So you’ve just picked up Repel the Rifts and the alien waves are already tearing through your defenses.
Don’t worry, every commander starts somewhere. This Repel the Rifts beginner’s guide is here to help you get your footing, understand the core systems, and actually start surviving those brutal nighttime assaults.
Repel the Rifts is a roguelite tower defense game set on a hostile alien world.
You’re a commander of a mining expedition that has gone very, very wrong, and now inter-dimensional creatures are pouring out of mysterious rifts every single night. Your job is to build up defenses, survey new terrain, collect powerful artifacts, and outlast wave after wave until you can track down the source of it all.
It sounds simple enough, but there’s a lot of depth hiding under the surface.
Here are the best tips for Repel the Rifts to help you survive your first runs and beyond.
Start With a Commander That Suits Your Playstyle
At the beginning of every run, you’ll choose a Commander.
Each one comes with a unique set of three starting towers, a passive ability, and a special active ability. This choice shapes your entire run, so it’s worth thinking about before you just grab whoever looks coolest.
As a beginner, look at the starting towers and ask yourself whether you understand what they do.
Simple, straightforward damage towers are a great starting point before you start experimenting with more conditional or support-heavy commanders.
Once you’ve played a few runs and understand the rhythm of the game, you can branch out and try the more complex options.
Don’t sleep on a commander’s passive ability.
These passive bonuses can quietly carry a run if you build around them, and ignoring them is one of the most common mistakes newer players make.
Understand the Day and Night Cycle
Repel the Rifts runs on a clear loop: survive the night, manage your resources during the day.
During nighttime, waves of inter-dimensional creatures swarm out of the rifts and push toward your base.
During the day, you’re shopping for tower upgrades in the market, surveying new terrain, and making decisions that set you up for the next night.
This rhythm is everything. Never skip over your daytime phase carelessly.
Every purchase and every survey decision has downstream consequences, and the waves only get tougher as the nights stack up.
Getting comfortable with using every moment of the day phase efficiently is one of the biggest skill jumps you can make early on.
Your goal for the main campaign is to survive 25 nights.
After that, you unlock Endless Mode where you can push your defenses to their absolute limit.
Tower Placement Is Everything
This is probably the most important early lesson in Repel the Rifts: geography matters.
Different towers perform better or worse depending on the terrain around them.
Placing a tower on the wrong tile type doesn’t just waste potential, it can leave a huge gap in your defense at exactly the wrong moment.
Before you slap a tower down, hover over the terrain and read what it does.
The game gives you the information you need; you just have to use it.
As new terrain gets revealed through surveying, keep asking yourself whether relocating or adding towers to take advantage of new geography is worth the investment.
You also want to think about chokepoints.
Enemies follow set paths toward your base, so towers that cover the maximum amount of enemy travel time will always outperform towers stuck in corners where enemies only pass once briefly.
Funneling enemies through concentrated fire is a classic tower defense principle, and it absolutely applies here.
Survey Strategically, Don’t Just Expand for the Sake of It
Every other day, you get the opportunity to survey the unknown and expand the map.
This is one of the more unique mechanics in Repel the Rifts, and it’s easy to misuse when you’re new.
Expanding opens up new terrain tiles, which means new opportunities for tower placement and geography bonuses, but it also means more ground to defend.
Don’t expand blindly. Survey in directions that give you favorable geography for the towers you’re already building around.
If you’ve been leaning into a fire-based setup, look for terrain that benefits that style before you commit to a direction. Expanding into terrain that doesn’t help your build is essentially wasted potential.
It’s also worth noting that surveying opens up paths for enemies.
Be mindful of how new terrain connects to your existing defense lines, and make sure you’re not accidentally creating a shortcut for enemy waves.
Be Smart With the Upgrade Market
After surviving each night, you’ll visit the upgrade market to purchase improvements for your towers.
This is where a lot of the strategic depth in Repel the Rifts comes from, upgrades don’t just bump numbers up, they can completely change how a tower functions.
The big beginner mistake here is buying upgrades reactively without a plan.
Instead, decide on a build direction early and buy upgrades that reinforce it.
If you’re going for a high fire-rate setup, focus your spending there. If you’re building around area-of-effect damage, look for upgrades that enhance splash coverage or trigger bonus effects on groups of enemies.
Don’t feel obligated to spend all your currency every day either.
Sometimes saving up for a more powerful upgrade later is the better move than buying a minor bump just because you have the coins.
Resource discipline is a real skill in this game.
Pick Up Artifacts and Actually Build Around Them
Throughout your runs, you’ll discover alien artifacts that add powerful passive effects to your defense.
These aren’t just small stat bonuses, some artifacts can fundamentally alter how your strategy plays out.
Finding the right artifact at the right time can snowball a run into something incredible.
The key with artifacts is to actively build around what you pick up, not just collect them passively.
If you grab an artifact that rewards high attack frequency, start steering your upgrades toward faster-attacking towers.
If an artifact gives bonuses for spreading status effects, look for towers and upgrades that inflict those effects.
Certain artifacts that scale over time (like ones that grant cumulative damage bonuses based on total attacks) are especially powerful in longer runs.
Prioritize artifacts with scaling potential when you spot them, especially if you’re aiming to push into Endless Mode.
Adjust Your Tower Targeting
This is a tip that catches a lot of newer players off guard: your towers can have their targeting priority adjusted.
By default, towers will attack whatever enemy is closest or first in line, but that’s not always the best call.
Some enemy types (particularly high-HP tanky enemies)can soak up a ton of damage while weaker, faster enemies slip past behind them.
Get in the habit of switching certain towers to target highest HP enemies when you know a tough wave is coming.
Burst them down before they can absorb too much of your fire. Similarly, make sure slower DPS towers are focused on enemies they can actually kill before they reach your base rather than wasting shots on targets already being handled elsewhere.
Managing targeting might feel like micro-management at first, but it becomes second nature quickly and can be the difference between barely surviving a wave and cruising through it.
Invest in the Mastery Tree Between Runs
Repel the Rifts has a mastery tree, a meta-progression system that lets you unlock permanent upgrades that carry over between runs.
Every time you play, even if you lose, you’re making progress toward new unlocks that make future runs stronger and more flexible.
Don’t ignore this system. Invest your mastery points consistently and look for upgrades that plug weaknesses in your usual playstyle.
If you keep dying to a particular wave type, see if there’s a mastery node that addresses that.
The mastery tree is also where you unlock deeper potential for specific commanders, so if you have a favorite, check what their tree looks like.
New players sometimes feel like using the mastery tree is “cheating” the difficulty. It isn’t. It’s a core part of the game loop, and the developer has confirmed that the base difficulty is designed to be beatable even without a fully developed tech tree, but those unlocks are there to be used and enjoyed.
Don’t Fear Losing, Every Run Teaches You Something
Repel the Rifts is a roguelite, which means losing is baked into the experience.
Your first handful of runs are going to end badly, and that’s completely expected.
The game has a fair difficulty curve, most deaths in Repel the Rifts are skill-based lessons in disguise, not cheap surprises.
When a run ends, take a moment to think about what specifically killed you.
Was it a particular enemy type you weren’t prepared for? Did you neglect a specific area of the map?
Did you over-invest in upgrades that didn’t synergize?
Identifying those moments is how you improve fast.
The combination of the mastery tree, artifact discovery, and commander unlocks means that every failed run still pushes you forward.
You’re always learning the system and building toward something stronger.
Stick with it, because Repel the Rifts is the kind of game that rewards patience with some deeply satisfying moments once everything clicks.
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Images in this guide are from the Repel the Rifts page on Steam and used under Fair Use.