[Mod] Engineer's Gauntlet — co-op wave defense

[TheMolunga]

Hold the line. Plant your Engine, then weather escalating waves that march straight for it — they won't be kited into a maze, so it's just you and a thickening swarm. Any character can play engineer.

 🔧 Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3753820770



 What it is
 - Craft and place the Engine, then activate it to start a run. Waves spawn around it on an escalating timer and path straight to it. Survive the configured number of waves to win — and if the Engine falls, repair the wreck with cutstone and run it again.
 - A defense layer that isn't Winona-locked: a buildable auto-turret (Gauntlet Sentry) that acquires the nearest threat, lobs an AOE shot, and self-repairs; and a minion you own and command (Gauntlet Sentinel) — right-click the Sentinel Commander to tell it to defend a point, follow you, or focus an enemy.



 - Three attacker types ramp in as the run hardens: a baseline Besieger, a fast fragile Swarmling, and a tanky Breaker that hunts your defenses specifically.



 - Configurable wave size (gentle warm-up → meat grinder), wave count, and pacing.
 - Built entirely on recolored shipped art — no new assets.

 For the technically curious: I built this as a server-authoritative netcode study — all gameplay truth on the master sim, clients sending validated intent, quantized/diffed netvars for state with batched RPCs for events, and a live naive-vs-optimized toggle with the before/after measured. There's a writeup with file:line citations to both my code and the shipped DST patterns it follows: https://github.com/Maliik-B/dst-engineers-gauntlet/blob/main/docs/netcode-decisions.md

 

 

 

 
Feedback very welcome — especially on balance (it's tuned solo so far) and co-op scaling. Hope you enjoy holding the line. ⚙️