Difficulty Scaling

Official tier descriptions

Verbatim texts from the new-campaign screen (TEXTKEY_CreateCampaign_*). Combat and management difficulty are picked independently; the top tier is Devastation.

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Combat difficulty scales the monsters

Combat difficulty is applied to every monster as a hidden affecter (AFFECTER_MonsterDifficulty*). Hard is the baseline. Easy and Normal make monsters far weaker; Very Hard and Devastation make them tankier and hit harder. On Devastation a monster has x1.5 the health and x1.5 the attack power of the same monster on Hard, and on top of that attack speed +20%, movement speed +15%, critical chance +10, critical damage bonus +50 and dodge chance +15.

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Your units change too

Combat difficulty also changes your own units on Easy, Normal, Very Hard, Devastation. Hard is the empty baseline (no player affecter).

AFFECTER_PlayerDifficulty*

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Two more combat-difficulty levers pile on top of that flat scaling:

Environment effects

Every expedition rolls a set of environment effects from the region's pool. Higher combat difficulty rolls fewer helpful and more harmful ones. Harmful effects weaken your units (e.g. a stat −30%, reduced hit chance, nausea) or strengthen the monsters - so they directly cut into your damage and survivability. Counts per tier:

The effects for each region, and how the roll works, are on Dungeon Environment Effect.

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Respawn interval & Magic Saturation

Monsters respawn faster on higher combat difficulty (every 1200 min on Easy, every 900 min on Normal, every 600 min on Hard / Very Hard / Devastation), so floors refill quicker. When Magic Saturation is on, Infinite Abyss inhabitants gain a bonus from AFFECTER_MagicSaturation, capped at 100. It stacks on top of the flat tier scaling by adding PerModifier percents, then applying once. The parent row names the day bands; each stage is its own affecter:

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AFFECTER_MagicSaturationLevel1-4

Management difficulty the economy

Management difficulty never touches combat. It scales what you pay to craft, build and research (and how demanding your settlers are). The material and workload numbers listed everywhere else on this wiki are the Hard baseline (factor x1.0, the game's design default); the game multiplies them by the factor below and rounds, never dropping below 1.

An ingredient listed as 3 costs 1 on Easy, 2 on Normal, 3 on Hard / Very Hard / Devastation.

Crafting and building labour, output counts, sell prices and unlock gates stay fixed.

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Treatment expectation (mood) by unit level

The baseline mood a settler of each level expects from their treatment (housing/food standard). Higher management difficulty lowers the baseline: a level-5 settler starts at -12 on Devastation vs -5 on Easy.

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Dungeon-stay mood penalty

Mood penalty applied the longer a unit stays on an expedition, in four escalating stages.

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