Locations
Every place out here pays in dose
DOSE drops you into ten biomes, from frozen ruins to a fungal forest that glows at night, each with its own weather and its own residents. Under the ground there are dungeons, and over the street there's a district of towers. All of them pay in dose, and all of them collect.
01
Ten biomes, ten bad neighbourhoods
Everyone starts on the Ash Flats, dead grey plains under a pale moon. From there it gets worse in interesting ways: snowed-in wrecks in the Frozen Ruins, fused sand in the Glass Crater, a scrapyard run by scavengers, a cracked white salt pan where the mirages move and a Flooded Highway where the puddles bite when the storm comes. Each biome has its own monsters, hazards, lighting and music.
Further out it gets properly nasty. There's the Toxic Bog with water you shouldn't touch, the Ruined City under drifting ash, the Fungal Forest with mushrooms the size of houses, and a Military Base where the turrets and minefields still work. Biomes come in tiers, and the higher tiers pay better in dose and in loot.
- Ash Flats
- Frozen Ruins
- Glass Crater
- Scrapyard
- Salt Flats
- Flooded Highway
- Toxic Bog
- Ruined City
- Fungal Forest
- Military Base
02
Weather, storms and the wall
Weather rolls through on its own schedule: drizzle, thunderstorms, snow, blizzards, sandstorms, ash fall, toxic fog and the green-skied rad storm. Some of it changes the fight. Blizzards, sandstorms and fog banks make you harder to spot, lightning lights up the Flooded Highway, and shock puddles get lively when a storm passes over. Day turns to night, and night is worse.
On a quick run there's a deadline too. A few minutes in, a storm wall starts sweeping across the map toward the beacon, and outside it you take damage and dose that keep climbing. On an open-world expedition the storm takes its time, but it still comes. Nobody gets to camp a crystal patch forever.
03
Expeditions, quick runs and detours
Quick runs drop you on one map with one beacon and a storm on the way. Expeditions open up the whole world: regions to cross, several extraction points to choose from and a lot of reasons to wander off the road. Press M and the map shows what you've explored, where the exits are and where the storm has got to.
Out there you'll find settlements with traders, monster camps, supply caches, landmarks, lairs with named mini-bosses and stairs leading down. There are secret stashes too, which stay hidden until somebody trips over one. The compass along the top marks what's close, which is handy when the fog rolls in.
04
Dungeons go down two floors
Hatches, grates, subway stairs and vault doors on the surface lead underground. There are four kinds of dungeon: the Vault Lab, the Sewer Tunnels, the Dead Line Subway and the Collapsed Bunker. Every one has two floors. The first ends at the way down. The second is harder, busier and better stocked, and it ends in a big arena with a boss at the bottom.
The deeper floors don't always match the top. A sewer can open into a Lava Forge, a subway into the Abyss Caves and a bunker into the Frozen Depths, with lava rivers, rope bridges and floors slick with ice. Down there the rads are in the air, so the clock is always ticking. The loot is why you go anyway.
05
Traps with a polite warning
Dungeons are full of things that aren't monsters. Swinging blades, spike floors, flame jets, falling rocks, crushers and saw tracks, plus bridges over the abyss that creak, crack and sometimes give way. Every trap has a tell, a sound and a bit of motion before it hurts. Noticing it in the middle of a fight is between you and your crew.
Falling into lava or the abyss is instant. No downed state, no revive and no getting dragged to the exit. Your loot lands on the last safe ground you stood on, so the crew can grab it on the way past. Lootable crates hide in dead ends and side rooms, and the second floor always has more of them.
06
The building district goes up
The building district is a block of gutted towers you walk straight into from the street, with no loading screen. Each one is a vertical dungeon three to five floors tall: a command tower, a frozen spire, rickety scaffold stacks, a lab and an old hospital. Every floor has its own residents, its own hazards and a few lootable crates.
You get up by stairs, by broken stairs you have to jump and by ladders. Walk up to a ladder and press R to climb. The boss waits on the roof or in the top hall, and once it's dead a zipline takes the crew back down to the street. One rule to remember: a fall of more than five metres kills you outright.
- Command Tower
- Rime Spire
- Scaffold Stacks
- Helix Labs
- St. Agnes General
07
Gravity always wins
Five metres is the line. Step off a roof edge, misjudge a gap or jump down a stairwell to save time, and the game shows you a big red WASTED card with a joke at your expense. There's no downed state and no revive. Your gear drops where you landed, so somebody has to walk down and fetch it.
Wipe the whole crew and the Whisp, our glowing little radiation mascot, floats in to laugh and roast the way you played. It mocks your decisions, never you. Then it's back to the menu and, more often than we'd like to admit, straight back up the same tower.
See it for yourself
The Bible only shows you the edges. The rest you find out in a run, with friends, under a green sky.