Systems
& Method

Health and time to kill

Every player and every standard enemy in Horde has 1500 health. That single number drives every kill-time figure on this site, so the maths is worth knowing.

Time to kill subtracts one shot because the first round leaves the barrel immediately. A weapon that kills in one shot has a time to kill of 0.00s no matter how slow it fires. That is why the Longshot and the Lancer both read 2400 damage per second while feeling nothing alike in a fight.

Difficulty never buffs enemies

This is the single most useful thing in the files. Nothing in the game raises enemy health or enemy damage by difficulty. Every tier changes you instead: your health, your damage output, how many times you can go down, and how long you bleed out. A Drone on Casual and a Drone on Inconceivable are the same Drone.

Read down the health column and the difficulty curve is obvious. Inconceivable gives you 600 effective health against Casual's 3000, a five-fold swing, while the thing shooting at you never changes. Your damage only drops to 0.66×, so enemies do not take much longer to kill. You just die far faster.

Horde and Siege tiers

Horde runs its own four-tier ladder: Rookie, Infantry, Commander, Allfather. It uses the same settings block as the campaign, but the values could not be pinned down, so they are not printed here. The files do confirm a promotion system that raises class stats specifically for Allfather, and that the squad perk pools are difficulty-tiered.

The point-blank window

The Gnasher gets a flat damage multiplier inside a set distance, and falls off outside it. In Horde that window is 20 metres deep, which is enormous, but the multiplier is only 1.75×. In Versus the window is much tighter and the multiplier is 2.5×.

Horde and Versus are tuned separately

Weapons are tuned once as a baseline, then each mode layers overrides on top. Versus has a full set of its own damage values. Horde and Siege have 26 override entries and not one of them touches a damage stat, so Horde fires the raw baseline weapon.

• Lancer: 180 in Horde, 75 in Versus. A 2.4× gap.
• Gnasher: 80 in Horde, 125 in Versus. One of only three weapons buffed for PvP.
• Longshot: 1200 in Horde, 900 in Versus.

If you have seen a damage number for E-Day somewhere else and it does not match this site, check which mode it came from first. Most published figures are Versus, because that is what the beta let people test.

How these numbers were read

Weapon tuning lives in a blackboard system that stores values without field names. The names are gameplay tags in a separate list, and the values are a flat stream. Matching one to the other is the whole problem.

• The value stream was aligned against the slot list using sequence alignment, scoring each candidate on whether the record type agreed with what the tag name implies, and whether the value was plausible for that tag.
• Any file where a single check disagreed was thrown out. 138 files were discarded.
• On the Gnasher, the accepted alignment scores 76 checks correct and 0 wrong.

The method reproduces figures that were known before it existed, which is the real test: Gnasher 125 with its 2.5× bonus, Breechshot 500 with a 3.0 headshot, Longshot 900/2.0, Hammerburst 65, Lancer 75, Vulcan 120, Gut-Puncher 1500, Torque Bow 500, and three damage falloff curves matched exactly.

Mod lists come from a different and much more reliable place: the the game's own item list, which names every mod entry directly. That is why the count is exactly 176 and why it is higher than what the customisation screen shows you at any one time.

What is still missing

Listed plainly, because a guide that hides its gaps is worse than one that has them.