Level Death

A God Hand-inspired dynamic difficulty mod for ULTRAKILL.

Level Death adds a performance-based difficulty director that reacts to how well you are playing. Stylish play raises the meter. Higher meter levels make enemy waves more dangerous through controlled upgrades, replacements, duplicates, enrage, and radiance.

The goal is simple:

Play well, make Hell worse.

Features

Four Level Death phases

The meter has no idle time decay, so quiet rooms and downtime will not punish you.

Wave-aware difficulty director

Level Death looks at enemy spawn waves instead of rolling randomly for every single enemy. It scans the wave, then makes a small number of controlled changes.

This keeps levels recognizable while still letting the game escalate when you are playing well.

Small waves are protected:

Single-enemy encounters can still become enraged or radiant, but they will not suddenly become obvious doubles or triples.

Smarter enemy pressure

Depending on your meter and settings, Level Death can:

• Enrage existing enemies
• Make enemies tier-1 radiant
• Replace some enemies with stronger enemies
• Duplicate safe enemies from the current wave
• Pull from a curated global enemy pool

Replacements are intended to be stronger than the enemy being replaced. The mod is designed to increase pressure, not act like a randomizer.

Curated global enemy pool

By default, Level Death can draw from a curated global pool of normal enemies. This allows stronger enemies to appear earlier when the meter is high enough.

Bosses, Idols, Prime Souls, major set-piece entities, and other special or unstable enemies are intentionally blocked.

Prefer a safer experience? Switch the enemy pool to Limited Enemy Pool, which focuses on enemies already seen in the current scene/session.

Damage and death behavior

ULTRAKILL rewards aggressive play, so Level Death does not heavily punish occasional hits.

• Isolated hits cause a small meter penalty.
• Consecutive hits within a short window cause larger penalties.
• Death halves your current meter by default instead of resetting it to zero.

Configgy support

Level Death supports Configgy for in-game configuration. It also generates a normal BepInEx config file after first launch:

ULTRAKILL/BepInEx/config/oai.ultrakill.leveldeath.cfg

Common settings include:

• Enable or disable the mod
• Show or hide the meter
• Change the starting difficulty
• Choose Global Enemies or Limited Enemy Pool
• Tune duplicates, replacements, and enemy upgrades
• Enable Cyber Grind-only mode
• Adjust damage and death penalties

Note: changing the starting difficulty applies when a scene loads. Restart the current level or load another level after changing it.

Installation

Mod manager

Install through Thunderstore Mod Manager or r2modman and launch ULTRAKILL through the manager.

Manual install

1. Install BepInEx for ULTRAKILL.
2. Install Configgy if you want the in-game config menu.
3. Copy LevelDeath.dll into:

ULTRAKILL/BepInEx/plugins/

Compatibility notes

Level Death changes enemy spawning and enemy difficulty behavior. It may conflict with mods that heavily modify enemy spawning, enemy AI, Cyber Grind waves, radiance, or custom difficulty systems.

If a campaign arena behaves strangely, try switching to Limited Enemy Pool or disabling type replacements in the config.

Version

0.7.3

Highlights:

• Four-phase Level Death meter from 0% to 400%
• Wave-based difficulty director
• Small-wave protection
• Configgy support
• Enraged and radiant enemy upgrades
• Curated global enemy pool
• Safer duplicate behavior around Idol-blessed enemies
• Death now halves the meter instead of resetting it

0.8.1

• Fixes to certain enemies (Filth and Strays) not getting replaced by stronger enemies. Prelude is now ironically one of the hardest stages to clear on Level Death.

0.8.0

• Sentries, Insurrectionists, Mirror Reapers and Minotaurs can now appear.
• New Feature: 'Large Enemies', includes Hideous Masses, Insurrectionists, Mirror Reapers and Minotaurs. Large enemies require at least five non-Filth natural enemies in the wave, require ground below, cannot replace flying enemies, and reduce other spawns when one appears. Large enemies are also 50% less common and have a high cooldown.
• Added cooldowns to 'mini-boss' and 'boss' enemies. These don't prevent them from spawning, but make it less likely they'll be chosen.
• Increased damage meter loss by 30% by default through Meter -> DamagePenaltyMultiplier.
• Added protection for softlock-prone arenas: if a natural spawn wave contains two or more Maurices, Level Death will not type-replace those Maurices. (For some reason, replacing Maurices was softlock sensitive)
• Retuned enemy rarity: Guttertanks are more common, Hideous Mass are rarer.
• Removed Very Cancerous Rodent and Puppets from the spawn pool.
• Optimized a bit

0.7.3

• Death/respawn now keeps a configurable fraction of the current meter instead of resetting to zero.
• Added Meter -> DeathMeterRetainedMultiplier, default 0.5, so death halves the current Level Death percentage.
• Added a short guard so one death does not get penalized twice if both Die and Respawn hooks fire.

0.7.2

• Fixed v0.7.1 compile errors caused by direct EnemyIdentifier references inside the clone idol-sanitizer.
• Idol/blessed-state checks now use reflection consistently, matching the rest of Level Death's compatibility layer.

0.7.1

• Fixed duplicated enemies inheriting Idol/blessed runtime state from the source/template.
• Level Death now skips Idol-blessed enemies as duplicate/replacement sources when clone-state cleanup is enabled.
• Added Advanced Safety -> RemoveInheritedIdolBlessingFromClones, enabled by default.
• Clarified that StartingDifficulty is applied on scene load, so changing it mid-level requires restarting or loading a new level.

0.7.0

• Added small-wave protection.
• Cleaned up config names and sections for Configgy/BepInEx.
• Updated README and manifest to v0.7.0.