Corebreak — complete guide
The full breakdown: mid-run perks, the permanent upgrade tree, how the Idle Rift system works, mutators, and the build strategies that scale deepest.
How it works
Break blocks
Fire balls upward to destroy layers of core strata. Each ball bounces between the walls and the blocks above. Clear rows to prevent the strata from pushing too low.
Collect cores
Broken strata drop cores. Cores are your run currency and long-term meta currency — spend them mid-run for power-ups and bank them between runs for permanent upgrades.
Forge
The Forge lets you combine cores into higher-tier resources. Forging unlocks deeper upgrades and scales your ceiling run-over-run. It's the engine of permanent progress.
Survive
If strata reach the floor the run ends. The deeper you go, the faster strata descend. Upgrade your ball count, damage, and speed to stay ahead of the pressure.
Seven run perks
Run perks are offered during play — typically after clearing a layer or reaching a milestone. They last only for the current run. Each perk stacks with the others.
Volley
Offense
Fire 3 extra balls per volley. Multiplies your clearing speed immediately. Best taken early — more balls means more cores per layer, which compounds across the rest of the run.
Power Core
Offense
+1 damage per ball hit. Stacks with your permanent HONED TIPS upgrade. A second Power Core doubles the bonus. Mandatory on deeper runs where block HP scales up.
Blast Radius
Offense
Each ball hit also damages adjacent blocks with splash. Useful on wide, uniform layers — not as strong on sparse or scattered strata where balls already route between blocks.
Lucky Strike
Luck
+15% chance for any hit to deal 3× damage. Great floor; high ceiling. Late in a run with many balls in play, Lucky Strike proc rate makes it effectively a persistent damage multiplier.
Aim Rig
Utility
Extended trajectory preview — shows the full bounce path of each ball before launch. Precision pick. Transforms into a significant advantage on narrow columns and ricochet angles.
Pushback
Defense
Shoves all strata up 3 rows the instant you take it. Grab it when you're close to the floor and need breathing room. It buys time rather than damage, so it's worth most late in a run when the strata are already crowding you out.
Chain Reaction
Offense
+12% chance a block breaks triggers a chain that cracks its immediate neighbors. Scales well with Volley — more balls hitting more blocks means more chain procs per volley.
Seven permanent upgrades
The Forge tree is deliberately small — seven nodes across three tiers, bought with Cores and kept forever. Every node changes how a run feels rather than nudging a percentage. You start each run with 6 balls and 1 base damage; the tree is what moves those numbers. Tier 1 is free. Tiers 2 and 3 unlock with Pro — purchased levels are kept in storage either way, so paid-tier nodes simply go inactive if an entitlement lapses. Costs shown are the base price of the first level; each further level in a node costs more.
Tier 1 — Foundation
| Upgrade | Max lvl | Base cost | Effect per level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deep Stock | 3 | 70 cores | +1 ball in your starting stream |
| Honed Tips | 2 | 100 cores | +1 base damage per ball |
| Salvage | 3 | 80 cores | +12% Cores earned per run |
Tier 2 — Advanced Pro
| Upgrade | Max lvl | Base cost | Effect per level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reinforced | 2 | 350 cores | +2 balls in your starting stream |
| Prospector | 2 | 320 cores | +15% Cores earned per run |
Tier 3 — Endgame Pro
| Upgrade | Max lvl | Base cost | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Streamline | 1 | 700 cores | +3 starting balls, but −1 base damage. A wide, thin build. |
| Overdrive | 1 | 800 cores | +2 base damage. Pure punch. |
Both tier 3 nodes are one-time buys at a flat price. Fully maxed, the tree takes you from 6 balls and 1 damage to 16 balls and 4 damage, with Cores earned up to +66% per run.
Upgrade priority: Max Deep Stock first — 9 starting balls instead of 6 is the biggest early swing you can buy. Take Salvage next so every later purchase arrives sooner, then Honed Tips to double your base damage. On Pro, Reinforced (+4 balls across two levels) outpaces Prospector unless you're grinding for the tier 3 nodes. At tier 3, Streamline is the wide build and Overdrive is the narrow one — if you buy both, Overdrive's +2 damage more than covers Streamline's −1, and you keep all the extra balls.
Seismic Rift — sixteen upgrades
Every run you drill fractures the strata, and those fractures leach Cores while the game is closed. With nothing bought, the Rift extracts 6 cores/hr into a 70-core store and accrues for up to 36 hours offline. Once storage is full, extraction stops — so rate and cap have to grow together, and you have to come back and collect. Two nodes are free; the other fourteen unlock with Pro. Costs shown are the base price of the first level; the curve is steep and every further level costs roughly twice the last.
Tier 1 — Foundation
| Upgrade | Group | Max lvl | Base cost | Effect per level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rift Condenser | Rate | 6 | 400 cores | Idle extraction rate +5/hr |
| Fracture Vault | Cap | 6 | 340 cores | Idle storage cap +50 |
Tier 2 — Advanced Pro
| Upgrade | Group | Max lvl | Base cost | Effect per level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seismic Surge | Rate | 4 | 1,200 cores | Extraction rate +12/hr |
| Pressure Seal | Rate | 3 | 2,400 cores | Rate +1/hr per depth zone of your best run (1 zone = 15m) |
| Fault Depth | Rate | 2 | 3,600 cores | Rate +2/hr per depth zone of your best run — stacks with Pressure Seal |
| Deep Matrix | Cap | 4 | 1,100 cores | Idle storage cap +120 |
| Overpressure | Cap | 3 | 2,000 cores | Bank up to +20% over cap; the overflow bleeds off if left too long |
| Deep Reserves | Cap | 3 | 1,600 cores | Extend offline accrual +24h (base 36h) |
| Resonance Tap | Yield | 3 | 1,500 cores | +20% yield when you collect at ≥80% capacity |
| Core Assay | Yield | 3 | 1,800 cores | +8% flat collection yield |
| Motherlode | Yield | 3 | 2,800 cores | 15% chance per level that a collection pays double |
| Streak Core | Daily | 3 | 2,200 cores | Idle rate +5/hr for every day of your current check-in streak (streak counts to 14) |
| Dawn Surge | Daily | 2 | 2,600 cores | Your first collection each day is worth +40% |
| Aftershock Core | Prestige | 3 | 3,000 cores | Rate +10/hr per Deep Core you hold |
| Rich Vein | Prestige | 3 | 2,600 cores | Idle cap +100 per Deep Core you hold |
| Resonance Array | Trophy | 1 | 12,000 cores | Auto-collect at 90% full. Requires maxed Rift Condenser, Fracture Vault and Seismic Surge, 1 Deep Core, and a best depth of 90m. |
Deep Cores are the Rift's prestige currency. Sink 8,000 cores into Rift upgrades and you can soft-reset the tree for one Deep Core; each core after that costs about four times the last. Every Deep Core is a permanent, compounding +15% on your extraction rate, and it's what Aftershock Core and Rich Vein scale off — those two nodes do nothing until you hold at least one.
Idle Rift order: Rift Condenser and Fracture Vault together — a big rate with a small store just fills up and stalls. On Pro, Seismic Surge is the best rate-per-core buy, with Deep Matrix behind it to hold the extra output. Add Core Assay and Resonance Tap once you're reliably collecting near full, and Streak Core if you open the game daily — at three levels and a 14-day streak it's worth +210/hr on its own. Take Deep Reserves only if you're regularly away longer than 36 hours. Save Pressure Seal and Fault Depth until your best run is genuinely deep, since both pay per 15m zone. Aftershock Core and Rich Vein come after your first Deep Core, and Resonance Array is the last thing you buy — it's gated behind maxed Condenser, Vault and Surge, a prestige, and 90m of depth.
Five mutators
Every run carries exactly one mutator, and you don't pick it. In a normal run the board seed decides which of the five you get. The Daily Drill derives its mutator from the UTC date instead, so everyone in the world plays the same rule on the same day — the Daily screen shows it as "Today's rule" before you drop in.
Dense Strata
The hard mode. Every brick spawns with 2.5× its normal HP, and rows come in denser — the rock chance per column rises from 48% to 56%. Nothing descends faster; you simply have far more wall to chew through. Denser rows mean more adjacent bricks, so perks that hit more than one at a time — BLAST RADIUS and CHAIN REACTION — earn their slot here.
Gem Rush
Gems spawn at double the usual rate — 11% of bricks instead of 5.5%. That matters because breaking a gem clears its entire row, so twice the gems means twice the row-wipes, and gems score double on top. The friendliest of the five, and the best one to be handed when you're testing a new build.
Low Gravity
Balls fly 8% slower. That's the whole rule — the flight path is unchanged, just stretched out. Volleys take marginally longer to resolve, which makes bounces easier to read and pairs naturally with AIM RIG. The gentlest mutator in the set.
Fragile Cores
Cuts 12% off the depth component of every brick's HP. It's an easing mutator, not a risk one — but it only bites deep. Brick HP is the largest of three floors, and the depth term doesn't dominate until you're well past depth 30, so shallow runs feel identical and a long descent feels noticeably softer.
Double Pickups
Ball pickups pay 2 balls instead of 1, and slightly more of them spawn. This is a ball-economy mutator, not a Cores one: it snowballs your stream far faster than normal, and since the board scales pressure against balls × damage, expect the strata to fight back harder as your stream grows.
Build paths and tips
- 01Deep Stock is the single best early investment.Three levels take your starting stream from 6 balls to 9 — a 50% wider opening volley for the cheapest node in the tree. More balls per volley means more breaks per layer, and breaks are what pay out Cores.
- 02Buy income before you buy power.Three levels of Salvage is +36% Cores on every run, and on Pro two levels of Prospector stack another +30% on top for +66% total. Tier 3 is a flat 700 and 800 cores; two thirds more income per run is what turns that from a grind into a goal.
- 03Your pressure is balls multiplied by damage — keep them balanced.The run engine measures how hard you're pushing as ball count times ball damage, so ten balls at 1 damage and two balls at 5 do the same work on paper. The wide stream wins in practice because it touches more distinct blocks per volley. Take VOLLEY when your damage is already up, POWER CORE when your stream is already wide, and stop taking whichever one you're long on.
- 04The Rift earns while you sleep — but only until it fills.With nothing bought it's 6 cores/hr into a 70-core store, so it tops out in under twelve hours and then extracts nothing. Raise Rift Condenser and Fracture Vault together. On Pro, Overpressure banks up to +20% over the cap per level — the excess bleeds off if you leave it too long, so it buys slack, not immunity — and Deep Reserves is the one to own if you're regularly away longer than the 36-hour offline window.
- 05AIM RIG is worth more on a wide build than a narrow one.Streamline trades a point of base damage for three extra balls, and the wider the stream the more a launch angle decides. AIM RIG extends the wall-bounce preview, so a read bounce sprays a whole column instead of clipping its edge. Take it early on a Deep Stock or Streamline run; on a narrow Overdrive build it matters less, because a few heavy balls forgive a sloppy angle.
- 06Fault Depth changes the Idle Rift meta.Maxed at two levels it pays +4/hr for every 15m zone of your best run, and it stacks with Pressure Seal. That closes the loop: upgrades → deeper runs → more idle income → faster upgrades. It's the late-game engine, but only once your best depth is genuinely deep — at 30m it's worth +8/hr, at 150m it's +40/hr.