Mutations in DOSE: Pick One Card, Live With the Cost

Radiation is how you level up in DOSE. Soak up enough dose and you gain a level, and every level comes with a choice: three mutation cards slide in above your action bar and you keep one. This post covers why the cards look the way they do and what they do to your survivor over a run. If you haven't read how dose itself works, start there.

How a mutation pick works

Your first level comes at 100 dose. After that the gaps get wider, because the level curve flattens out the hotter you get. Every level you gain queues one offer. If you jump two levels at once, say off a big kill streak, you see one set of cards with a "+1 WAITING" tag on it, and the next set shows up as soon as you choose.

You get 10 seconds. Press F1, F2 or F3, or click a card. If the timer runs out, the game picks for you based on your class. A Glowstick that ignores the cards will drift toward defensive and dose-heavy picks. A Scavver drifts toward offense and speed.

The game never pauses for this. In co-op, one player's level-up shouldn't freeze three other people mid-fight. So during combat the picker shrinks to a thin strip with just the names and F-key chips, and hovering it opens the full cards again.

Every card has a downside

There are 18 mutations in the current build, and every one has a green line and a red line. Crystal Plating cuts the damage you take by 20% and costs you 10% movement speed. Night Eyes gives you 50% more sight in the dark and fog, but you deal 15% less damage in daylight. Brittle Crystals is the blunt one: 20% more damage dealt, 10% more damage taken.

We did this because a free upgrade isn't really a decision. If every card is just "more", you take the biggest number and stop reading. With a cost on every card, the right pick depends on what you're already carrying and where you're headed. Night Eyes is great in a zone at night and a real problem once the sun comes up.

Some cards change how you play more than they change your stats:

• Leech Veins drains 4 rads into you every time one of your melee swings connects. Stimpaks stop working on you, so only your crew can heal you.
• Static Hair stuns any mutant that hits you for half a second. You also set off every trap and mine near you.
• Bloom fires a flash when you go down that stuns mutants within 12 m for 4 seconds. You pay with 10% less max health.
• Mirror Cells copies the last mutation you took. It's only offered once you already own one, and it lowers your lethal dose by 10%.

Stacking

Mutations stack across the run. A level 6 survivor is carrying six of them, and all their numbers add up. Most cards only show up once per run. Two of them, Thick Hide and Feral Reflex, can be taken up to three times each. Three Thick Hides is 30% less damage taken for 12% less speed, which is a real build for a Glowstick holding a doorway.

Mirror Cells right after a strong pick is the combo people find first. Take Feral Reflex, then Mirror Cells, and you've got its +15% attack speed twice.

Mutations and your dose

A lot of the cards touch dose directly. Those are the ones that make a run tense.

Hungry Cells gives you 20% more dose from everything. More dose means faster levels, and faster levels mean more mutations. It also lowers your lethal dose by 10%, so you hit burn-out sooner. Dense Marrow goes the other way: your lethal dose goes up 15%, and you move 10% slower because you're hauling all that extra bone around.

Glow Gills is for people who like standing in hot pools. You get 25% more dose from pools and crystals, and your glow radius grows by 1 m. Glow matters because mutants find you by it. Your glow starts at 4 m and grows 0.6 m per level, and mutants notice you from twice that distance. So Glow Gills' extra metre means they spot you 2 m sooner. Dim Veins is the opposite card: 2 m less glow so you get found later, and 15% less dose from everything.

Here's a moment that comes up a lot. You're a Scavver at level 5, the beacon is a couple of screens away, and the picker offers Hungry Cells. Taking it means you'll level faster on the way out. It also means the burn-out line just moved closer, and every kill between you and the beacon pushes you toward it a little faster. Pretty often the smart pick is the boring card.

What mutations do to your body

Mutations show up on your model, so your crew can tell how far gone you are without opening a menu. There are four stages:

1. At 3 mutations, glowing veins spread across your body.
2. At 6, crystals start growing out of you: 4 of them, on places like your back and shoulders.
3. At 10, your silhouette gets 12% bigger and the crystals double to 8.
4. At 15 you're a crystal giant, 28% bigger, with 14 growths.

Each stage-up comes with a flash and a little scale pop.

To be honest: with the current numbers, most survivors burn out around level 7 or 8, and a crew that reaches the beacon at about 1,500 dose has had six picks. So the veins and the first crystals are what you'll see in a normal run. The last two stages need more levels than the dose curve usually lets anyone survive. Those numbers may still move while we balance.

Builds we like for each class

Any survivor can take any card, but each class's kit pulls the picks in its own direction. These are combos we keep coming back to.

Glowstick

The Glowstick is the tank, swinging a lead pipe in the middle of the horde. Crystal Plating plus a couple of Thick Hides makes it very hard to kill, and Static Hair punishes every mutant that swings at you. The speed losses add up fast, so lean on your crew to cover distance.

Gamma Lance, a skill you can swap in, already drinks 20% of its damage back as health, and Siphon Pores adds 2% on top. The catch is that Siphon Pores cuts healing from others by 30%.

Medic

The Medic keeps people alive with a pistol from a few steps back. Bloom is great here: if the Medic goes down, the flash buys the crew 4 seconds to get there. Hive Whisper's +10% damage near a crewmate is close to free on a Medic, who is almost always near someone. Third Arm means more stimpaks, but your energy regenerates 15% slower, and a Medic runs on energy.

Scavver

The Scavver is the rifle and the damage. Brittle Crystals and Feral Reflex push damage up hard, and Hollow Bones adds 20% speed for repositioning. All three raise your damage taken, so stack them and you'll fold to the first thing that reaches you.

Rigger

The Rigger fights with fire, turrets and mines, plus a machete for anything close. Third Arm fits because more grenades means more fire on the ground. Brittle Crystals boosts skill damage too, not just the machete.

Glow Bait pulls nearby monsters to a canister for 3 seconds before it blows, and with Brittle Crystals that blast hits 20% harder.

Two numbers we had to change

We run every class through a balance sim with its best greedy five-mutation stack. The rules are simple: it can clear packs at most about 1.8 times faster than without mutations, and it can never become immortal. Two cards broke that.

Static Hair used to stun for a full second per hit. A melee pack basically stun-locked itself on you, and survival went up more than three times from that card alone. It's half a second now. Siphon Pores started at 5% lifesteal, and on a tank's area damage it cancelled out everything they took. It's 2% now. Both still feel good to pick, and neither plays the game for you.

What happens when you extract or die

Mutations belong to one expedition. Levels, mutations and skill points reset every time you head out, even after a clean extraction. Extract, and your dose is banked toward your rank with the crew bonus, and the gear you carried out goes to your stash. Your body starts the next run clean.

Die before you extract and it's all gone at once: the gear on you, the run's dose, your level and your mutations. The defeat screen spells it out, right down to how many mutations you lost. We wanted that to sting a bit. A survivor who rolled Leech Veins and Static Hair plays nothing like one who took Dim Veins and crept to the beacon, and each run should get to be its own story.

If you want to argue about which card is secretly the best, come find us on Discord. After your picks, read how extraction works, or see how the four classes fit together in co-op.