Wave

Waves are the primary component of In The Lurch, with the goal being to defeat as many waves as possible.

Waves consist of a number of monsters all simultaneously spawning, and the wave ends upon every monster being defeated. Waves fail if all players are dead.

Wave characteristics
This is a quick reference table of the specific characteristics of the first 15 waves:

Please note that this ignores additional behavior provided by modifiers. If there is no music track associated with this wave, Dire Threat, Bloodletting, Dust Devils, or Deep Sixed is randomly selected, instead, except for past Wave 15, which will always play Dance or Die.

Exceptions

 * If the Splash modifier is above 0%, Flyers can begin spawning as soon as Wave 1.
 * If the Callus or Healing modifiers are above 0%, Healers can begin spawning as soon as Wave 1.
 * If Topheavy is above 0%, it will guarantee bosses (either Giants, Lizards, or Spiders) will spawn on any wave, but it will not enable other bosses to spawn randomly.

Wave strength
A numerical "wave strength" is created to determine the number and power of monsters. Until Wave 16, the formula for determining horde strength is:

$${\text{wave strength}} = 15 * ({\text{wave number}} + 1)$$

After Wave 15, the formula instead changes to:

$${\text{wave strength}} = (15 * ({\text{wave number}} + 1)) + 200 + (50 * ({\text{wave number}} - 15))$$

In addition, modifiers will also affect this formula. Plus Horde or Topheavy will increase it to accommodate additional monsters, while negative will instead cause less monsters to spawn.

Multiplayer differences
With the exception of The Big One on Wave 15, which instead gains damage resistance per player, additional monsters will spawn per player. Rather than simply multiplying the horde strength by number of players, each player will be treated as separate "blocks" of horde strength, meaning in a 3 player game, 3 instances of 100 horde strength will be divvied up and assigned modifiers instead of 1 fluid list of monsters created from 300 horde strength. This ensures that runs of the same seed but different player count will encounter the exact same group of monsters save for the monsters added by additional players.

Monster selection
Per each player's block of monsters, the horde strength is divvied up randomly between available monsters, with each monsters taking a different portion and having a different percentage chance to appear. Monsters have a higher chance to be selected based on the number player their block is associated with, causing larger groups of weaker enemies to spawn for low number of players and smaller groups of stronger enemies beginning to appear more frequently with higher number of players.

The following table shows each monster's cost on wave strength as well as their chance of being selected per player's block of monsters. Note that spawn rates are not split evenly between all available monsters. The spawner will go down the list in this order, and if that monster type is available, it will do a percentage check to choose that monster. If it does not pass, it will go down to the next enemy below. Essentially, for a Dino to spawn, all other monsters failed a percentage check in a row to be selected, or the remaining horde strength in the block was not divisible by 3 to allow another monster to spawn instead.

* Boss will choose randomly between Giant, Lizard, or Spider.

* If Wave 3 or higher, Special will choose randomly between Worm or Flyer. If Wave 11 or higher, Burners and Shockers may also be randomly chosen, and every Special has a 1% chance to be a Doppelganger.

* Dinos have a 20% chance of being a Green Dino, which grants them strength priority over other Dinos and also has predictive aim, meaning they will try to lead attacks on moving players.

Other selection info

 * Bosses cheat a bit. While on Wave 10 or 15, bosses only cost 10 horde strength instead of 25! In addition, past Wave 15, bosses cost 1 less horde strength per wave number past 15.


 * The Healing modifier reduces or raises the cost of Healers by 1 per 10%.

Assigning Healers' targets and modifiers
Once a list of monsters has been selected, the monsters are then ordered by a numerical sorting strength number created by the sum of health and doubled armor. However, Green Dinos are also manually adjusted to be ranked above Dinos due to their predictive aim, and Healers are always set to 0 to be the very lowest priority.

Healers will choose the highest priority monster without the Ambush modifier applied to them. If that monster already has a Healer assigned to them, they have a 95% chance to go down the list to the next highest monster, where the check keeps repeating until the Healer finds a partner.

If the modifier does not effect every monster, modifiers will either choose what monster to affect based either on this order, such as Fire Affinity, or the reverse of this order, such as Shelled.

Modifiers can also affect sorting priority. Because it is dependent on health values, the Flesh and Armor modifiers also change their associated value in sort strength. For instance, a sufficiently high Flesh modifier could cause Lizards to gain priority over other bosses, or a sufficiently high Armor modifier could cause Dinos to begin overtaking Tallboys. Mount also affects several sort strengths in an attempt to make more mount combinations available. While Mount is above 0%, Lizard gains 500 sort strength to become the most important unit barring The Big One, and Dinos, but not Green Dinos, gain 200 sort strength to give them priority over Tallboys.

Monster placement
Monsters spawn in a ring shaped proximity zone around each player's current location, right outside of fog range, with slight variance in distance to mix up timings of arrival. Each monster immediately begins targeting and searching for the nearest player they spawn by, or if they are given the Territorial modifier, heading towards the players' campfire in the center of the map.

Progress bar
The progress bar is calculated by the tallied strength cost of all remaining monsters divided by the entire wave's strength, as opposed to the number of monsters remaining. As such, taking out higher strength cost monsters results in more progress being shown. Progress is used to determine final score when a wave is failed to allow for more granular personal bests or competitive head-to-head scores.

By default, all remaining monsters enter a berserk state when progress is 30% or lower, though the Rage modifier can raise or lower this. On the interface, the bar's red portion represents when berserk will be activated.

If tallied strength of the wave increases due to the Backup modifier or The Big One summoning, for the sake of personal bests or competitive head-to-head play, the progress bar's percentage will remain frozen at its lowest value the players reached until a lower actual percentage is achieved.

On Wave 15, 70% of the progress bar will be based on The Big One's lowest remaining health reached, while the remaining 30% behaves as normal.