How Radiation Works in DOSE: Dose, Glow and Burn-Out

When we pitch DOSE, the first line is always the same: radiation is your XP. The whole game grew out of that idea, and new players still get it wrong for their first ten minutes. They see a glowing green pool and walk around it. Then it clicks that the pool is the point.

Here's how the dose works in the current build. Some numbers will move as we balance. The shape won't.

Your dose is your XP

There's no separate experience bar in DOSE. Every rad you soak up goes into one number, your dose, and your level comes straight from it. You hit level 1 at 100 dose, level 2 at about 280 and level 4 at 800. The curve flattens as you go, so each level costs more rads than the last one.

Dose feeds your health too. A fresh survivor starts at 100 max HP before gear, and that cap rises as the dose climbs. At 300 rads you're sitting around 133. Every level also brings a mutation pick: three cards, you keep one, and you get 10 seconds to choose so a co-op run never has to pause. Those get their own post: mutations in DOSE.

So far, a normal RPG. The catch is that the extra health doesn't last.

Where the dose comes from

Most of it comes from killing things. Every monster carries some dose, and when it dies, the survivors standing nearby get a share. In a crew that share is split. Solo, you keep all of it. With two of you in range, each gets 70 %. Three get 60 % each, and a full crew of four gets 50 % each. The crew still earns more per kill overall, but nobody gets cooked because their friends kill fast.

That split is a fairly recent change. Before it, every survivor got the full dose from every kill, and a four-player crew would burn out six or seven minutes in, often before anyone had found the beacon. That's punishing people for bringing friends.

Chain kills within about two and a half seconds of each other, and from the third kill on each one adds a bonus point of dose, up to 10 extra. We call it a Massacre, and the chain gets its own audio sting as it grows.

Then there's the ground itself. Hot pools glow green and pay out dose every second you stand in them, somewhere between 14 and 30 a second at the middle depending on the pool, less toward the edges. Crystals are the quick snack: walk into one and you get 60 dose on the spot. Quick Run maps place five hotspots ringed with crystals, which is where you top up before a rough fight.

The glow, and who comes looking for it

Dose makes you glow. Your glow radius starts at 4 metres and grows 0.6 metres per level, and mutants notice you from twice that distance. At level 0 something has to be within about 8 metres to spot you. At level 7 it's more than 16. Under the dose gauge the HUD shows your glow tier: Dim, then Bright from level 4, Blazing from level 7, and Beacon once your light passes 10 metres.

Monsters go after the brightest survivor whose light reaches them, and if two are equally bright, the closer one. Whoever carries the most dose is who the swarm runs at. Fine if that's a Glowstick built to tank. Bad if it's the Scavver who ate every crystal on the map.

Glow Eaters break the usual rules. They're fast mutants with blue glowing veins, and right now about 40 % of far packs bring one along. A Glow Eater skips normal detection and hunts the brightest survivor within 30 metres. Each bite pulls 40 dose out of you, and it heals itself on what it takes. After a bite it ignores taunts for 2 seconds, so the Glowstick has to time Flare Up between bites. Our bestiary entry sums it up: "It does not want your flesh. It wants the light inside it."

The good news is it only has 90 HP. Burst it down before the second bite and keep it away from whoever's carrying the most. Picture it: you're at 1,700 dose, the beacon is two screens away, and a Glow Eater just came out of the fog.

Rad sickness and burning out

Here's the catch from earlier. Max HP climbs with your dose, peaks, and then radiation sickness starts eating it. Without gear, the peak sits around 665 dose at about 142 max HP. Past that, every extra rad costs you health. Somewhere near 1,000 dose a RAD SICKNESS strip shows up over your health bar with how much max HP you've lost. Once you're below 40 % of your peak it turns red and reads EXTRACT SOON. A pale tick on the bar marks where your max used to be.

If the dose pushes your max HP all the way to zero, you burn out. For a survivor without gear that happens at about 2,250 dose, around level 7. Medics shrug off sickness a bit better and last to roughly 2,800. A burn-out ends your run. You go down for good, your carried loot drops in a bag, and unlike a normal downed crewmate you can't be dragged to the beacon. The rest of the crew can still get out.

It's harsh on purpose. Dying without extracting costs you everything you carried, along with the run's dose, levels and mutations. We looked at a secure slot and some kind of insurance, and we said no. Losing a big run should sting. That's what makes a clean extraction feel good.

Gear, mutations and sharing the load

You can bend the curve, just never for free. Gear rolls rad resistance, which cuts how much dose you take in, plus bonuses to your lethal dose and glow modifiers that make you dimmer or brighter by up to 60 %. In our balance runs, lead-lined gear roughly doubles how long you can stand in a hot zone before burning out. It's a real choice, never immunity.

Mutations work the same way, with a price on every one. Dense Marrow raises your lethal dose by 15 % but slows you down 10 %. Hungry Cells gives you 20 % more dose from everything and lowers your lethal dose by 10 %. Dim Veins shrinks your glow by 2 metres so mutants find you later, and in exchange you gain 15 % less dose. If you want to reach Beacon at all, you'll need some of this, because a bare survivor burns out before their light gets that far.

Crews can also move dose around. The Glowstick's Siphon pulls dose out of every ally nearby, and the Medic's Transfusion draws it out of one crewmate who's close to the edge. 15 % is lost on the way. When a crew moves dose like this, everyone who extracts banks the crew average, so you can't funnel it all into one player to pump up a single rank.

Storms and boss arenas

You can't camp a crystal patch forever. On a Quick Run map, four minutes in, a storm wall starts sweeping from the side you dropped in toward the beacon, closing the map one strip at a time. Outside it you take damage that keeps growing, plus 6 dose a second. The closer you get to the wall, the more the sky goes green with the rad storm look. In the open-world expedition the storm closes in over a much longer window.

Boss arenas have the opposite rule. While an extraction boss is alive, its wall blocks most of the rads, and inside it you only gain dose at 10 %. The game tells you in chat as the guardian wakes up. We added this when boss fights grew to five or ten minutes. Every add kill was paying dose to the whole arena, and the math said a crew would get sick in the middle of a fight it couldn't leave. Lowering add dose wouldn't fix the boss's own payout, and moving the sickness curve would change every hazard outside, so we tied one rule to a wall you can see. Your dose still creeps up, and showing up too hot still hurts.

Banking your dose at extraction

None of this counts until you get it out. Find a beacon, light the flare and hold the ring for 75 seconds while everything nearby comes at you. Everyone who makes it out banks their dose times a crew bonus: 1.1 for two survivors, 1.2 for three, 1.3 for four. A crewmate who's downed but not burned out can be dragged along once the flare is lit, and they bank half. The full breakdown is in extraction in DOSE.

Banked dose is your season rank. Right now the tiers are Clean, Exposed at 1,000, Hot at 5,000, Ghoul at 15,000 and Reactor at 40,000. Meltdown takes Reactor points plus a spot in the top 1 % of the board. Points shrink by 5 % a week, so you have to keep extracting. Ranks also open up classes: the Medic unlocks at Exposed and the Rigger at Hot.

We're still tuning all of this, and the best feedback is people telling us when they got greedy and paid for it. Come share yours on our Discord. If you want to know who should carry the glow in your crew, read DOSE classes and co-op next.