Hull Rupture ships with six game modes and four modifiers. Two modes were present in the June 2026 demo — Classic and Trade — and a combat-focused mode was confirmed to be in development, while a Cursed Mode was discussed in the devlogs with the promise that every choice carries consequences.
The baseline mode, and the one the demo's repeatable standard mode was built around: survive twenty waves and beat the final boss. It is the cleanest way to learn the module network and the kill-zone geometry, because nothing is layered on top of the core loop.
Trade mode was added during the June 2026 Next Fest demo, and it is the mode that turns the economy into a puzzle rather than a checklist. Because the alien assault clock keeps recalculating resources, momentum and mission length regardless of mode, a mode built around trading has to solve for the same variables through a different lever. Expect to make more deliberate route choices in Trade and to carry less slack into each encounter.
Cursed mode was previewed in the devlogs with the hook that every choice has consequences — a decision you make on the route map is not free, and the run remembers. In practice this is the mode where the roguelite structure stops being a map of optional branches and starts being a chain of commitments. It is the mode to attempt once the Classic loop is automatic.
Four modifiers ship in the full game, and the demo's modifier pool mostly affected resource management and production, with the full game adding combat-focused ones — particularly turret buffs. The best-documented is Spikes, which grants +1% defensive unit damage per human assigned to a ship job, reaching roughly 400% at 400 workers. Separately from modifiers, the game has artifacts, which behave like special modifiers and are the variable that makes late-run builds diverge from each other.
Mode, modifier and ship are not independent difficulty sliders — they change the shape of the problem. A mode that pressures your economy makes a hull with forgiving damage tolerance more valuable, a modifier that rewards turret damage makes chokepoint geometry more valuable, and an artifact that improves production makes a Spikes-style crew-heavy build spike harder. The useful mental model is that the modifiers change what your layout should optimise for, and the hull determines what layout you are even able to build.