Peaceful mode freezes the Creep instead of deleting it

Dawnsweeper is free on phones, with one purchase: Peaceful mode, $1.99, once. It has no ads. We looked at ads seriously, specifically billboards that villages would build in the world and that we would sell directly, and checked both stores’ rules for them. Then we dropped the idea as “a lot of work for minimal benefit”. What was left was the simplest model we could think of: the whole game for free, plus one thing some players will want and others never will.

Peaceful is that thing. It’s a world with no Creep.

Why switching freezes

You can switch any world into Peaceful and back out, at any time, from the pause menu. The question was what happens to the Creep that’s already there when you switch in. There were two honest answers: delete it, or freeze it.

We freeze it. Deleting the Creep would be a free clear: switch on, every edge is safe, switch off with a clean board. It would also wipe out whatever you were in the middle of. You might be halfway through a Nest ring, or holding back old Creep next to a village. Freezing keeps your world as it is and stops its clock.

While Peaceful is on, nothing about the Creep moves with time. There are no Tide beats, no festering, no Nest pulses, and no ageing. The Creep’s levels stay where they were, and a Surge or Dawn under way stands still too. The Creep is drawn frosted, its levels still distinct, with no amber shimmer before a Tide that isn’t coming, and the Tide chip reads “Peaceful”. The Creep’s ambient sound and the tense music go quiet.

Frozen Creep still clears exactly like live Creep: reveal it. A Nest still dies when you clear its ring, so the screenshot above, a small Nest at 77 of 80 with Peaceful on, is a Nest you can finish in peace.

What the settlers notice

The village simulation keeps running: people, the economy, the calendar, trade, towns, building and digging all go on as usual. What changes is danger. No new monsters come out of the Creep, and lairs in old Creep go quiet. A village’s dread falls at its usual rate, and its people stop keeping away from a lair’s hunting ground. Monsters already out finish their fights, and any that go 20 seconds without striking a blow go back into the Creep.

Switching back, exactly

When you switch Peaceful off, every Creep timer resumes from where it stopped. Nothing catches up on the time you spent in Peaceful, and nothing jumps forward.

We checked this by logging the Tide’s countdown across a switch in a test world. A little over forty minutes in, with the next Tide due in 20.1 seconds, Peaceful went on. Ten game minutes later the Tide was still due in 20.1 seconds, with the count of Tide beats unchanged at 8. Peaceful went off, and the countdown read 20.1 seconds. The ninth Tide came twenty seconds after that.

The same goes for ages. A Creep cell that was 14 minutes old when you froze it is 14 minutes old when you unfreeze it, and becomes level 3 one minute later. Every Nest’s pulse comes when it was due. The switch is saved with the world like any other move you make, so closing the app in the middle of it changes nothing.

The odd corners

A mine hit still bursts in Peaceful. The 9 by 9 around it re-covers with frozen level-1 Creep, and you lose your streak, the same as always. It never wakes a Nest. So a Peaceful world is Creep-free only until you hit a mine.

A new world started in Peaceful never has Creep at all, because the Tide only wakes once you hold ground, and Peaceful keeps it asleep. It’s a plain endless Minesweeper with villages growing on it.

Your streak counts in Peaceful, and there’s one personal best for all your worlds, whichever way you played them.

If you buy Peaceful and later get a new phone, Restore purchases in Settings brings it back. If you stop owning it, a world that’s already Peaceful keeps playing that way, but its switch can only turn Peaceful off.