Bosses
Learn the tells or wipe trying
Some beacons have a guardian, and the bottom of every dungeon has a warden. DOSE bosses are raid-style fights built for a crew, with big telegraphs, blunt callouts and a fair bit of wiping before it clicks. Here's who's waiting, without the cheat sheet.
01
Two kinds of boss
Extraction bosses guard the beacons. Light the flare at the wrong one and something the size of a building wakes up next to it, and nobody goes home until it's dead. There are 15 of them across the wasteland. They drop no loot. You fight them for the way out, for rank points and for the story you tell afterwards.
Dungeon bosses wait at the bottom of the second floor, behind a big gate, and those are the loot bosses. There are 20 of them, five for each dungeon type. Each one is built around a single signature trick, which sounds simple right up until the trick happens. The chest they leave behind is why crews keep going down.
02
Built to be read, then learned
Every attack that matters has a tell. It gets a shape on the ground, a sound of its own and a blunt callout under the health bar, and it never relies on colour alone. Bosses shift through phases as they lose health, and the game warns you before each one. The camera pulls out so the whole crew can see what's coming.
Expect to wipe the first time you meet a new one. The fights reuse a small set of jobs, like stacking up, spreading out and killing the right add first, so what you learn on one boss carries over to the next. Hit hard enough together and even a titan staggers. Hoarding your big hits for the right moment is half the skill.
03
The Boss Board keeps score
Every extraction boss kill gets a letter grade and rank points on the Boss Board. The grade cares about how fast you killed it. The points also care about how fast you got there. Par times stretch for smaller crews, so a duo isn't held to a full crew's pace, and a wipe scores nothing at all.
The board keeps the best runs for each boss, split by crew size, plus an overall list. Grades run from S down to D. Someone will always have a faster time than you, and they will mention it in chat. That's rather the point.
04
Guardians of the beacons
Here are four of the extraction bosses, as they look in the game right now. Each one owns a biome and fights in a ring around its beacon that won't let you leave. We're not printing their move lists here. Finding out is half the fun, and the other half is the Boss Board.
The Behemoth
the first thing the old world built that the new one couldn't kill. The chains belong to whoever tried.
Mother Lode
the crater never cooled, because she lives under it and grows glass the way a queen grows a brood.
Cinderwyrm
it came down burning with the bombs and never quite landed.
Rimefather
the Rime Cult says he is the winter itself. Up close, he is worse.
05
Four more who want a word
Not every guardian is a single big monster. One brings a crowd, one brings a whole overpass, one brings an airbase and one brings the scrapyard with him. All four are crew fights first. A solo survivor can try any of them, and we admire the optimism.
The Pale Shepherd
every husk on the flats walks toward his bell, and he walks them toward the dosed.
Kingclaw
a crab that outgrew every shell on the coast and moved into a highway overpass instead.
The Hive Sovereign
the army kept something in Hangar Six. The base is her hive now.
Junkheart
a husk fell into the car crusher with the crane magnet running. The yard crowned what came out.
06
The bosses on the roof
The building district has its own bosses, one for each kind of tower, and they live at the top. You climb floor by floor through their staff, their pets and their bad decisions, then meet them on the roof or in the last hall under it. Beat one and the zipline unlocks, which is the fastest way down that doesn't involve falling.
Expect a colonel who held his tower for forty years on canned food and spite, a scientist who wrote the containment protocol and then wrote the exception, and a hospital doctor forty years into her night shift. Each tower boss brings one trick from its own building, and the building is very much on its side.
07
There are more of them
Eight renders is not the whole roster. There are 15 extraction bosses, 20 dungeon bosses, a boss on top of every kind of tower and 32 mini-bosses roaming the wastes with one nasty habit each. Something under the salt flats breathes. Something in the old theatre is still singing. We'll let you find those yourselves.
See it for yourself
The Bible only shows you the edges. The rest you find out in a run, with friends, under a green sky.