightnings I can play the night without pausing except for upgrading the outside walls. Take that for comparison

I reached tier 10, on the run that I'm using to write this article, at the start of day 37. The zombies did not cause much trouble and I was able to pass by all the rounds leading up to it by just upgrading a couple walls. For most people, the 30 by 30 area within your base has already run out of crystal veins. This is when you have to extend your crystals outside of the base area. The technique for this, is also very important. This is also the reason why the 'zombies walk over transporters' skill upgrade is needed before going for factories. (you can allocate more points to factories first if you get tier 10 late)

If you placed your base correctly, the zombies should spawn and go towards your base in a very organized manner. Kind of like this -->

They come to your base in a big line. As you can see this only applies to the two adjacent borders the base is at. And this is where you will mainly be placing your crystal mines when you do it outside the base range. As you can see, the least zombies spawn on the edges of the two borders, so you can put your crystal mines there. Keep in mind you should put your crystal mines outside of the line, or else the zombies spawning naturally inside that area will attack it.

So an even more ideal map layout would be having many crystal mines near the adjacent borders your base is facing. This doesn't matter that much though. Just look at the corner that you want the base to be in.

This is where shields really come to use, to protect the extended crystal mines. This technique might be pretty premature for the time being, as there are not many zombies spawning yet, compared to the much later rounds. So I recommend you not to use this yet. There is this technique where you put uraniums, shields, and walls on one separate supply chain, so the uraniums can arrive to the shields much faster because they only have one general route to go and they don't go travel all the way back to the main base. The same logic also applies to shields to walls. For some reason yorg.io does not deliver the materials to what is nearest, instead it delivers the stuff randomly to whichever factory has vacancy. So by putting these three towers in a supply chain this effectively eliminates the randomness factor of supplying shields to the outside walls.

You might say that Corrupt X doesn't use walls to protect his outside crystal mines, while this is true, it is a safety precaution for when something does happen to your outside crystal mines, and since he doesn't go past round 100, where the amount of zombies really get more, he doesn't experience the mass destruction of his outer mines every round. Anyways, this technique is used to make room for crystal mines for higher base tiers.

At round 39 with a tier 10 base and the updated defense, the yellow zombies couldn't touch my base for more than 3 seconds. Take that for comparison

At this point you will realize in one day the lightnings won't get very full of ammo. Instead of upgrading your factories you should gauge how fast the lightnings will kill the zombies. In my case, really quickly. So if the lightnings kill the zombies quickly it wouldn't use a lot of it's ammo. Then the next day, built on the existing ammo left from last night, it can slowly get to full. So don't go ahead and waste money on miners and factories for nothing.

When you get to base level 11 is when you want to put shields, because that is when your crystal production gets fast enough that shield towers won't put that much of a drain to the economy. **Again, this is just my recommendation, you can do whatever you want.**

You can see the zombies are dying before they get to the walls. Yes, the power of chaining and grouped lightnings.

You no longer need to mind about the border walls much anymore, because the shields can take care of those by themselves. You should still check to fill out any missing pieces though.

Round 60. you can see for yourself how the regular zombies don't pose any threat anymore, it's just the boss you have to mind about.

Round 61 daytime, I got level 12 base. This was actually faster than what I have previously done before. My previous best was 61 night :D Anyways, At each round you should be looking for good spots you can place your crystal mines at. That way it would be save you the trial and error for finding the spot for the crystal mines.

Round 62. You should have finished mining, transporters, and factories skill upgrades. Now you are free, you can choose whatever you want to use your skill points on. It is completely your choice. But of course, choose what you need, don't just start saving up for 8 crystal mines upgrade, stupid.

As you are breezing through the rounds you wonder: "why do i remember hard mode being so difficult?"

At level 13, at this case at round 77, you can probably start using the shields technique I told you earlier, because you will really need to start extending your crystal mines out of your base. Also keep in mind Corrupt X finished his run on level 12, so he doesn't have to use that many crystal mines.

Round 80, you can see how the defense is kind of 'overpowered' now, I'm literally zapping the boss to death. Keep in mind, it looks like it's wasting money by upgrading them too much now, but it's just preparation for the zombies getting stronger near the next base level upgrade, in this case, it will be a bit less than 20 rounds time.

As the number of zombies increases you might have many times where there are too many zombies on one wall and is therefore destroying it quickly. By using fast forward, grouped zombies can spread out and leave the pile, putting less pressure on the wall. If you don't want zombies to spread out when you use fast forward, you can always use barricading walls to block them from exploding in all sides once you press fast forward. The ores on the map also act as barricades.

At base level 14 I implemented my first individual shield supply chain. It looks like this --> A couple uraniums, and a couple shields. Works surpsingly well I'd say. In the later rounds do a double wall instead of single wall to be safer.

And just like that, round 100 can be achieved with great ease, unlike how Corrupt X displays it to be. It's only slightly stressful for 20 or so rounds.

At level 14, I also added walls by the border guarded with a couple very spaced lightnings. They kill the zombies relatively fast as well, at least they won't kill the walls with shields replenishing them every so often very quickly. I also started spamming all lightning towers I can near the base and maxing them.

Round 110. You should really start noticing this boss isn't much of an upgrade from the previous boss anymore. This will also become much more apparent in the late 100s.

Now you can see better, since there are more zombies spawning, how the zombies come in an organized manner if you place your base correctly. Also notice how the places where I put my mines are exactly where the lines of zombies avoid. -->

This delicate pattern only works well if starting the night in regular speed though, as starting the night in fast forward will scatter the zombies around, therefore getting to your protected places and cause you **more frustration**. Also fast forwarding rounds is really unpredictable in itself so I highly recommend to never fast forward rounds. (the quote at the start is a joke, by the way)

As it is getting harder to get to each base level upgrade, you might notice that the zombies are getting stronger compared to the defenses. In this case, if you want to save a ton of money in upgrading walls, you can use the **pro tip** mentioned near the start of the article, but with level 1 walls. This prevents the need to max out the wall which uses a lot of money that can be used to upgrade the base. This will be used a lot in the late game because a group of zombies one shot maxed out walls, but if you want to save money early you can do that. This is a bit risky though, as not all attempts can succeed in stalling. Especially if the zombies are coming in diagonally, it is very hard to instant replace them. You want to look for a wall where the zombies are only coming from the sides to do this trick on. Also keep in mind that low frame rates can also potentially decrease successful stall rates. So disabling particles might help here.

As you are making your way to level 17 you might be contemplating whether to get warp (the instant transporting upgrade) on the skill tree. As shields get increasingly important in shielding the crystal and uranium mines, who doesn't love instantly transporting shields? Well, I have found out the answer to this the hard way. A run on round 200 died beacuse I got warp. Turns out the shields production at this level isn't enough. And how do I know that? Since I have to cover a large area by the border, adding on to the pressure on the main base, there is a lot of shield loss happening throughout the entire base. And as I was observing the effects of warp on a round, I noticed that after one wall got shielded, the wall next to it got shielded. And so on. So apparently the shield towers shield walls in a specific order. So when you think about it, this isn't a very good thing. Keep in mind that the rounds have to be in regular speed so the shield spam technique cannot be used here, though I don't think anything will change with the order of walls getting shielded.

\*shield spam can only be used in fast forward, and is a technique to survive rounds where otherwise walls will be instantly annihilated. I won't pretend I know how this works, because I don't.\*

Do you see your border walls taking forever to get shielded? That is because your shield towers randomly decide which wall to send the shields to. And once one shield tower is set to send a shield to this wall, no other shield tower can go to it. This leads to some pretty long waiting times if you get unlucky. You can combat this by making separate supply chains in the same border. You can split the transporters so that this set of transporters only supply this side of the walls and so on. Something like this -->

I have two separate supply chains on the same set of walls. This makes it so that shields cannot travel a very long distance to reach the target wall since there is no possibility for that anymore.

By round 200 you should have gotten level 17, and should have two border walls. Rounds don't look any different from each other anymore, even tens of rounds. But the change is gradual though, and you might have more trouble getting to level 18. For some people zombies are already too strong, and are taking ages to kill. That's okay, and if you aren't close to getting enough for the next base level, then you have entered late game.

**Late game: until you die, obviously**

Now when zombies are too strong, and you can't handle the zombies for much longer, you can use another damage dealing source. And this is when the 'extra space' mentioned in the very start of the article is used. It is used to store cannons. Did I say only use lightnings? Did Corrupt X say to only use lightnings? Well, Corrupt X didn't reach level 17 or 18 base. Therefore he doesn't use this. There are two main reasons to use cannons: 1. because lightnings cannot deal damage fast enough anymore as base levels get exponentially longer to get while zombie count, health, and damage grow somewhat more linearly. 2. because as the attacking zone of the base gets bigger as you begin to stack more and more lightnings on top of each other, the zombies now attack distinctly in a couple spots. This makes it so that cannons, with a 1 tile explosive radius, can hit many many zombies at once. The damage of cannons is also a lot more than that of lightnings, and there is a double damage upgrade in the skill tree as well.

Of course, cannons are extremely expensive. So if you are close to level 17 or 18 you might as well just go ahead and get it before implementing cannons in your base. At this point in game you are just trying to push as many rounds as possible, and your determination to keep going carries how many rounds you can survive. A group of zombies, especially in the diagonal file, can easily one shot your max tier walls, so this is when the level 1 wall stalling trick really saves you time and money. Your cannons can deal massive damage to zombies very quickly, but it is barely noticable because of so much pausing. It is also not very useful because if you let a round be at this stage of the run, you will suffer massive losses.

Anyways, after you reach a new base tier, or just decide to spam cannons already, you can slowly replace your lightnings with cannons, but preferrably leave a couple. Here's an example --> You can see I left a few lightnings just in case, and put the cannons in range of the zombies.

You need to be really careful about the diagonal group of zombies, as the cannons target the zombies coming from the sides first as they come to the base first. They die extremely quickly, but by that time the diagonal file of zombiese would already have done some damage. You need to pay really close attention to the diagonal file and pause right after each zombie attack destroys the wall, so that the wall can be placed with greater ease. Don't be fooled though, it still needs a lot of attention. You can stall the zombies closer to the base if you find that difficult.

At this point rounds will become extremely monotonous, as each round isn't much of an upgrade from the last anymore. And the ever increasing amount of zombies makes it so that it is very difficult to fast forward and not lose a bunch of things. And as you slowly replace your lightnigs with cannons, you also shouldn't make it so that zombies gradually come to your base after the main wave has been defeated, as this wastes the cannons' ammo a lot. This might not appear very crucial yet, but once you get the double damage upgrade, your cannons will not have enough ammo to sustain itself. So it is best to just let each round be on regular speed until all the zombies burn. You shouldn't have much problems with your walls on the border. If you do, you should consider splitting the supply chains into more separate ones, upgrade the walls, or add reinforcements.

And this is all you have to know before base level 19. I have not reached this point yet, and am currently trying to do so.

I hope this article helped you realize hard isn't that hard after all, it just needs the right technique.

**UPDATE 22-12-2021** also yes the stuff below has just been winged it has not been thought through.

Level 19 has been reached at day 325. Though not refined, this is a milestone to say the least. A couple new things happen once you reach level 19. You get more shield towers. You can use the shield towers, in addition to selling a couple you have inside your main base, to create a border that nearly extends the whole opposite borders. I do not recommend expanding the entire border even if you have the materials to do so because of the way the zombies spawn and the base location, they will concentrate on one or two walls, making it very difficult to maintain. Something like this would do -->

This makes it so that the previously very stressed out diagonal file will now be more chill than the side parts.

**These things are the conditions I have on my base, and yours might be different. Here are the ways that I used to solve them.**

You are reaching higher and higher rounds. 340, 350, 360. You seem to be able to reach 400 very soon without any problems. But suddenly your walls start breaking again. You haven't seen that since what? 30 days ago! And before you know it the breaches are happening everywhere in your base. How I get \*partially\* combat this is by using lag.

Lag? You ask. Isn't this supposed to make your game just more inconvenient to play?

Now this strategy varies between computers as each computer starts experiencing calculation delays (which is what lag comes from) in different times of the run.

Remember how I said fast forward makes zombies spread out? I discovered that it is actually due to lag. And how do I know? Because my game started making zombies spread out for no reason at every night starting at around day 39x. At first this seemed inconvenient, but as more walls started breaking, I found a way to use it to my advantage.

You see, another way I found that lag is what makes the zombies spread out is by placing transporters and cannonball factories. Crazy, I know. But this is the basis of the 'strategy' that I made in a hurry to combat the walls breaking in the border. **there is probably a better way to do this**

So in each round, which if you have gotten to this point (post the stuff on yorgio discord to get some congratulations by the way) you should be already familiar with, there are always a couple rounds which have infinitely many zombies on them, and they tend to break very easily, even if the wall is at max level. And all of them breaking will result in your whole screen turning into exclamation marks of your internal mines breaking, and that will cost more money than you use to fix your walls every night. So by using lag, which is in the form of 'recomputing network' you see when placing a factory, you can reposition the zombies to other walls to reduce the current pressured walls' pressure and shifting the pressure to another wall. (sorry no screenshot because im making this update after i finished my run)

Sounds good, until you actually try it out. Turns out if you do it too much the zombies all gather up in one spot, which if you haven't guessed already is probably going to be even worse than when you started the night. Other walls become very much pressured after placing a factory or transporter. The spreading zombies cause them to fall out of the wall and onto the base.

A good way to make it work better though, aside from minimally spreading the zombies with very short sessions of recomputing network, is to put another layer of walls. You might think it would be useless and just wastes money, but the walls I'm placing are spaced. That way once a group of zombies break through the first layer of walls, I can replace the wall that the zombies just broke and place a cannonball factory to create lag, and then to spread the group of zombies out. They don't get obstructed by the neighboring walls because I put the two layers one space apart. This also frees up a space on the first layer for zombies to distribute to after the recomputing network session. What I do sometimes is that if there are many groups of zombies that are about to break through, just sell all the walls that are being pressured a lot and replace them. After that you can do the short burst of recomputing network and spread the zombies out. This method is risky though, so I recommend putting more walls on the extra layer of walls to reinforce the walls that are about to break on the second layer. You can even add a third layer, which I did in the end of my run but didn't come to much use.

Another small thing I did was to shorten the outer walls a bit, though it didn't really do much help. This makes it so that the shield towers have less demand in general, therefore it can supply the missing shields faster. I realized that was an option when I wondered why the diagonal lane was receiving so little attention. Keep this in mind if you get this far into the run. Don't make your border walls so wide at level 19.

Another problem I seem to have sometimes is cannons running out of ammo.

As you replace your lightnings with cannons you are having a better time defending with the zombies because they deal much more damage. But each cannonball only goes to one spot. So if you fast forward your game into the night, zombies will scatter into your base and you cannons simply cannot deal with them. And this is the source of the problem. As mentioned immediately above, zombie breakthroughs, excess zombies that fall off of the outer walls created from the recomputing network sessions, and screamers all go towards the base. And adding on to the fact that cannons waste a whole bunch of ammo due to the zombies moving and the cannonballs taking forever to travel, this makes any stray zombies that go onto the base after all the zombies going towards the main base structure has been dealt with very costly towards their ammo. You can always upgrade your resources and factories to max level, but that will cost a lot.

I solved this by firstly, keeping a couple of lightnings in the outer layer of defenses, on the diagonal lane of zombies, to get rid of the screamers before the screamers expend too much of the cannons' ammo. In fact when the screamers arrive into the cannons' radius none of the cannonballs are able to hit the group of screamers making them a pure waste of ammo. So keeping a couple of lightnings help a lot. Secondly, I used more layers of walls and reinforcement walls like I just mentioned to keep zombies from reaching the base, even if they broke through the main wall line.

Before I talk about this other problem that I am having at higher rounds, you need to be able to deal with **graphics problems.** Graphics problems occur when the game tries to render too many things at once and then the graphics crashes. Although you can still technically play the game with the graphics problems, it will be extremely difficult and its more worth it to just restart the wave. As you might imagine the chance of this happening exponentially increases as your number of rounds and the stuff you build goes up.

As I don't have a screenshot of it right now, it kind of looks like a sudden flash of white and then nothing. Everything that changes after that crash happens will appear. You can still function the game normally but you can't see anything. It is very noticable. If you don't notice it then well, your computer is good enough that it doesn't happen to you.

And now you got familiar with this, I can talk about this other problem I have at higher rounds.

So when you get a graphics problem at night, your instinct will be to save the game and reload the game, to make it normal again, right? Well yes, but that is actually very bad for the night you are about to have. Because if you save in the middle of the night, and load it up again, the night will immediately play once you resume the game. This is especially bad because once you load your save, the things originally in your transporters will have disappeared, and it will take some time before your transport chain will be fully functional again. So until then you are going to suffer some damage because your shields are not properly producing. This also explains why Corrupt X said that 'you reload the save at the cost of some resources', in case you were wondering. You lose crystals.

So the rule of thumb in high rounds on hard is to never ever save in the middle of the night. Otherwise, you're in for a bad time. I have learnt this the hard way by nearly choking the whole run by saving on night 414 after getting a graphics problem.

One last thing that is bound to happen to all of you players, no matter the day and no matter the strategy, is zombies getting too strong.

As prices of leveling up the base increase, it is harder to get to each base level, and grinding to each base level takes more time than in easier gamemodes. Therefore the point where your base leveling speed cannot catch up with the strength of the zombies is not very far away. Adding on to the fact that you need a lot of money to get the things to keep your base alive, this is what truly makes hard mode 'hard'. And what makes it fun at the same time! You can say that new strategies can help solve the problem of the difficulty curve, but no matter the strategy the zombies will over power your base and what you currently have someday. And when that point comes, where you are spending way too much on walls, you might want to consider reloading the save file every new day. First of all, it can help you save a ton of time trying to pause and resume your game and fixing all the walls over and over again, **and** risking the zombies breaking through at any point. Secondly, depending on the round, it can actually save you money in the long run because you will be spending more money than loading the savegame loses you. (I upgraded my transporters a little just for that sake for saving a little more money per loaded game)

Again, other problems may appear for you and you will have to adapt for what you think is best for you. You will be bound to have more problems with your base as the rounds goes on, don't just expect smooth sailing until round infinity. That was what I did and oh boy was I wrong.

Thank you all for reading this, and good luck on your hard mode runs.

Sincerely, yeet---

**Other notes**

yeet--- is the creator of this article and the world record? holder of hard mode with 309 rounds. (currently trying to push more!) The Easy Mode WR Holder has used the 309 save file and tried to survive more rounds on that basis, but I won't count that because I played the vast majority and the most important parts of the run.

oops, now that record has been demolished again with a record of 419 rounds. The Easy mode WR holder still plays a part in this. Not by using my save this time, but my setting a goal for me to reach 419, which I happily accepted it as a challenge. I could have gone further, but I have gone tired of playing it. I will try to reach level 20 next time, but until then, see you readers until the next article update. ***I still have strategies that I have thought of that could possibly be used to reach higher levels, though those will have to be tested in a later date.***

Base level progression: warning: very detailed. only my best base level times are recorded, if you are not on pace with these please don't worry and don't restart because you are. This is just for a benchmark of what you want to do on what day.

Hard mode records

T2 by 2 late day

T3 by 4 mid night

T4 by 7 mid day

T5 by 10 late day

T6 by 13 mid night (tier 1 lightnings)

T7 by 18 start (2 tier 3’s, tier 4 miners tier 5 factories)

T8 by 23 mid day (4 tier 4’s, tier 4 miners tier 6 factories)

T9 by 29 late day (5 tier 6’s, tier 4 miners tier 7 factories)

T10 by 36 night start (7 tier 8’s, tier 5 miners and tier 9 factories)

T11 by 47 night start (10 tier 10’s, tier 7 miners and tier 10 factories) \*not the best\*

T12 by 61 late day (more tier 11’s than tier 12’s preferably) \*improvable\*

T13 by 77 mid day

T14 by 95 mid night (just spam all lightnings already)

T15 by 119 start

T16 by 147 start (DO NOT get warp only get the last transporter upgrade)

T17 by 184 start

T18 by 236 mid day

T19 at 325 start

disclaimer: this is not the best strategy out there. Since very few people actually grind hard mode, there aren't enough brains to develop strategies or techniques that can help with surviving more rounds on hard. There can easily be other strategies that can dwarf mine out there. You also do not need to strictly follow this. This guide is only the strategy that I currently use, as mentioned before, it is not the best. You yourself, (yes, im talking about you) can be the creator of a new strategy that can get even farther in hard.

It is also necessary to make a couple adjustments to your base yourself to suit your own base's needs. I cannot guarantee the conditions of your base will be exactly identical to mine. For example, you could make a couple compartments for the zombies to go instead of landing in your crystal mines and destroying them. Some might have the conditions I discussed in the article earlier than expected. In this case, do what you must do. Don't just completely follow the article and die, and the blaming the article.

For some insurance (and for experimenting if you want) you can also create a separate save file to store in your device in case something goes terribly wrong. In that case you can always go back to that point in the run without losing all of your progress.

Another thing you can do to boost your hard mode progress is to find a really good map layout, and then get to round 2 with it, then save that file on your computer. That way you can always come back to it for a good layout to start with without having to search. ***You have to set it to round 2 because if you save it in round 1, when you load it back up it will shorten the time of day 1 by 2 times, and that is not worth it. The time for day 1 is twice the time for the subsequent days, and you load the save on day 1 it will assume that you already had the extra time and gives you the default 45 seconds instead of 1m30s.***

Recap of what I discussed in this article: (or basically a tl;dr)

Base location is really important

Stall zombies with walls

Don't forget to use your skill points and in the right places

Only use lightnings until late in the run (base level 17 or 18)

Don't put shields too early as they waste money

Chaining lightnings efficiently is key

Use border wall shielding supply chain technique

Cannons only when your base is very vulnerable in the late game

Thank you for taking your time, thank you for trying hard mode yourself, thank you for dedicating your time to reading this. This means a lot to me, and I just want to help the community. I hope I got you interested in playing hard mode yourself. Regardless, have a great rest of your day.

still things left to fill in! development still in progress

(shield spam no need anymore haha i just found out a counter argument for that)
*I wil*

*l left a sign here----wifun*

note: join the yorg.io discord if you haven't

when should i edit this again

maybe make this a full game guide someday

well grade 11 and 12 probably not gonna let me have enough time to do this so well rip skull emoji