Strandbreak Online

Controls

W A S D, or the arrow keys

Move. There is no fire button — weapons fire by themselves

Drag the left half of the screen

Move on a phone. The stick appears where your thumb lands and follows it past the edge of the ring, so you never run out of stick mid-dodge

Move the mouse, or the right stick on a pad

Turn. It points the character and its marker and nothing else — it does not choose targets, and your weapons go on firing at whatever is closest

Space, A on a pad, or the on-screen button

Your character's signature ability: Overdrive, Deadeye, Hack or Deploy

1, 2 and 3 — or click the card

Take one of the three upgrades at a milestone. Ordinary levels do not ask

R, while the cards are up

Reroll the hand. Three per run, and they do not come back

The small X in a card's corner

Banish that upgrade for the rest of the run. Two per run, and this is the one thing with no keyboard shortcut

A and D on the character screen, then Enter

Choose a character and drop in

R on the character screen

Roll a different universe. S types a seed in by hand, so one you liked can be played again

M

Mute and unmute; the setting is remembered

Tips

• Nothing pauses, including you. There is no pause button: a run is also running on the server and on up to three other machines, so looking away hands your character to the AI rather than stopping the world — and it plays on until it dies. The experience earned while you were gone is docked for it. Milestones are the only levels that ask, and the field does not stop while they are up. Every fifth level to twenty and every tenth after that: three cards, twenty seconds, and a horde still walking toward where you were standing when you levelled. If you run out of time the game chooses for you, and it chooses well — it is the same scorer that takes every ordinary level on your behalf.
• A second gun is the one to take first. Each character has three of their own to choose from and room to carry two, and one fires alongside your own weapon rather than replacing it — its own clock, its own colour, for the rest of the run. It starts on a single round and grows to three, and that is the ceiling: two guns, six extra bullets, and after that a milestone deepens what you have rather than handing you more. A percentage compounds quietly; a second stream of fire is something you can see from across the screen.
• Levelling is worth something before you pick anything: each level is about 2.4% more damage and 4% more health on its own, compounding. A shard you can reach is worth the detour even when nothing on offer excites you.
• Aim at the evolution from the first card. It needs the weapon at level 6 and its one named passive taken all the way to 5 — Combat Arm for Hellfire, Targeting Implant for Predator, Overclock for Black Ice, Servo Legs for Swarm Protocol. Spreading levels thinly across passives is what stops people ever seeing one, and an evolution changes what a weapon does rather than how big its numbers are: Hellfire turns the shotgun's cone into a wall you push, and Swarm Protocol stops aiming altogether and fires in every direction.
• Banish is the X in the corner of a card, and it clears that upgrade out of the hands already dealt as well as the ones to come. That matters more than it sounds: you level several times in a row in the first minute, so the cards you are about to be shown have already been decided.
• In co-op, standing near a squadmate is a straight damage bonus and it stacks with each one in range. It costs nothing but the ground you give up, so the question is never whether to group — it is which corner of the field is worth grouping in.
• Read the bar under each character's feet rather than the corner of the screen. There is no number anywhere: full health sits back and stays dim, amber means hurt, and red and pulsing is the only animated thing on a character in the whole game.

What changed

• 2026-09-14The boss now arrives at three minutes instead of thirteen, and again every six, so the set piece of the game is something a first run meets rather than something only a mastered character ever sees. It has no health bar: the fight is read off the boss itself, which changes shape at every phase and telegraphs everything it throws.
• 2026-09-14Playing a character now makes them permanently stronger, which until today it did not — the bonus was written, capped at four percent, and never applied to anything. A first run of any class lasts about five minutes; a well-played character reaches fifteen; one with everything unlocked can hold out for twenty to thirty. Past that is meant to be impossible rather than merely difficult.
• 2026-09-14Two characters could no longer lose. The Netrunner's infection spread to three neighbours on every death and never expired, which in a crowd of six hundred is a chain reaction rather than a skill — one cast eventually owned the field for the rest of the run. It now fades after four generations. The difficulty also compounds with your level instead of climbing in a straight line, which is the shape your own power has always had.
• 2026-09-14Solo means solo. A run started alone used to be given an AI squadmate, and because it counted as a squad member it brought its own share of the horde with it — so a solo run was never really one person's worth of game.
• 2026-09-13The second guns were far too much. One of them opened firing five rounds and grew to eight, and you could carry three at once — the screen turned into confetti and the run became one you could not lose. A second gun now starts on a single round and reaches three, you carry two at most, and each character has their own three to choose from.
• 2026-09-12Levels stop interrupting you. The game takes the ordinary ones itself and says what it took in one line; the choice moves to milestones — every fifth level to twenty, every tenth after — where it is three big cards instead of three small ones, and some of them hand you a second gun that fires alongside your own for the rest of the run.
• 2026-09-12The whole screen moves you on a phone. Over half of it used to be dead: a touch outside the left 52%, or in the top fifth, was dropped and the character simply did not go.
• 2026-09-12You can see twice as much of the field on a phone. The camera was showing as many world units as the screen had pixels, so a phone held sideways got half the warning a desktop did — in a game where seeing it coming is the whole skill. The floor is darker to match, so the smaller figures still read against it.
• 2026-09-12A pass over the phone. The character screen has a way back to the menu, which on a touchscreen it did not; the main menu's buttons went from 28 pixels tall to 48 on a phone held sideways; and the level-up cards now stack full size in portrait instead of shrinking to 45% and taking the reroll button down to 43 by 14 with them.
• 2026-09-12The control hint no longer says the mouse aims. It never did — your weapons fire at whatever is nearest and the pointer only turns the character, so a player told they were aiming spent their first run trying to.
• 2026-09-12Online co-op is live. Up to four in a run, and you can drop into one already in progress as long as it is inside its first five minutes — you arrive at the squad's level with a build rolled for you, and you score from the moment you walk in.
• 2026-09-12The squadmate the game gives a solo run now stands down when a person joins and gives them its place, instead of a squad of two people and a bot.
• 2026-09-12You can see how your squad is doing without looking away. The arrow that points at an ally off the edge of the screen now carries their health, so a character about to go down reads at a glance — the ally the game gives you and any character Guardian AI is driving included.
• 2026-09-12Starts roughly three times lighter. The art is half the download it was, and a run now fetches only the universe it is set in instead of all five.
• 2026-09-12The four characters are one game again. Measured across three seeds, the gap between the longest- and shortest-lived was 4.2x; it is 1.29x. The Ranger's rifle fires a tight pair, the Artificer's turret is no longer a second character, and Black Ice was touching nearly four times as many enemies a second as any other evolution.
• 2026-09-12A strong build used to stop being offered cards at all after about seventy upgrades — for half the length of a good run, with no message. Three small repeatable upgrades now sit behind everything else and appear only when nothing new can be taken.
• 2026-09-11Renamed to Strandbreak Online.
• 2026-09-10A co-op run no longer ends at fifteen minutes. The room ends a run when the squad is down, the same way a solo run always did.
• 2026-09-10Beating the boss now actually pays the bonus it promised, and a squadmate's health bar shows their real health instead of the numbers they had when they joined.