We slowed the Creep to a third, but kept it ageing at full speed
We put version 1.0.0 of Dawnsweeper on an Android phone and played it on Medium, the default difficulty. The verdict fit in one line:
“the creep is way too fast. drop it to 1/3rd the speed.”
That’s an easy instruction to follow badly. “The Creep” in Dawnsweeper is several clocks, and they don’t all mean the same thing.
Which clocks are the Creep’s speed
The Creep moves in three ways. The Tide takes one layer of ground from every open edge, on a beat. Festering is old Creep waking a new Nest. Nest pulses are a live Nest pushing Creep out from its core. Those three are how fast the Creep spreads, and those are what we slowed. One number multiplies all of them by three:
| Easy | Medium | Hard | |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Tide beat every | 90 s → 270 s | 60 s → 180 s | 40 s → 120 s |
| At most one festering Nest per | 15 → 45 min | 10 → 30 min | 7 → 21 min |
| A Nest pulse every | 60 s → 180 s at every difficulty |
Easy and Hard kept their ratios to Medium, so Hard is still half again as fast as Medium and Easy still half again as slow.
Some timers looked like speed and weren’t. The amber shimmer that warns of the next Tide still comes two seconds before it, because it’s a warning, not a pace. A Nest still withdraws after an hour without you nearby, because that measures your absence. A world saved under the old timing loaded fine: the Tide that was already due went off when it was due, and every beat after it came at the new period.
The clock we didn’t slow
The fourth clock is age. Every Creep cell ages, and its age is its level: level 1 when it lands, level 2 at 5 minutes, 3 at 15, 4 at 40, and level 5 at two hours. Level is how the Creep looks, from a thin purple film to something much darker, and how strong its monsters are. Clearing it is the same at every level.
The obvious reading of “a third of the speed” is to triple the ages too. We ran it both ways before deciding: 4 hours of play per world with a scripted player who sweeps diligently, on 20 fresh seeds of one set and 20 of another, then smaller sets for normal and lazy play.
| Spread ×3 slower, ages unchanged | Spread ×3 slower, ages ×3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Settlers killed by monsters per world, diligent, 20 seeds | 1.7 (0.8 at level 4, 0.9 at level 5) | 0.1 (none at levels 4 or 5) |
| Per world, normal play, 10 seeds | 0.8 | 0.1 |
| Per world, lazy play, 10 seeds | 0.2, with 0.9 villages | 0.1, with 1.6 villages |
With ages tripled, level-4 Creep needs two hours of neglect and level 5 needs six. In a normal session nothing would ever get old enough to matter. A lazy player would lose nothing. And the Creep’s five looks, which were a deliberate part of the design, would barely be seen.
We kept the ages. The danger stays where the design puts it: level 4 means a stretch of Creep you’ve left alone for 40 minutes, and a village next to it is in real trouble. What the slower spread changes is how often that happens. Less Creep reaches a village at all, so old Creep beside a village is rarer by itself.
The worst cases came down too. On the same 40 fresh seeds, 4 hours each with a diligent player, rampages by level-5 monsters (a run of deaths in one village, each within ten minutes of the last) went from 8 to 3. The median deaths in one went from 9 to 6, and the worst from 26 to 6. Across all 40 worlds, deaths to level-5 monsters fell from 85 to 13.
What a slower Creep did to the world
The surprise was how much bigger the worlds got. With the Creep slower, a diligent player held far more ground, and settlers moved onto all of it. In 4-hour diligent runs, worlds went from 8 or 9 villages and 200 to 250 people to 15 to 19 villages and 420 to 530 people.
That felt like a straight win. The board was calmer, the villages more numerous, and the danger more clearly the player’s doing. It took a tester’s 24-hour world, a week later, to show where that growth ended up: 47 villages and 1,322 people, far too many to care about. That’s a different post.
What it’s like now
On Medium the Tide comes every three minutes. The chip at the top of the screen counts it down, and the amber shimmer runs along your open edges two seconds before it. Three minutes is long enough to finish a deduction, flag an edge, or run to the far side of your ground and seal a gap before it goes. Creep you leave alone still darkens on the old schedule, and a level-5 patch still means two hours of neglect.
If you want the Creep to stop altogether, that’s what Peaceful mode is for.