Modes and Difficulty

The four ways to play: Campaign, Open Campaign, Survival, and Sandbox, plus difficulty presets, hardcore death rules, co-op, and the post-2.0 endgame fork.

The Riftbreaker is the same core game across several modes, but the mode you pick changes the shape of a run completely: whether there is a story to follow, whether you start anywhere or at a fixed point, whether the goal is to finish or just to survive, and how much the game fights back. On top of the modes sit the difficulty presets and a few rules, hardcore death, co-op, the endgame fork, that change the stakes more than the mode label alone suggests. Choosing well at the start saves you from a run that is either too soft to be interesting or too brutal to finish.

The four modes

Mode	What it is
Campaign	The main story. Build the headquarters, research tech, explore biomes, gather rare resources, and construct the rift home. Missions and story beats structure progression.
Open Campaign	Added in World Expansion IV (March 2026). Skip the scripted story and choose any biome as your start, with full control over how and where you begin. A freeform alternative to the linear campaign.
Survival	A challenge mode. Survive escalating waves on a chosen biome for a set time, with configurable difficulty and its own rebalanced research tree.
Sandbox	Full control over the game, including resources, enemy spawns, and weather. The freeform creative and testing mode.

Every mode and mission is balanced for both single-player and co-op.

Co-op

Co-op was added on August 25, 2025 in the 2.0 update and supports up to 4 players. As of this writing it is PC only. Consoles did receive the 2.0 update, but co-op is listed as PC-only, so a console player gets the 2.0 changes without the co-op feature. Whether console co-op shipped later than launch was not confirmed in the research, so verify the current console status before relying on it.

Difficulty and the death rules

Difficulty presets referenced in the research are Easy, Normal, Hard, and Brutal, and custom difficulty plus modding tools let players tune nearly everything. A “Merciless” preset is referenced by some guides but was not clearly confirmed in the sources, so treat it as unverified rather than an official preset.

Hardcore mode changes the whole calculus of death. Normally, as long as you have a portal, you respawn there on death and drop a weapon at the death location. Hardcore removes that safety net: death ends the run.

Survival mode has its own knobs on top of the presets. Enemy strength increases the closer you are to the map edge, and a configurable attacks-per-wave multiplier, cited in a range of 1 to 5, controls how many enemy groups arrive per wave. The Cryo Fields biome on Brutal is called out as unforgiving and is one of the current difficulty frontiers.

How waves respond to you

One rule cuts across every mode and matters more than the difficulty label. Wave difficulty scales with your tech research level and how much of the map your base covers, so a large, high-tech base draws bigger, nastier waves, including Omega bosses, than a compact one. This means two players on the same preset can face very different pressure depending on how they have built. Picking a mode and a difficulty sets the floor; how you expand sets the ceiling.

The endgame fork

The Campaign “ends” when you build the rift and can return to Earth, but the 2.0 update added a meaningful fork at that point. Returning to Earth completes the story. Choosing not to return unlocks the Megastructure Research Tree and Megastructure buildings, the extended endgame added in 2.0. Megastructures are massive, upkeep-heavy projects that strain your economy and logistics to their limits and become the new endgame centerpiece, and they are Campaign-only. For many players, Survival is the other endgame: a score and challenge mode where you survive escalating waves as long as possible on a chosen biome with whatever difficulty you set.