Hull Rupture is a base-management and tower-defense roguelite where you play Despot, a tyrannical AI that survived the Galactic Union's annihilation of Earth and now commands humanity's last warship on a run toward the alien homeworld. A Classic run is 20 alien waves long, and between them you build production modules, assign a human workforce, pick a route across a freeform galaxy map, and reshape the hull so the route the aliens take is the one your guns can cover.
What this Hull Rupture guide covers
Every run stacks four layers on top of each other, and you are constantly trading between them.
- Resources and power. Energy, Fuel, Minerals, Mystic Goo, Microchips, Nanobots, Plasteel, Adamantium and Tokens all move at different rates, and the human workforce that converts raw stuff into finished goods is finite.
- Modules and turrets. Modules produce, repair, buff and reinforce; turrets shoot. They draw on the same power, materials and hull weight, so every gun you add is a module you did not add.
- The galaxy map. Between waves you choose where to go, and every stop is an event, a market, a shipyard or a fight.
- Mid-run adaptation. You always know when aliens arrive and roughly where they will breach, but every wave is stronger than the last, so the shape you built for wave 3 is wrong by wave 12.
The production chain guide is where the resource layer gets solved; the rest of this page is the frame around it.
The ship is the colony, the factory and the survival machine
The developers frame Hull Rupture this way: the ship plays all three roles at once. It is where your people live, where everything you make is manufactured, and the thing that has to survive. Unlike their earlier Despotism games, you are allowed to pause and rethink instead of micromanaging in real time.
That matters more than it sounds. Hull Rupture shares a universe with Despotism 3k, Despot's Game and Slime 3K, and none of them are prerequisites — you can start here cold — but the pause-and-rethink freedom is the mechanical difference that makes a 20-wave run manageable.
Despot's HP is the run's health bar
Despot has HP, and if the aliens reduce it to 0 the run is over. So the thing you are protecting is the ship and the AI in it, not the crew: your crew is a resource you spend, assign and recycle, and a run that ends is a run where the economy was not good enough.
Combat never pauses, which means production keeps running while aliens board through drop pods and march toward the Airlock. Plan to expand between waves rather than during them. The 20-wave survival plan covers the order of operations that falls out of that.
Before your first run
Two things are worth sorting out before wave 1 rather than after. The first is the tutorial: it lives in General settings, and turning it off takes seconds, but it is also where the game introduces energy, humans and your first weapon stations. The tutorial guide covers when to leave it on.
The second is difficulty. The game ships with four difficulty levels, and the higher ones do not just scale numbers — they add fights to your map that are not part of the 20. The difficulty guide spells out exactly what changes above the base tier.