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Chronoromancer

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Tower Defense

Live wiki revision 2046 · October 3, 2026View or improve the source →
Player wiki noticeThis community-maintained page may contain gameplay, story, and mature-content spoilers.

Overview

Tower Defense (TD) combines a deployed Army, purchased turrets, defensive barriers, and the player's own ranged weapon. Protect the building on the left while enemies approach from the right. Clear every wave before Lives reach zero.
The battle runs in Godot. On Windows it opens its own battle window; the main game waits for you to return. Supported Android builds use the embedded TD runtime. The battle follows the main game's selected language.
This guide covers the current playable system, checked against the game on 4 October 2026. Recruitment and battle access requirements are listed without revealing story outcomes.
The current Godot Fortress battlefield. Illustrative Wave-1 composition: Ghost, Cid, one Steamshot and three Walls, using the normal starting budget with 20 Leadership; enemies positioned for a clear view.

Getting Started

  1. Finish Story Beat 31 to open Hideout defense and the Operations Center route through Cid's Underground Clinic.
  2. Enter Barracks → Review TD Roster to see recruits, equipment, Hero EXP, and training.
  3. Use the fortress workshops for permanent improvements. Steamshot is already purchased; the other seven turret designs need an initial purchase.
  4. Launch a battle, place a small defensive line, and leave enough resources to respond to later enemies.
  5. Start the wave with the bottom-left wave button. Use Pause while adjusting positions, and return to normal speed when a new threat appears.
  6. Between attempts, spend earned Hero EXP on training and shared Army EXP on workshop research. Obtain upgrade materials through Reclamation Bay.
The main-game defense actions and fortress room travel cost 0 minutes. Orchid's separate queue-processing action costs 60 minutes.

Battles and Access

Battle action Where Requirement Campaign waves
Defend the Hideout Underground Resistance Hideout Story Beat 31 completed 10
Defend the Fortress Operations Center, entered through Cid's Underground Clinic Operations Center unlocked after Story Beat 31 20
Defend the Syndicate Gates Syndicate Gates Story Beat 85 and Our War both completed 25
An actual campaign clear unlocks Infinite mode for that particular map. Future launches of the cleared map use Infinite mode. Clearing a different map does not unlock it here.
The Notebook's Tower Defense Story Requirements setting controls whether the story demands the Hideout clear before Beat 32 and Fortress clear before Beat 76. It defaults on for Windows/Linux and off for Android/macOS. Turning it off bypasses those story gates; it does not award victory, EXP, completed waves, or Infinite mode. The current desktop battle launcher supports Windows; the Linux setting alone does not make a Linux TD build available.
Full wave rosters and enemy rewards: Waves and Enemies.

Controls and Interface

Action Control
Deploy Select a barrier, turret, or hero in the left column; click or tap a valid battlefield position
Cancel placement or moving Right-click, Escape, or the on-screen cancel control
Inspect a deployed unit Click or tap it to show its current Health and stats
Move a deployed unit Select it, press its green M button, then choose the new position
Start the next wave Bottom-left wave button when no wave is running
Pause or resume Play/Pause control
Battle speed Speed control, or keyboard 1 / 2 / 3 for ×1 / ×2 / ×3
Scroll the battlefield A / D, Left/Right arrows, drag the battlefield, or move the pointer near its sides
Player gun Click/tap the battlefield during an active, unpaused wave with no placement or move pending
Change gun position R, cycling three positions around the defended building
Preview selected hero's animation Select a deployed hero and press S; this previews the animation
Bank rewards or leave Gear icon → System menu
Hero combat specials activate automatically when their cooldown and target conditions are satisfied. The S key previews the animation; it does not manually trigger the combat effect or spend its cooldown.
Moving is free and preserves current damage. It does not heal a unit, refund its original cost, consume another barrier supply, or allow a withdrawn hero to deploy again. Buildings, placed objects, and the enemy spawn area block overlapping deployments.

Resources and Deployment Limits

Every fresh attempt starts with 220 Salvage, 160 Ammo, and 200 + current Leadership Command. Lives start at 12, increasing with Fortress Resilience research to 30.
Salvage, Ammo, and Command are battle-only deployment resources. Kills and cleared-wave bonuses replenish them. They are separate from the permanent Scraps, Alloy, Circuitry, Reagents, Flux, and Pristine Cores used by the workshops. Leftover battle currency does not become Reclamation materials.
  • Each hero can deploy once per battle. Losing or extracting that hero uses up the deployment for this attempt.
  • Turrets have a shared active limit of 3–12, plus a separate per-design limit. Destroyed turrets free an active slot, but replacement still costs battle resources.
  • Each of Orchid's eight regular barrier designs has its own whole-battle supply. Destruction does not refund it, and clearing a wave does not refill it.
  • Trees and Kinetic Shield Gates instead have five active copies per design, with their required hero alive and deployed.
  • Lost Lives are not restored between waves. Barrier repairs do not repair Lives.

Player Weapon and Arcade Bonuses

The player's equipped Ranged Weapon level sets manual-shot damage. A higher Ability improves aim response; increasing Ability above 100 progressively reduces bullet spread, reaching its minimum spread at 1,000. The gun's firing interval uses real time, so selecting ×3 battle speed does not triple manual fire.
Manual shots do not consume the Ammo deployment balance. With no effective ranged weapon, the gun contributes no damaging shot.
Four activated prizes from Neural Targeting also work in TD:
Activated prize TD gun effect
Gatling Feed Hold primary fire for repeated shots
Expanded Ammo Case 25% more shots per second: interval decreases from 0.275 to 0.22 seconds
Armor-Piercing Rounds Bullet passes through every enemy along its path, hitting each once
RIP Double manual-shot damage
All four stack. Reaching the arcade score by itself is insufficient: activate the prize in its prize menu. These bonuses affect the player's gun, not hero or turret weapons.

Experience and Leadership

Final blows determine EXP ownership. A hero's personal kills award that hero Hero EXP. Player-gun and turret final blows award shared Army EXP. One kill is not simultaneously assigned to both pools. Defeat and an early return can still retain earned EXP.
Hero EXP pays for that hero's six training stats. Army EXP pays for permanent turret, fortress-control, and regular-barrier upgrades. Armor uses materials and Cores without Army EXP.
Once the player has learned Leadership and has at least 1 Leadership when starting the attempt, every 10 fully cleared waves awards +1 Leadership: waves 10, 20, 30, and so on. This works on every map in campaign and Infinite mode, has no gain cap, and starts counting again in each new attempt. It does not teach the skill when Leadership is still locked. The higher Command starting budget applies to the next attempt.

Infinite Mode

Infinite mode repeats that map's authored campaign waves with additional enemy groups. It has no terminal victory wave. Its wave number continues rising rather than resetting to the template's number.
Enemy Health and attack damage scale by 1.1^(wave − 1) in both modes. Speed and base kill-currency rewards do not receive this wave multiplier. Wave 20 is approximately 6.12 times the Wave-1 Health and damage.
Infinite kill EXP gains an additional 25 percentage points every 20 waves:
Actual Infinite wave Kill EXP multiplier
1–20 100%
21–40 125%
41–60 150%
61–80 175%
Each following 20-wave block +25 percentage points
Fractional EXP is retained across reward banking rather than discarded on every small kill. A Training Data Chip's personal-kill bonus also applies to its bearer.

Banking and Returning

The Godot System menu: bank rewards, continue the live battle, or return to Chronoromancer.
Open the gear menu and select Bank current progress to preserve the attempt's earned rewards without ending the live battle. Choose Back to battlefield to continue, or Return to Chronoromancer to leave. A normal return also attempts to bank current progress.
Banking preserves earned EXP, kill/retreat records, and fully cleared-wave progress. It is not a resumable battlefield save: placed units, enemy positions, and battle currency are not restored as a paused battle later. Victory/defeat finishes the attempt; the next launch starts a fresh one.
If the battle closes unexpectedly, the last successfully banked rewards can be recovered by the main game. An uncleared current wave does not count as a completed wave. Repeated banking or loading does not repeatedly award the same checkpoint's EXP or Leadership.

Practical Battle Advice

Start with a compact defended area that keeps ranged units in range of the approach. Barriers buy firing time, but enemies can move around an isolated obstacle; watch the whole battlefield instead of assuming one Wall seals every route.
Keep melee recruits close enough to make contact, protect fragile ranged recruits, and move damaged units before they withdraw. Save resources for replacements and later wave compositions. Use Nanite Beacons near structures that actually need repairs; they do not heal heroes.
For workshop progression, compare Turret Control, turret damage, Structural Reinforcement, and per-design barrier supply with the problem causing your losses. A stronger turret cannot help if your active limit prevents placing it; more barrier Health cannot replenish an exhausted design's supply.
Decide which EXP pool you need. Let a hero secure kills for personal training, or use the player's gun/turrets when saving Army EXP for research.


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Text adapted from the community-maintained Chronoromancer Wiki under CC BY-SA 4.0.