Iron Wizard mode is a game mode in later GemCraft games.
GemCraft Chapter 2[]
In GemCraft 2: Chasing Shadows, Iron Wizard mode is exclusive to the Steam version of the game. The player must have a wizard level of 100 in order to unlock it, after which a new game on a different slot must be started to play it. In this mode, you play all levels as in the normal game but with certain modifications:
- No XP, leveling, shadow cores, battle traits. difficulty choice, talisman, endurance.
- Achievements don't give skill points.
- Many achievements are not possible (given the play restrictions).
- Open tome chambers to collect skills.
- At the beginning, you start with 5 orblets. Unlock wizard towers to gather orblets which are heavier than in normal mode (slow down monsters that carry them by 65%), provide no mana gain bonus, and incur a 2% mana gain penalty when taken out of the battlefield.
- Beating a field (including vision fields) gives 5 skill points.
Trivia
- There is an image bug with the orb of presence, a second, oval-like orb appears on the lower right portion of it when the orb itself appears. This is actually supposed to be the orb's shadow and is present with the normal orb as well.
- The orb and orblets are red.
- The hextiles have a red tint.
- Due to the lack of a difficulty choice, the shapes of the field tokens are different. They all have only one hole which gets filled in with a white glow when the field is beaten.
- Similarly, fields that normally require you to beat another field on Glaring difficulty unlock when you beat that field despite the lack of an explicit Glaring difficulty.
- While XP cannot be gained by calling early waves, mana can still be gotten this way.
- Due to the lack of wizard level, the mana regeneration rate is constant and very low (39/min on mana pool level 1). However, vision fields use different presets, resulting in much higher mana regeneration rates than regular fields.
GemCraft: Frostborn Wrath[]
Iron Wizard mode was added on the March 10 2021 update to GemCraft: Frostborn Wrath. It has the following differences from Frostborn/Chilling modes:
- The Beam skill is given at the start.
- The wave counts and monster HP are increased for every field.
- The wizard tower on field L5 has additional locks.
- There are other minor map changes, for example on field P5 it is normally impossible to build towers, but since stashes can only be destroyed by gems in towers, extra paths are added on this field that contain the stashes and where towers can be built.
- No XP, leveling, talisman, traits, shadow cores, endurance and trial modes.
- Achievements don't give skill points.
- 6 skill points are given for the first win on each field.
- Wizard Stashes are not present. Instead an iron, brass and bronze stash (their HP and armor increases by orders of magnitude in that order) are added to every field, which are present until they are opened. They usually contain skill points, but some of them contain skill tomes or field tokens.
- Due to the lack of the three battle modes, field tokens are lit up differently. They retain their three-holed shapes, but the holes are filled in depending on which stashes you opened. The lights also have different colors from their standard mode counterparts: the one for an iron stash is white, the one for a brass stash is yellow and the one for a bronze stash is orange. There is no benefit of replaying a field with all three holes lit up.
- Many achievements are not possible (given the play restrictions). This includes achievements needed to unlock the Hidden Mods, making these unavailable in Iron Wizard mode. The following "Hidden Mod Key" achievements are unavailable:
- Fully Lit, since the endurance and trial modes are unavailable.
- Multiline, since the talisman is not available.
- Disciple, since trial mode is not available.
- Blue Wand, because there is no Wizard Level.