---
title: Creatures
description: Every creature in Fractara's overworld — how hard it hits, how much it can take, how fast it comes back, and how all of that changes with your level and armour.
---

<div className="prose">
  Nothing in the overworld has a fixed health bar. A creature's toughness rises
  with its level and its tier, and what it hits you for depends just as much on
  you — your level, and whether your armour turns its damage aside. The table
  below runs that arithmetic live. Move the controls and the whole thing
  re-reads for the fight you are actually in.
</div>

<CreatureTable />

## How a hit lands

<div className="prose">
  <p>
    Every creature swings on its own rhythm. A Crawler comes at you every 1.5
    seconds for very little; a Jotunn takes 3.5 seconds to wind up and makes it
    count. The <strong>Per 10s</strong> column exists because those two threats
    are hard to compare any other way — it is the damage a creature puts on you
    over ten seconds of standing still, and it is usually the number that
    decides whether a fight is survivable.
  </p>
  <p>
    Four things move a hit up or down:
  </p>
</div>

<ul className="contract-grid">
  <li>
    <strong>Tier</strong>
    <span>
      A creature's tier is the single biggest lever. Health climbs steeply —
      an Epic is five times the health of a Normal — while damage climbs
      gently, only thirty percent across the whole range. Tiers make fights
      longer far more than they make them deadlier.
    </span>
  </li>
  <li>
    <strong>The level gap</strong>
    <span>
      Every level a creature has on you adds ten percent to its damage, and
      every level you have on it takes ten percent off. That stops at double
      damage in its favour and half damage in yours.
    </span>
  </li>
  <li>
    <strong>Your defence</strong>
    <span>
      Levelling raises your defence, which divides everything coming at you.
      It rises by roughly eighty percent between level 1 and level 26, and
      then it stops — see the ceiling below.
    </span>
  </li>
  <li>
    <strong>Armour matchup</strong>
    <span>
      Armour that resists what a creature deals takes a quarter off every hit.
      Armour it counters adds a quarter. Nothing else in the fight is that
      cheap to change.
    </span>
  </li>
</ul>

<div className="callout">
  <div className="callout-title">Fifteen levels is a wall, not a slope</div>
  <p>
    When a creature is fifteen or more levels above you, the usual arithmetic
    stops applying and its hits land on a punishing minimum instead — between
    60 and 100 damage depending on tier, whatever your armour says. This is
    deliberate. It is the game telling you that you have walked somewhere you
    are not meant to be yet, in the one language that cannot be misread.
  </p>
</div>

## What you will actually meet

<div className="prose">
  Tier is not sprinkled evenly across the map. The overworld weights what it
  places against your progress, so the early world is mostly Timid and Normal
  creatures and the late world is mostly Vicious and Epic ones. This is why the
  same species feels like a different animal a hundred hours in.
</div>

<div className="table-wrap">
  <table>
    <caption>
      Roughly how often each tier appears as you progress. Epic creatures do not
      appear at all until the world considers you ready for them.
    </caption>
    <thead>
      <tr>
        <th scope="col">Your progress</th>
        <th scope="col" className="num">Timid</th>
        <th scope="col" className="num">Normal</th>
        <th scope="col" className="num">Strong</th>
        <th scope="col" className="num">Vicious</th>
        <th scope="col" className="num">Epic</th>
      </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
        <th scope="row">Levels 1–4</th>
        <td className="num">60%</td>
        <td className="num">35%</td>
        <td className="num">5%</td>
        <td className="num">—</td>
        <td className="num">—</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <th scope="row">Levels 5–9</th>
        <td className="num">20%</td>
        <td className="num">55%</td>
        <td className="num">20%</td>
        <td className="num">5%</td>
        <td className="num">—</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <th scope="row">Levels 10–14</th>
        <td className="num">—</td>
        <td className="num">40%</td>
        <td className="num">45%</td>
        <td className="num">12%</td>
        <td className="num">3%</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <th scope="row">Levels 15–19</th>
        <td className="num">—</td>
        <td className="num">15%</td>
        <td className="num">45%</td>
        <td className="num">30%</td>
        <td className="num">10%</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <th scope="row">Levels 20–24</th>
        <td className="num">—</td>
        <td className="num">—</td>
        <td className="num">30%</td>
        <td className="num">50%</td>
        <td className="num">20%</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <th scope="row">Levels 25–26</th>
        <td className="num">—</td>
        <td className="num">—</td>
        <td className="num">10%</td>
        <td className="num">55%</td>
        <td className="num">35%</td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>
</div>

<div className="prose">
  Tier also caps how many can come at you at once. A pack of Timid or Normal
  creatures can run to five; Strong and Vicious top out at four; an Epic
  creature travels alone or in a pair. A five-Wolf pack and a two-Wolf pack are
  very different evenings.
</div>

## Coming back

<div className="prose">
  Ordinary creatures return quickly enough to keep a hunt moving. Anything rare
  or valuable sits on a much longer clock, so clearing one changes the map for
  the rest of a session rather than for the next few minutes.
</div>

<div className="callout">
  <div className="callout-title">Reading the respawn window</div>
  <p>
    Most creatures come back on a fixed delay — seven minutes for a Salamander,
    ten for Goblins, up to forty-five for Boar. The rare encounters are
    different: they carry an hour of drift on a six-hour clock, which is why
    they are listed as a <strong>5–7 hour</strong> window. The exact moment
    inside that range is not predictable, and is not meant to be.
  </p>
</div>

## The three that break the rules

<div className="prose">
  <p>
    Three creatures in the overworld are tuned by hand for their own encounter
    rather than by the curve above, so they are deliberately absent from the
    table.
  </p>
</div>

<ul className="contract-grid">
  <li>
    <strong>Giant Mantis</strong>
    <span>
      A regional event rather than a wandering creature. It hits many times
      harder than anything of its size has a right to, watches for you from a
      long way off, and does not lose interest.
    </span>
  </li>
  <li>
    <strong>Hobgoblin</strong>
    <span>
      A boss among the goblin lines. Roughly double the punch of an ordinary
      goblin on top of a much deeper health pool, on an hourly clock.
    </span>
  </li>
  <li>
    <strong>Phoenix</strong>
    <span>
      A rare boss on the 5–7 hour clock. The reward for finding one is
      proportionate to how rarely you will.
    </span>
  </li>
</ul>

## Named in the world, not yet in it

<div className="prose">
  Fractara has far more creatures written than it currently places. Most are
  waiting on a dungeon, an event, or a region to belong to. The one worth
  naming is the <strong>Dragon</strong>: it is fully defined, classed as a
  legend, and carries the same 5–7 hour clock as the rare encounters — but
  nothing in the overworld places one yet. If someone tells you they have seen
  one, they have not.
</div>

<div className="callout callout-rift">
  <div className="callout-title">These numbers are live, and still moving</div>
  <p>
    Everything on this page is what the servers are running right now. It is
    also openly provisional: the combat curve is a starting point that is being
    tuned against real play, and the defence progression in particular is still
    being staged. Expect these values to shift. When they do, this page moves
    with them.
  </p>
</div>