Dungeon — added v271 · level 890 to enter

The House of Hours

A dungeon boss that scores nothing but the SPACING of your blows — hold the trigger and it pays zero, forever

A great leaning hourglass frame stands on the surface with no glass left in it — two stone discs held apart on four canted uprights, and a wide fan of spilled sand poured out across the ground, going nowhere. Whatever is down there stopped counting a long time ago. Below it is the fifteenth of what turned out to be a whole series of themed combat dungeons the game calls "axis" rooms — each one scores something completely different about how you fight, never simply how hard you hit.

The fifteenth axis

By the time this dungeon was added, the other fourteen already covered where you stand, when you strike, what you spend, what you can lose, how hard you hit, what you repeat, what you give up forever, which weapon (never how big), what damage you'd already taken, what you declared before anything happened, what you leave alive, what order you did it in, how much you left for someone else, and how predictable you are. The House of Hours' answer is: how much longer you took than you just took.

The boss, the Lengthener, keeps no clock or schedule of its own — it only remembers the gap between your last two blows. A blow is drawn, and worth anything, only if the pause before it was longer than the pause before that one, by at least a fixed margin. The number every blow has to beat is a number you yourself produced one blow earlier. Nothing about the room is knowable at the door the way an earlier dungeon's fixed schedule is — the target only exists after you have already struck three times.

How a sitting works

• The fight is broken into 6 sittings of 8 blows each. A sitting pays 26,000 gold multiplied by the fraction of its 8 blows that were drawn, banked the instant it fills — and what you've banked survives your death.
• Below a 50% drawn fraction, the whole sitting is void and pays exactly zero, no matter how much damage you dealt.
• Holding the fire button produces a perfectly flat interval between blows — the single most habitual behaviour in the game — and it is the one input that can never draw a blow. Measured: it scored zero out of eight, six sittings running, every time. A slow, steady, metronomic rhythm (one shot every half second, unchanging) also scored zero out of eight, six times over — steady is not the same as slowing down. Deliberately drawing each gap out longer than the last, instead, paid 282,000 across a full run.
• Clearing all 6 sittings triggers a closing settlement worth up to 165,000 gold (scaled by your overall paid fraction), plus Gold Bars if you paid enough of it.

The three drag stones

Three stones stand in a ring around the Lengthener. Interacting with one raises the DRAG — the minimum amount your gap has to grow by for a blow to count — in exchange for a fixed bonus added to that sitting's payout. None of the three make you hit harder by a single point; they only ask more of your patience for more money.

The pin: why a bigger weapon is actually a liability

While a sitting is still open, the Lengthener's health bar will not fall below a fixed floor (48,000) — this room only counts the spacing of your blows, never their size, so raw damage buys nothing while a sitting is in progress. But the floor is applied after the bar moves, which means a single blow big enough to carry the bar all the way from that floor to zero kills the boss outright — and voids every sitting that hadn't been taken yet. Overwhelming damage is the worst possible outcome in this dungeon, deliberately: the room is built to punish exactly the strategy every other dungeon in the game rewards.

Entry requirement

Requires total level 890 to enter. This was lowered from an original 2,500 at v362, as part of a broad pass that lowered level requirements across nearly every high-end destination in the game — planets included — after the operator's direct instruction: "lower requirements for all the planets, so there is always something achievable that the player wants to get." The House of Hours' own requirement was brought down in that same pass.

Version history

• v271 — added. Ships as the fifteenth dungeon and fifteenth "axis," with the full design described above: the Lengthener, the 6-sitting structure, the three drag stones, and the pin. The next dungeon, The Almshouse (v273), claimed a sixteenth axis in turn.
• v362 — level requirement lowered from 2,500 to 890, part of a game-wide reduction in high-level gates.
• v363 — boss health rebalanced from 129,004 down to 45,925, and its displayed nameplate number changed from a deterministic 3,100 to a deterministic 1,065 (the number shown to the player has never matched the boss's real hit points exactly — both are fixed display/balance numbers, not a bug).

Trivia

• The Lengthener deals a flat 95 damage per hit — explicitly "identical to the last thirteen. No damage creep," per the game's own source comments. Across fifteen dungeons' worth of bosses, the threat of being hit was deliberately kept constant so that each room's difficulty comes entirely from its own unique rule, not from a harder-hitting enemy.
• This is one of seventeen "axis dungeons" the game builds on Earth, each with its own unique combat rule instead of a bigger health bar — see the full roster and their shared balance history for the other sixteen.