KAHIBARO
Table of Contents
Solo Challenges
Solo challenges are personal goals you set for yourself when playing without a team. They are useful for practicing fundamentals because they expose every weakness in your routing, awareness, and stamina habits. A good approach is to think of solo challenges as training drills, not just as bragging rights.
Start with simple objectives that have a clear success condition, such as reaching a specific floor, extracting a minimum amount of ichor, or completing a run without collapsing on any floor. Define your rule set before you queue in. For example, you might allow yourself only one healing item per floor or restrict yourself to certain routes like always clearing the left side machines first.
The key to successful solo challenges is consistency. Use the same toon and roughly similar trinkets for several attempts so you can actually measure improvement. After each failed attempt, identify exactly why the run ended. Was it greedy extraction, poor stamina management, or ignoring a safe escape route? Turn that reason into a micro challenge, such as “no greedy last‑second machines” or “always reset stamina before crossing a dangerous hallway.”
Solo challenges also help you learn how floors feel over time. Pay attention to typical machine clusters and common patrol paths. Over many repetitions, you can build your own mental “playbook” for where to go first, when to disengage, and how aggressive you can be on each floor.
High-Floor Challenges
High‑floor challenges focus on how deep you can push a run before the difficulty forces you out. These challenges are about long‑term resource management, mental stamina, and risk control. They usually start becoming meaningful around floor 10, then escalate heavily as you aim for floor 20 or beyond.
Before you attempt any high‑floor challenge, you should already be comfortable surviving early floors without burning through too many items or taking frequent damage. Set a concrete target, for example “reach floor 15 without a collapse” or “hit floor 20 with at least one healing item left.” This gives you a clear balance point between speed and safety.
The core idea in high‑floor challenges is to preserve your safety buffer. This means leaving some machines untouched if finishing them would expose you to extra danger, skipping questionable side routes, and avoiding greedy plays near exits. Treat every unnecessary chase as a failure in planning, not as something that just happens.
As you push higher, you will notice that small mistakes compound. A sloppy chase that costs one heart early might end the run five floors later. Use that pressure to refine your decision making. Ask yourself on every floor whether you are playing as if you need to survive ten floors from now, not just the one you are on.
It is helpful to log your best floors and what went right. Maybe you avoided certain layouts, delayed risky machines until patrols moved, or prioritized especially safe extraction clusters. Turn those observations into a personal rule set for future high‑floor attempts.
No-Damage Runs
No‑damage runs are precision challenges where the goal is to complete a set of floors without losing any hearts. You can define the challenge for a single floor, a range of floors, or an entire run. These are strict tests of awareness and discipline. One careless mistake completely invalidates the attempt.
Before attempting full‑run no‑damage challenges, practice floor‑specific ones. For instance, “no damage on floors 1 to 5” or “no damage on any elevator exit segment.” This builds habits that you can later extend into a complete run. The main skill you are training is risk filtration, the ability to instantly recognize and decline dangerous opportunities, such as finishing a near‑completed machine with a Twisted patrolling too close.
You should also define how you handle near misses. If a Twisted almost catches you or corners you, your priority is to maintain the no‑damage condition, even if it means abandoning machines with high progress. A completed floor is meaningless if you take a hit along the way.
Pathing is crucial. Choose routes that minimize line‑of‑sight exposure and high‑risk intersections. Learn safe “reset” areas on each map where you can break line of sight and re‑evaluate. For this challenge, movement and routing are more important than extraction speed.
Remember that your mental focus is a resource. Doing many no‑damage attempts in a row can make you impatient, which increases the chance of a silly mistake. Keep sessions short and stop when you notice yourself rushing. Treat each attempt like a careful puzzle, not a race.
In no‑damage runs, any loss of a heart instantly fails the challenge, regardless of how close you are to completion. Always prioritize avoiding damage over finishing objectives.
No-Trinket Runs
No‑trinket runs remove one of the game’s biggest power sources. Without trinkets, you lose bonuses to extraction, stamina, movement, or survival. This forces you to rely entirely on baseline toon stats and your own decision making. It is an excellent way to expose bad habits that powerful trinkets normally hide.
Define your no‑trinket challenge clearly. You might remove all trinkets from the start and keep your usual items, or combine it with other conditions like “no trinkets and limited healing.” Starting with a toon that has strong inherent stats or useful abilities is typically the safest way to learn how these runs feel.
Without trinkets, your mistakes are more expensive. You will notice that pushing machines with low stamina or staying in unsafe rooms for too long is punished more quickly. Use that feedback to tighten your timings. Get used to backing off machines early, repositioning more often, and spending more time reading patrols rather than brute forcing risky checks.
Because your baseline speed and safety are lower, routing becomes more important than ever. Choose safer machine clusters over scattered machines deep in dangerous zones. On some floors, it is better to accept slower extraction if the path to those machines has fewer choke points.
You can also use no‑trinket challenges as benchmarks. Once you can regularly reach a certain floor with no trinkets, adding them back in will feel like a significant upgrade, and you will be better at using their power instead of leaning on it.
In no‑trinket runs, assume your toon is weaker than usual. Adjust by playing more cautiously, avoiding unnecessary chases, and prioritizing safe routes over greedy machines.
Speed Runs
Speed runs are all about completing floors or entire runs in the shortest time possible. They flip your usual priorities. Instead of maximum safety, you choose controlled risk to minimize wasted seconds. These challenges are perfect for advanced players who are already confident in basic survival.
Define the scope of your speed run. You might time a single floor, the first ten floors, or a full climb until you escape or fail. Decide what counts as a valid run. For example, you may allow damage, but not collapses, or you might accept any outcome as long as the time is fast.
Timing usually starts as soon as you gain control on the first floor and stops at a clear endpoint such as hitting the elevator or finishing the last required objective. Use a simple external timer if the game does not provide one that matches your challenge rules.
The main skill in speed runs is routing under pressure. You need to quickly identify the densest machine clusters and move there immediately, avoiding unnecessary detours. Cutting corners safely is a constant decision. You will occasionally push machines aggressively near patrolling Twisteds, but you must learn to read when you can finish a cycle and when to bail out early.
Speed runs are also where movement fundamentals matter most. Clean pathing, tight turns, good use of stamina, and minimal backtracking can save more time than taking reckless risks. If you discover a layout that works exceptionally well for fast clears, try to reproduce the same decisions whenever similar floor shapes appear again.
Finally, accept that many attempts will die early to bad luck or tiny mistakes. The nature of speed challenges is high variance. Do not chase perfection on every run. Instead, aim for incremental improvements in your average times and then go for record runs once your routing feels polished.
In speed runs, never trade your entire run for a few seconds. A safe but slightly slower route that finishes is better than an ultra‑risky path that fails most of the time.
Toon-Specific Challenges
Toon‑specific challenges restrict you to a single toon or a particular subset of their abilities. These challenges help you fully understand what makes each toon unique, along with their strengths and weaknesses. They are valuable both for mastery and for discovering unexpected playstyles.
Start with simple conditions, such as “reach floor X using only this toon” or “complete a run while leaning heavily on this toon’s signature strength, like extraction or distraction.” For advanced variations, you can add extra rules such as limiting items or avoiding certain maps if they trivialize that toon’s weaknesses.
Pay attention to how your chosen toon naturally wants to play. Some are better at extraction, others at kiting or survival. Your challenge should lean into this identity. If a toon is built for distraction, consider goals like “complete multiple floors while constantly holding aggro away from machines” if you are playing with others, or “survive long chases without collapse” in solo attempts.
You can also invert the toon’s intended role to increase difficulty. For example, using a distraction‑oriented toon as your main extractor forces you to carefully compensate for their weaker extraction or stamina profile. This can reveal creative tricks, like alternative routes and timing patterns that you might ignore when using meta‑friendly builds.
Track your lessons from each toon‑specific challenge. Once completed, you will have a clear sense of when that toon feels strongest, what floors or layouts are most dangerous for them, and how to adjust your standard strategy to make them shine.
Team Challenges
Team challenges focus on coordinated goals that require multiple players to cooperate under special rules. They are excellent for groups that already understand basic roles like extractor, distractor, and support, and want a new layer of depth and fun.
Before you start, gather your group and agree on the exact challenge rules. Examples include “no one can use healing items,” “only one player is allowed to extract on each floor,” or “everyone must reach a particular floor without collapsing.” The stricter the rules, the more important communication and planning become.
During the run, treat your constraints as if they were game mechanics. If your challenge limits who can interact with machines, you will need careful positioning so the correct player is near the machines while others focus on scouting or distraction. If the challenge limits items, work out in advance who will pick up which resources and when to use them.
Team challenges are also a great way to practice role discipline. For instance, you might run a “pure role” challenge where each player locks into a single role and cannot stray from it. An extractor stays mostly on machines, a distractor handles most aggro, a support manages revives and safety, and a scout moves ahead to reveal layouts. This can expose weak spots in your usual team habits, such as poor callouts or slow reactions when someone is in danger.
After each attempt, talk briefly about what worked and what failed. Team challenges are as much about group learning as they are about completion. Use them to strengthen trust, refine communication patterns, and build shared strategies that will carry over into your normal runs.