Between encounters you move across a galaxy route map, and the node you choose determines the encounter you get. This is the roguelite layer, and it is where Hull Rupture stops being a tower defence with a build phase and becomes a run.
Every encounter recalculates three things: your resources, your momentum, and your estimated mission length. Those three numbers are the entire economy of the game. Resources determine what you can build next, momentum determines how fast the alien assault clock arrives, and mission length determines how many waves you will actually face. A route that raises your resources but shortens your mission is not automatically the profitable route.
The map explicitly offers the trade-off: some routes are safe and low-yield, others are lucrative and dangerous. On dangerous routes, the encounters can be resolved through what the developers call "decisive crew cuts" — spending people to solve a situation outright. That is a legitimate tactic and it is often the correct one, but it is spending a resource you will want later, and on a route where a second bad encounter follows, it can cascade.
Alongside fixed encounters the route map inserts random events, some of which are opportunities rather than threats. In Cursed Mode the events become decisions with consequences, so the difference between an event you can decline and one you cannot is the difference between the two modes.
Because the numbers recompute at every node, run planning is a rolling forecast rather than a plan. The practical approach is to keep three things in mind at all times: how many waves away the next assault is, how much of the crew is currently working, and whether your module network still has an unbroken chain from resource to power. A run that loses its production chain cannot be recovered by adding defence, because defence without power does not fire for long.