TerraTD — Wiki

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Overview

TerraTD is a tower defense game about shaping the route. Creeps walk from the spawn points to your base; you buy towers with the coins they drop, and the towers you place are themselves walls. Where you build decides both what gets shot and how far the creeps have to walk to reach you.

There are — towers, each with — tiers and an unlimited overcharge past that, and — creep types.

How to Play

  1. Pick a run length and a map style on the menu, then press play.
  2. Spend your opening bank before the first wave — there is a build phase, and the countdown is on the wave pill.
  3. Tap a tower in the shop, then tap a floor tile to place it. The shop is sorted cheapest first.
  4. Click a placed tower to upgrade it, sell it, or change what it shoots at.
  5. A 10 Minute run ends on its clock — hold out and you win. Endless has no clock and never stops.

Timed runs last — minutes.

Mazing — the one rule

Towers block pathing. Creeps walk around them, so a line of towers is a wall and a clever line of towers is a maze. Lengthening the walk is usually worth more than adding damage, because every extra tile is more time under fire from guns you already own.

You can never seal the route. A placement that would leave any spawn with no path to the base is refused outright. So you can make the walk as long as you like, but you cannot make it impossible — there is no softlock to engineer.

The dashed red lines on the map show the route creeps will actually take, redrawn the moment you place or sell a tower. Turn them off with the route button next to the eye.

On Maul maps the tiles around each spawn are reserved lane and cannot be built on. The exit is not — you can always build touching the base from every side.

Targeting

Every tower picks its own target. Select a tower to change it.

Slow Field and melee towers hit everything in range, so they have no target to choose and offer no picker.

Towers

Four tiers each. Past the top tier, overcharge is repeatable forever: the cost climbs faster than the power, so it is an unbounded sink for a bank you would otherwise never spend. Overcharge never changes range or fire rate — a tower that grew its footprint each level would redraw your maze under you.

Creeps

Waves mix these. Every map opens on Grunts; runners, swarms and tanks arrive as the ladder climbs, and a boss shows up from wave 4.

Economy

Coins come from kills. Unspent gold earns interest between waves, so banking is a real strategy rather than a tax on playing.

Maps

Maps are generated, not hand-drawn. Two styles, and the difference between them was measured off the ten hand-authored maps the game shipped with rather than invented.

What makes a map good enough to serve

Every generated map is scored before you see it, and rejected if it fails any of these. Several candidates are built and the best one is kept.

Daily & Scores

The main play button serves the daily map: everyone playing that run length and map style today gets the identical map, generated from the date. That is what makes the scoreboard mean anything — the same ground, the same waves, for everybody.

Only the daily run is scored. "Play a different map" rolls a fresh map that is yours alone; it is practice, and it does not post a score.

The scoreboard is split by mode — run length × map style — because an Endless run scores far higher than a 10-minute one and a single list would just be an Endless list.

Controls

Plans & To-Do

Everything planned, in progress, or deliberately parked. Shipped items stay listed so the history of the thing is readable in one place.

Design Proposals

Work-in-progress design and visual mockups for things that are not in the game yet. Each is a live, standalone page that can render real game data rather than a picture of it. They are public — anyone with the link can read them.