A Field Guide to Things That Want to Leak

Today's post is a bestiary. td-survivors has about 23 regular enemies that walk the path trying to reach the exit (each one that gets there is called a "leak," hence the title), and I want to show you all of them. But not as a wall of stat blocks, because that would be boring and you'd close the tab. Instead, here's the design idea I keep coming back to: every enemy is a tiny lecture. Each one exists to punish a specific lazy strategy, or to teach you a specific counter. Once you look at them that way, the roster stops being "monsters" and starts being a checklist of bad habits the game wants to break you of.

If you're new here, the shape of the game is in post 04: fixed path, tower defense chassis, Vampire Survivors XP orbs and level-up cards bolted on top. The towers doing the shooting got their own writeup in post 05, and a lot of what follows is really about how these enemies pick fights with those towers.

Usual honesty break first: none of the art is final. Every sprite here is Kenney's CC0 top-down TD tileset, reused shamelessly. Most enemies are literally one of a handful of base sprites, just scaled by how big the thing is meant to be. (The bosses, in a later post, are usually a Splitter scaled way up until it looks scary.) Sounds and music are Juhani Junkala's CC0 packs, the font is "Press Start 2P," and yes, "td-survivors" is still a placeholder name. Programmer art all the way down.

The grunts: the ones that teach you the verbs

These are the plain enemies. No gimmick, no lecture, just the baseline you measure everything else against.

• Normie is the enemy in its purest form. Some HP, some speed, walks the path, dies to bullets. It exists so the other enemies have something to be a variation of.
• Speedy is Normie who skipped leg day and did nothing but cardio. Fast and fragile. Its whole job is to outpace your slow towers: a tower with a long reload will watch it sprint clean out of range between shots. Speedy is the game asking, politely, whether all your DPS is tied up in big slow guns.
• Splitter is tanky and, on death, bursts into two Minis (little half-size versions that keep walking). Kill one thing, now you have two things. It's the enemy that teaches you a full-clear takes longer than it looks.
• Brood is the one that punishes procrastination. While it's alive it lays a Mini every 5 seconds. Ignore it for a while and one enemy quietly becomes ten. Brood is a to-do list: the longer you leave it, the worse it gets.

The "read the room" enemies: each one counters a strategy

This is the meat of the bestiary. Every enemy in this section exists because there's some comfy, lazy way to play, and this monster is here to make that way stop working.

Gravekin eats the dead. It absorbs nearby corpses to heal, and it physically grows as it does, so a Gravekin walking through a fresh killing field arrives at your last tower fat and full. Lesson: killing everything in a neat pile in front of one tower has a downside now.

Medic heal-pulses the enemies around it. On its own it's harmless, but escorting a pack it turns your chip damage into a Sisyphus routine. The Medic is basically the reason aim modes exist: if your tower only ever shoots the frontmost enemy, it will happily ignore the one healing everyone. Sometimes the right target is not the closest one.

Troll just regenerates. Constantly. Hit it for a chunk, blink, and the chunk is back. You cannot out-click a Troll with burst damage the way you'd like to, because raw hits get undone. The answer is damage-over-time: burn or poison it, and the regen loses the tug-of-war. The Troll is a walking advertisement for status effects (more on those below).

Berserker is a trap disguised as a weakling. Below 50% HP it takes +25% damage, which sounds like a reward for hurting it. Except it also moves 60% faster the moment it drops under half, so all your gentle chip damage does is kick it into overdrive and send it sprinting for the exit while your slow towers whiff. Berserker wants you to nibble. The correct move is to burst it down in one window or leave it entirely. No half measures.

Bulwark projects a frontal barrier: anyone ahead of it takes 40% less damage. This one is sneaky, because it punishes the single most natural aiming instinct in tower defense: target whoever's first, closest to the exit. Do that with a Bulwark in the pack and you're pouring damage into the one enemy it's specifically protecting. Bulwark says: stop autopiloting your target priority.

Shieldbearer carries a shield that eats the first 5 hits entirely, regardless of how big each hit is. Five pebbles, five cannonballs, doesn't matter, all five bounce. This is a hard counter to the Sniper and its one enormous shot: your beautiful crit lands on the shield and does nothing. Against a Shieldbearer, five tiny fast hits beat one big slow one, which is a very different tower than the one that wrecks everything else.

Brute is Shieldbearer's mirror twin. Instead of eating whole hits, it has flat armor that subtracts 5 from every hit. A tower that fires a firehose of 3-damage pellets does zero to a Brute (3 minus 5, floored at nothing). A tower that lands 40-damage haymakers barely notices. Shieldbearer hates big hits, Brute hates small ones. Bring both kinds of tower or bring regrets.

Hopper blinks 1.5 units forward every 4 seconds. In practice it teleports out from under your slow shells right as they'd land, so anything with a long travel time keeps kissing empty path. Hopper is the game telling your artillery to account for the fact that the target won't be there when the shell arrives.

Phantom phases out on a cycle and goes fully untargetable for a stretch, then pops back. Single-shot towers spend half the fight with no valid target and just stand there. The counter is continuous and area damage, the Flame tower especially: it doesn't care that the Phantom flickers, because it's already burning the ground the Phantom is standing on.

Slime leaves a speed-boost trail on the path behind it, and other enemies ride it, so a Slime up front is quietly making the whole wave faster. The saving grace: the trail is flammable. Set it alight and the shortcut becomes a hazard. Slime is a little systems-design joke that mostly works.

Frost Elemental exists purely to make the frost-only players sweat. It's immune to slow, and it actually speeds UP when hit by frost, so your comfy freeze-everything build is now a buff dispenser. Its one weakness: +50% burn damage. The Frost Elemental is a personal callout to anyone who solved the whole game with one Frost tower and stopped thinking.

Thief vacuums up any uncollected XP orbs it passes. If you've been lazy about hoovering orbs with your cursor (see post 04 for why that's a thing you do with the mouse), the Thief walks off with your level-ups. It doesn't hurt your lives. It hurts your progress, which is somehow worse.

Saboteur jams a nearby tower for 3 seconds, graying it out and shutting it up mid-fight. This is the enemy that finally adds a downside to the classic move of hugging the path with your short-range flamethrower for maximum uptime. Park your best tower right on the path and the Saboteur strolls by and mutes it at the worst possible moment. Spacing is a decision again.

A quick word on status effects

Two of those counters lean on damage-over-time, so the systems deserve a paragraph, because they're how you actually beat the Troll and the armored tanks.

Burn is a damage-over-time that keeps the highest DPS applied and stacks its duration. Reapply a stronger burn and it upgrades; reapply a weaker one and you just top up the clock. It's a clean model that avoids the classic "spam the weak burn to overwrite the strong one" exploit.

Poison works the opposite way: up to 5 independent stacks, each one ticking on its own timer. A single poison tower barely tickles, but stack five and you've got a proper acid bath. Poison rewards volume; burn rewards a single hard hit. Between them, every regenerating or armored thing in the bestiary has an answer.

The dormant mimic, a.k.a. how the game punishes greed

I saved the best for last, because it's the only enemy in the game that's also a jump-scare.

Meet the dormant mimic (internally, the Doppel Orb). It sits just off the path, perfectly still, disguised as a big fat juicy XP orb. Not a normal orb. A premium one. The kind of orb that, when you see it, your greedy little cursor drifts toward it on pure instinct before your brain has voted.

And the instant your cursor gets close enough to "collect" it: the mimic wakes up, reveals itself, and sprints for the exit at a genuinely alarming speed. It was never XP. It was a monster doing an impression of your reward. It drops double XP, sure, but only if you can actually kill it, and it did not give you much runway to do that.

It is pure jump-scare, it gets me every single time, and it is comfortably my favorite thing in the game.

Fittingly, it's also a menace behind the scenes. A dormant mimic recently found a way to block a stage victory outright: it sat there, technically still on the field, refusing to count as dead or gone, so the win condition just... never fired. Even the placeholder monsters find new ways to break the build. I fixed it. Probably.

Next time

That's the trash mobs. Next post, the enemies get health bars: five bosses, five completely different ways for a run to fall apart, over in post 07. Bring poison. See you on the path.