TOMBGRAB
SUNKEN TEMPLE RELIC RUNNER
FIELD REPORT · OPENING
The shaft goes down forty metres and then it stops being a shaft and starts being a cathedral. Torchlight finds fourteen pillars, a hieroglyph wall that runs off into black, a gold sarcophagus lid on a stepped altar — and between you and all of it, hanging in the still air, is everything the dynasty ever buried. You have a grapple cord, an hourglass, and about ninety seconds of somebody else’s sunlight.
TOMBGRAB puts a full-face excavation mask over your sensors and drops you onto the floor of a colossal sun temple that has been sealed for three thousand years. Braziers gutter in the draught. Dust turns slowly in the light. The glyphs on the walls glow faintly, the way things do in a place that was never meant to be opened. Relics float in the dead air above the flagstones — shards, lapis scarabs, sun idols, ward seals, swift sandals, ankh sigils, spare flasks — and there is exactly one way to collect any of it: put your reticle on it and fire the cord.
☀ THE HEADLINE MECHANIC: SUN SHAFTS
Cracks in the temple ceiling let six blades of daylight fall all the way to the floor — and they orbit slowly around the chamber while you work. Stand inside one and the HUD flips to SUNLIT: every relic you bank while lit pays double, stacked on top of your chain, your sigil and your mask bonus. The whole run becomes a dance — hook the loot, drag yourself into the moving light, hook more before the shaft slides away. It is the simplest idea in the game and it completely rewires how you play it, because now the room itself is worth chasing.
The aiming is built to be trusted absolutely. The reticle is your cursor — the system pointer is hidden, so there is no gap between where you point and where you hit. The instant the reticle touches a relic a 3D ring snaps around it and the brackets flare; that ring is drawn at precisely the radius the grapple test uses, so the ringed relic is always the relic you get. Then hold the button. Holding re-fires the cord four and a half times a second at wherever the reticle currently sits, so sweeping across a shelf of floating treasure vacuums the whole shelf while the ring hops piece to piece. When you are lit by a sun shaft and the chain is at ×8, a single sweep reads like a slot machine paying out in gold leaf.
Your timer is an hourglass. Sand runs out constantly and the only way to buy more is to keep working: every relic shard trickles a fraction of a second back into the glass and a Sun Idol dumps +6 whole seconds in. Play well and a single tomb runs almost forever; stand still for ten seconds and the sand starts to hiss. When the glass empties you lose a flask and re-run the same tomb with your haul intact — real pressure, never a dead end. Five flasks per expedition.
Everything in a tomb is both a curse and a payday. A Curse Orb costs you a flask on contact — and pays a fortune if you hook it with the cord and banish it instead. Blink-dash straight into a guardian’s curse bolt and you parry it for five-figure points plus real damage to the boss. Chain any two pickups inside 4.5 seconds and the RELIC CHAIN climbs: ×2, ×3, ×5, ×8, all the way to a ×12 multiplier at sixty links. Multiply that by a sun shaft, an ankh sigil and a pharaoh’s mask and one lapis scarab can out-earn an entire early tomb.
Every fifth tomb, the sarcophagus is not empty. An AWAKENED GUARDIAN rises off the altar — STONE ANUBIS, THE USURPER, KHARNAK, OBSIDIAN COLOSSUS, THE SAND KING, THRONES END — a nemes-crowned colossus of painted stone with gold plate across the chest, two fists swinging on loose shoulders and eyes that light up like lamp oil. It looms curse volleys, slams the floor with expanding shockwave rings you have to jump or blink through, and looses tomb wraiths to run you down while you sprint for Spears of Ra — the only thing that reaches a stone heart. Drop it below half health and it awakens fully: faster volleys, double slams, no patience left. Fell it and the bounty lands in slow motion worth tomb level × 60,000.
Five masks hang in the camp and each one is a real build, not a paint job. SCARAB VISOR stretches your cord a fifth further. ANUBIS WARLORD is consecrated jackal plate — a sixth flask, a free ward seal and ten percent more sand, paid for in speed and a tax on your haul. DESERT WRAITH is a sand shroud, twenty-six percent faster with a shorter blink. CURSE CALLER pays +42% on everything while quietly draining your hourglass ten percent quicker. SOLAR PHARAOH is the divine nemes crown: +68% value, four flasks, eighteen percent less sand — pure greed for raiders who simply do not get hit. Whichever you seal into becomes your literal point of view for that tomb, complete with its own etched frame, lens tint, drifting dust and torch-glow on the glass.
The temple goes on for a very long way. 120 hand-tuned tombs across twelve regions — Sandstone Vestibule, Torchlit Hall, Hieroglyph Vault, Jackal Catacomb, Jade Treasury, Molten Forge, Flooded Crypt, Star Ceiling, Scarab Nest, Obsidian Labyrinth, Sun Sanctum and the Throne of Ages — each one recolouring the entire excavation, from the stone and the glyph glow to the brazier flame and how much light still reaches this deep. Bank one to three stars per tomb, unlock the next node on the temple map, and keep descending into infinite escalation past 120. When the last flask finally goes dark, the real competition begins: enter your raider name, choose your flag, and your haul goes into the Global Top 100 against expeditions from everywhere.
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