Stonewards Waves, Horn and Endless Mode Explained

How many waves are in a run?

The studio has not published a number. This is one of the most-asked questions about Stonewards, and it is asked in Russian, Japanese and Korean as often as in English — with no official answer in any of them. Anyone quoting a fixed wave count is either reporting their own run or making it up.

What is documented is the structure around the waves, and that turns out to be the more useful part.

The horn

The horn is the game’s clock. It sounds before a wave lands, and it is the deadline on every mining trip. The store page puts it plainly: “When the wave ends, the clock starts. Dive into procedural mines, gather valuable resources, and get back before the next horn sounds.”

Treat it as a hard budget, not a suggestion — the studio’s own copy notes that if you take too long “your friends will be defending the kingdom one dwarf short.”

The end-of-wave upgrade window

Between waves everyone picks an upgrade, and this window has been rewritten twice in Early Access because of how badly it broke in co-op:

Hotfix 0.1.7 added “a 60-second timer to multiplayer upgrade selections, with auto-select when time runs out.” Before this, one distracted player froze the entire run.
Hotfix 0.1.8 added a temporary multiplayer pause: after everyone has selected their end-of-wave upgrade, the game “stays paused until any player presses Continue.” The studio was explicit that this works alongside the 60-second auto-select “so one AFK player can’t block the run indefinitely”, and equally explicit that it is a temporary solution while it keeps improving multiplayer pause options.

There was also a straightforward bug in this window until 0.1.6, which fixed “player input becoming blocked during End-of-Wave or regular upgrade selections.”

Endless Mode and Infinite Mode

Both names appear in the official patch notes, and they are not the same thing.

Endless Mode is a mode with its own difficulty curve. Hotfix 0.1.6 “reworked Endless Mode difficulty scaling to use a non-linear progression” — meaning the ramp is no longer a straight line, and that any endurance advice written before August 18 is describing different maths.

Infinite Mode is something the host continues into after a run ends. Hotfix 0.1.3 fixed “an issue where players who had not yet unlocked Infinite Mode could become stuck on the end-of-run screen when the host continued into Infinite Mode” — so it is unlockable, it is entered from the end-of-run screen, and until August 12 it could trap teammates who did not have it.

The same patch cycle mentions Infinite Waves directly: Hotfix 0.1.4 fixed enemy health bars overflowing for clients during Infinite Waves.

Bosses

Bosses exist, and the King fights alongside you. The clearest evidence is a bug fix in Hotfix 0.1.7: “Fixed a softlock that could occur when the player died just before the King defeated the boss.” Read that sentence carefully — the King is an active combatant that can land the killing blow on a boss, not just an objective to protect.

The roadmap adds “a brand new map with new monsters and bosses” in Q4 2026 and again in Q2 2027, which confirms boss content is mapped to maps rather than to a separate progression track.

The maps

Three are named in the patch notes: Map 1, Map 2 and the Dungeon Map. There is also a Bastion battlefield (0.1.7 fixed incorrect blocking zones on it).

The Dungeon Map has taken the most repair work — collision reworked across it in 0.1.7 for invisible projectile blockers, oversized prop and rampart colliders and walls that did not block projectiles, plus another invisible collision fix in 0.1.8 and out-of-bounds protection added in 0.1.5. Recycling items in the Dungeon also gives the correct resources only since 0.1.7.

Map 2 has its own quirks: Hotfix 0.1.6 reduced “the intensity of the white terrain layer on Map 2 to make it easier on the eyes”, and 0.1.4 fixed props there dropping Map 1 Stone instead of the right resource. Map unlocks are shared across the party since 0.1.3.

The Skip option

“What is the Skip option for?” is an open thread on the Steam forum, and the studio has not answered it in a patch note. This site does not know either, and would rather say so than guess.

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