How to Play Funguys Swarm

Game Overview

Funguys Swarm is a survivor-style roguelite that combines real-time arena combat with deck-building upgrade mechanics. You control a Funguy character — a charming mushroom-based warrior — fighting against endless waves of the Fire King’s minions across multiple arenas. Each arena run is self-contained: you enter, survive escalating enemy waves, collect upgrades, fight a boss, and either win or return to the Sanctuary to try again.

The core appeal is build diversity. With seven elements, dozens of skills, multiple pets, three equippable Treelings, Fire Curses, relics, and weapon upgrade paths, no two runs feel identical.

Movement and Positioning

Your character moves freely in all directions using WASD or the left analog stick. There are no movement restrictions in most arenas — the entire arena is your maneuvering space.

Dodging is entirely dash-based. Press Space or your controller’s jump button to dash in the direction you are moving. Dash grants invulnerability frames (i-frames) during the dash animation, allowing you to pass through enemy attacks without taking damage. Dash charges are limited and can be upgraded through Sanctuary progression and skill selections.

Your weapon fires automatically in the direction of your mouse cursor (or right analog stick on controller). You do not need to press an attack button. This means your attention can remain on movement and positioning while your weapon handles continuous damage output.

Combat System

Weapons are the foundation of your damage output. Each character starts with a default weapon, but additional weapons can be purchased from the Shroom Shop or found as rare drops during arena runs. Weapons have four upgradeable attributes: base damage, attack speed, critical hit chance, and critical hit damage multiplier.

Skills are special abilities that activate based on their trigger type. Skills are drawn from your chosen element and are offered during level-up screens. Each skill has multiple upgrade paths that change its behavior.

Passive upgrades provide permanent stat boosts that apply throughout the run. These include elemental resistance, additional dash charges, pickup radius increases, and element-specific multipliers.

Elemental effects are status conditions applied by certain weapons and skills. Freeze temporarily immobilizes enemies. Shock causes enemies to take increased damage from all sources. Poison deals damage over time. Burn deals periodic fire damage.

Level-Up and Upgrade Selection

When your XP bar fills, you level up and the game pauses momentarily while three upgrade cards are presented. Each card represents a possible upgrade: a weapon stat boost, a new or upgraded skill, a passive ability, or a Fire Curse modifier.

Choosing upgrades strategically is the core skill that separates good runs from great ones. A strong build requires synergy between your weapon type, skill triggers, and passive bonuses.

Banish allows you to discard upgrade cards you do not want. Using it no longer immediately concludes the level-up screen — you can banish multiple undesirable cards before selecting your final upgrade.

Arena Progression

Each arena has a timer that fills as you defeat enemies. When the timer reaches maximum, the arena boss spawns. Defeating the boss completes the arena and triggers the next stage’s unlock. Carrot Farm is always available first. Frozen Pond unlocks after your first Carrot Farm completion. Lava Jungle follows, then Egglosseum. The final arena, Hellscape, unlocks after completing Egglosseum.

Arena difficulty scales within each run based on time elapsed and enemy kill count. This means longer runs face progressively harder enemy compositions.

The Forest Sanctuary

The Sanctuary is your hub area accessible between arena runs. It contains the Weapon Upgrade station for permanent weapon improvements, the Skill Shrine for skill power and cooldown upgrades, the Pet Sanctuary for equipping combat companions, the Sanctuary Tree for Treeling management, and the Shroom Shop for purchasing weapons, relics, and items.

Meta-Progression: Forest Strength

The 1.0 update introduced Forest Strength, which is the most important meta-progression system in the game. Each arena you complete grants a Forest Strength point. These points unlock permanent upgrades that affect all future runs, including the ability to ban certain card types from appearing during level-ups, bonus starting equipment, and reduced Fire Curse penalties.

Saving and Progress

All Sanctuary progress, Forest Strength points, Starpath completions, and unlocked characters are saved automatically to your Steam cloud save (or console equivalent). There is no cross-platform save transfer.