Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde

This achievement is a rough grind, but it's not nearly as daunting as it seems.

Unlocking Hardcore Mode

You have to select Hardcore mode on a fresh save file, but you can't do that from the very start. You first have to unlock Hardcore mode in the Divinity Web on a normal save file.

The Hardcore mode upgrade is near the bottom of the web. To get it, you'll need to defeat the boss of Desert Ruins on Hard, so you'll have to play a fair amount on a normal file to get there. That means you'll probably spend 10ish hours playing the game before you can even access Hardcore mode.

What is Hardcore Mode?

Hardcore mode plays just like normal mode with one critical exception: if you die during any run, your save file is wiped clean. This achievement thus requires you to unlock 500 upgrades in a Hardcore save file without ever dying in a run.

Fortunately, you can cheese this a little bit by dashboarding. When in the middle of a run, you can return to your Xbox dashboard and manually close the game. Reopening the game will put you back before the beginning of that run.

Dashboarding does not work if the "Defeat" screen actually pops up. That happens as soon as you run out of health, so to preserve your attempt at this achievement, you need to dashboard before your character actually dies. It can be easy to rapidly lose health when you're surrounded, especially on higher difficulty maps, so I recommended being extra cautious with dashboarding.

What You Need

The Divinity Web has many more than 500 nodes on it, so this achievement doesn't require a full completion of the game. Just most of it.

To unlock enough nodes in the web, you'll need to complete a few maps on Hard, complete a few Build Challenges on Hard, and two Build Challenges for several characters.

Here are my basic stats when I got the achievement:

• I completed 44 total runs, 35 on Normal and 9 on Hard.
• I completed every stage on Normal, but I only completed 5 stages on Hard (Desert Ruins, The Hinterlands, Darkmood Grove, Spine Dunes, and Cemetery).
• I completed at least two Normal Challenges for each character and a Hard challenge for the last four characters (Hugo, Shakpana, Sickle, and McDiggins).
• My Hardcore savefile has a playtime just under 18 hours.

Strategy

My overarching strategy was just to be careful. Stick to easier stages when possible and farm resources when needed.

Choosing Stages

I chose stages to play based on what I needed to keep moving in the Divinity Web. I played challenges when I needed one to open a path, or I would go to the appropriate stage when I needed to kill monsters. When I unlocked useful upgrades, I would go back to an easy stage (mostly just Desert Ruins on Normal) to farm any resources I needed. After I unlocked everything that would make me more powerful, I moved on to the next thing.

To complete the achievement, I didn't unlock any of the Brutal stage upgrades, and there was a small selection of other upgrades I didn't get, either. That means that you can avoid a couple of the hard Build Challenges if you're not good with the character or equipment.

Playing Stages

A detailed plan will ultimately come down to what fits with your playstyle. After the experience from playing while unlocking Hardcore mode in the first place, I found the early game (the first 10 or so runs) to be relatively straightforward with any character. After that, I would generally recommend using Conrad for his high survivability.

The big thing to remember is that you're going to want your build to have some decent AoE in order to survive the stages themselves, but then you'll also need some decent DPS to beat the bosses.

When I started playing stages on Hard, I often got my AoE from Shock Bolt (the Chain Lightning mod does an excellent job of cleaning up the weak mobs across the entire screen), and Shadow Shuriken was often my DPS. Other weapons could certainly serve those roles too, but I found that I would get overwhelmed early if I focused too much on pure damage output and it would take forever to kill bosses if I invested too heavily in AoE.

For pets, I would always try to get Hearty because generating hearts is big for surviving. I almost always took Slayther for the increase to damage, too. Slayther buffs each of the weapons I mentioned above, so that one fit my preferred build perfectly. From there, I would try to get the defensive pets, Chicon Rad for damage mitigation and Blocker to reduce damage from projectiles.

I think the first 2-3 minutes of any run are the most important as there's a snowballing effect if you struggle to keep up. With my first few level ups, I'd grab all the weapons I wanted for that run to get new weapons out of the selection pool. Then I would reroll most level up choices until I got something that helped with AoE. I'd try to get my AoE ability up to about level 20 before grabbing much for my other weapons. If I wasn't comfortably killing most things around the 7-8 minute mark, I dashboarded to scrap that run.

The last piece of advice I'd give is to prioritize chests and shops. The shops are the big thing because buying a couple pets and maybe some XP or healing is a pretty big deal. Chests are important to fund all those shop visits. When playing maps on hard,

With that general strategy, I had a few close calls, but I only had to dashboard 4 times total, all when I was attempting a higher difficulty map for the first time.