How to play EMBERDUST

You are one small thing standing in a burning arena. The Blight keeps coming. You keep moving.

EMBERDUST is a top-down survival arena game that runs in a browser tab. There is nothing to install and no account to make — you open the page, pick a name for the leaderboard, and play. This page covers everything the game does not spell out on screen.

The loop

Enemies spawn in waves and walk toward you. Your weapons fire on their own; your only job is where you stand. Killing things drops teal experience crystals and, now and then, a purple bomb shard: enough crystals levels you up and offers you a choice of upgrades, and enough shards fills the bomb bar. Weapons and passives reset at the start of every run, so each round is built from whatever it hands you.

The Blight gets denser the longer you last. Surviving ten minutes in a single run lifts the cap on every upgrade by one — a permanent improvement, not a per-run one.

The tutorial: a scripted first run

A device that has never played is walked through a scripted, guided walkthrough instead of being dropped into an arena — a real round in the same engine, but with every event placed on purpose. It is the same every single time you play it, so nothing about it depends on luck.

It goes like this, and each step waits for you to actually do the thing before it moves on:

1. A level-up card, with three known choices. Pick one — that is the whole upgrade system, shown rather than described.
2. A ring on the floor to walk to. That is movement, and it is the only movement the game has.
3. Blight spawn around you and die on their own, with the reach of your weapon drawn on the floor, so "your weapons fire by themselves" is something you watch happen.
4. Two kinds of pickup, both ringed in the colour of the bar they feed and both counted until you have taken every one: teal crystals fill the experience bar, and purple shards charge the bomb — with both bars outlined and labelled while you walk over them. The shard is the half of the drop table people miss, so it is not left to be discovered.
5. Another card, because that is what filling the bar buys.
6. Space to dash, then E to set off a bomb at a full charge, with the purple bar highlighted while you do it.
7. A tour of the screen itself: the health bar, the level and experience bar, the bomb bar, the embershard slots, the clock, the counters and the weapon row, each named with a line pointing at it, plus the full list of keys.
8. A boss — brought to you immediately rather than after three minutes, with its health bar labelled, and then a real fight, because the last thing a tutorial should do is describe one.

Ground rules, all enforced by the game rather than promised: the arena pauses while the tutorial is showing you something, so you cannot be attacked while reading; the tutorial cannot kill you (your health floors at 1); and the round pays nothing and changes nothing — no Embers, no stats, no unlocks, no leaderboard entry, no challenge progress. It is a practice round, not a run.

EXIT in the bottom-right corner leaves at any point, and T does the same from the keyboard. Afterwards it is always available again: the TUTORIAL button on the title screen, Y, or the Replay Tutorial row in settings. Resetting your progress also brings it back, because a wipe is meant to feel like arriving for the first time.

Controls

On a phone or tablet the game draws its own touch controls: a thumb stick on the left, and DASH, BOMB, ULT and pause buttons on the right. It is the same game, not a mobile cut-down.

The first five minutes

A brand new device starts in the tutorial, not in a live arena — the scripted walkthrough described above. Once it is finished the game is exactly as this page describes: you start a run, you move, your weapons do the rest. Nothing is ever withheld for later and no other screen needs a manual; the tutorial is the manual.

Daily challenges

Three goals change every day and are printed on the title screen, the pause screen and the end-of-run screen. They are always the same three kinds of thing — survive for a while, reach a level, defeat a number of enemies — and each day gives you one easy, one medium and one hard version. Nothing needs an hour: the hardest tier is under the first boss clock.

Each goal pays Embers the moment you reach it. Clear all three in one day and you get a bonus and a seal; three seals unlock a skin that cannot be bought at any price. Challenges only count in a solo survival run — a 1v1 or 2v2 duel is its own game and does not advance them, and neither does a run you died in.

Level-ups

Every level offers a choice between upgrades — new weapons, or passives that change how the ones you have behave. You only get to see three at a time, and the pool is not fixed: some options only appear once you have the thing they build on. Choosing is the whole strategy, because you cannot take everything.

Embers, the UPGRADES shop and the EMBERSHOP

Embers are the currency you bank from a run. They survive death, and they survive closing the tab, because they are saved in your browser rather than on a server.

• UPGRADES spends Embers on permanent advantages — more health, more damage, starting speed.
• EMBERSHOP spends Embers on how you look. Every skin is cosmetic: it changes the pixels of your character and nothing else. No skin has a stat, a speed bonus, a smaller hitbox or an ability. The game says so on the shop screen and the build enforces it.

Some EMBERSHOP skins cannot be bought at any price. Those are trophies: beat a boss for the first time and its skin is yours.

The shop has three shelves. SKINS is the cosmetics above. TRAILS is a wake drawn behind you — a look, with no effect on how you play. There are seven of them, from CINDER (ghosts of your own body, in embers) through COMET (a tapering ribbon with a hot white core), RIMEWAKE, VOLTWAKE, NULLTRAIL and VORTEX up to STARFALL (five-pointed stars trailing behind you). Every wake is around fifty pixels long — measured in distance travelled rather than in frames, so it is the same tail at any frame rate. The plainer the drawing, the cheaper the trail; that is the rule the whole shop follows. A trail is only ever drawn — the build refuses to let one reach a damage, speed, health or crit calculation, so a 650-Ember wake is exactly as cosmetic as no wake at all. SUPPLIES spends Embers on a head start for one run only: extra level-up cards at the start, a charged bomb, or more health. A supply you buy is held until your next solo run uses it, so it is never wasted by joining a friend's game — nor by a tutorial round, which never spends one.

The five bosses

Bosses arrive at set points in a run and announce themselves before they hit. Each one behaves differently — one charges, one howls and speeds up, one circles and shrieks, one is a duck and should not be underestimated, and one is a banana that throws enormous flaming boomerangs and catches them again — until you hurt it enough.

A trophy is awarded the first time you beat that boss, once per browser. Beating it again does not stack anything — it is already yours.

Co-op

EMBERDUST plays with friends, and the plumbing is deliberately simple:

• HOST ONLINE GAME gives you a four-character room code. Anyone with the code can join from their own tab, anywhere.
• JOIN ONLINE GAME takes that code.
• HOST LOCAL GAME and FIND LOCAL GAME do the same thing between two tabs on the same machine, or two devices on the same network — no code needed.

Everything on the field is simulated by the host and sent to the other players, so a join does not change how the game feels. If a connection drops mid-round the game reconnects and rejoins by itself — you may see the world hold still for a moment, but the round is not lost, and it picks up again where it left off. Players can drop in and out mid-run; a partner who joins late is not punished and one who leaves does not end the round. There is also a head-to-head mode — two attacks and two upgrades each — and a way to invite a specific player who is online and let them accept or decline.

The leaderboard

Your best survival time is submitted under the name you chose, and the board shows everyone's. It is one shared board for the whole game, visible from any browser.

Sharing a run

When a run ends, SHARE on the death screen opens a card: your time across the top in the largest type on it, then your level, kills, bosses and the Embers you banked, your personal best, your name if you have chosen one, and the address of the game in full — https://emberdust.online — so it can be typed or pasted rather than guessed at. It is a picture — 1200 by 630, the size the social networks unfurl — so it can go into a group chat without anyone having to be told what the game is. SHARE CARD opens your device's own share sheet; if there is no share sheet, the picture is saved to your downloads and the link is copied to your clipboard instead, and COPY LINK does the second half of that on demand.

Nothing is uploaded to make the card, and there is no account involved: every number on it is already in the browser — the run you just finished, your best time, and the name you typed for the leaderboard if you typed one. A player who never chose a name gets the card anyway, signed A WANDERER. There is nothing on the card that was not already on your screen.

Saving and starting over

Your Embers, upgrades, best time, name and skins are stored in your browser. That means two things worth knowing up front: clearing site data wipes your progress, and progress does not follow you to another browser or another device. There is no account to log into, so there is nothing to recover it from.

The game includes a RESET PROGRESS option that clears all of it, including your row on the leaderboard, deliberately and immediately. A reset leaves you exactly as if you had never played: the first-run tips come back, the daily challenges start from zero, and the shop forgets what you owned.

One limit is worth stating plainly, because it is the difference between a reset that works and one that looks broken: a leaderboard row can only be deleted by the browser that wrote it. If a row under your name was written from another device, or from a browser that has since lost the anonymous identity it played under, the reset cannot reach it. When that happens the game tells you so on screen instead of reporting a clean erase, so a name still on the board after a reset is something you were told about, not something that was hidden from you.

What's new

When the game changes, players who were already here see a short WHAT'S NEW panel listing what was added, once. It does not appear every time you open the game — only after something has actually shipped since your last visit — and it does not appear at all to someone playing for the first time, for whom a list of changes is a list of changes to a history they were not part of.

Performance

The game draws a 480×270 pixel canvas scaled up to fill your window with nearest-neighbour filtering, so it looks like the screen it was built for and runs at a steady frame rate on almost anything, including old laptops and phones. If it feels heavy, make the window smaller — the work scales with the canvas, not the monitor.