Every Day We Fight Forever War Mode Explained: Unlocks and Rules

Every Day We Fight Forever War mode is an endless post-campaign challenge where players battle through increasingly difficult cycles. Completed runs allow you to keep earned equipment or reset to level one with only a dart gun and teleporter.

Unlocking and Entering the Post-Campaign Loop

Forever War mode unlocks immediately after completing the main campaign. Rather than returning the squad to a standard title screen, the mode sets up an ongoing combat cycle where you continue engaging hostile Rifter forces across the city map. Each finished cycle transitions directly into the next, marked on the interface by indicators such as Forever Mode +1.

The structure differs fundamentally from Iron Man mode. Iron Man is selected at the start of a brand-new campaign to introduce roguelite death penalties that reset portions of your progress. Forever War mode serves exclusively as an endgame continuation loop. You can use manholes to fast travel between districts and the sewer hideout, stocking gear and tuning your squad before picking the next combat encounter.

Starting Loadout Selection

When initiating a new loop within Forever War mode, the game presents two distinct loadout formats. You can preserve all progression accumulated across your campaign and earlier cycles, or strip the squad down to a fresh start.

The Level 1 reset provides two specific tools for navigation and survival:

1. Resonator Darts: These allow fighters to destroy incrustations blocking pathways in the environment. In active combat, hitting a Rifter with a dart encrusts them in webbing, preventing them from acting while making them temporarily immune to incoming damage.
2. Teleporter: This item costs 10 Action Points (AP) to activate. It moves a character across a wider area than 10 AP of normal foot movement would cover, bypassing terrain obstacles when overhead ceilings permit.

Enemy Stat Scaling and Cycle Progression

Every cycle in Forever War mode increases the difficulty parameters of Rifter units. Enemies receive larger health pools, stronger shield values, and heavier damage profiles. Combat encounters are randomized across standard skirmishes, set pieces, and boss fights, meaning unit compositions and cover layouts reshuffle each time you enter a zone.

Tactical encounters require careful handling of enemy capabilities:

• Strikers: Melee units that can teleport into range. While they cannot teleport and strike in the exact same move, their melee attacks ignore shields and armor entirely. Strikers also carry proximity reaction triggers that retaliate against units moving too close.
• Enforcers: Heavily armored units equipped with protective plates. Direct shots to the head or body deal minimal damage until armor chunks are blown off by explosive strikes or targeted fire to exposed areas like the legs.
• Sentinels and Grenadiers: Enemies utilizing defensive energy shielding and area-of-effect explosives. Electric status effects, such as retaliation shock deployed by holograms, destroy Rifter shields instantly.

Players can modify baseline modifiers in the game menu before entering encounters. The customizable settings let you adjust incoming damage, enemy stats, scrap payout rates, and experience multipliers to match your chosen tier alongside the game's Nightmare or Hard difficulty presets.

Managing Reactions and Squad Upgrades

Combat survival across endless loops relies heavily on action economy and squad triggers. Each fighter and enemy possesses reflex actions that execute outside their active phase.

• Vivian brings defensive crowd control. Her deployable hologram attracts enemy fire, and upgrading her tree can apply electric shocks that remove shields when targets shoot the decoy. She can also trigger kill assist shots when an ally leaves an enemy with low health.
• Leo supports fire lanes and resources. Through Covering Fire, he shoots enemies that attack his teammates. His skill tree also features AP donation upgrades, allowing him to spend AP to supply his allies with action pools.
• Dylan controls close-quarters space. His Proximity Punch automatically triggers when an enemy enters his melee zone, knocking the Rifter down and ignoring energy shielding. This ability can be paired with skills that drop smoke clouds to blind nearby shooters and restore health.

Skills can be refunded at any time in the character menu without penalty. This allows you to reconfigure character builds freely between skirmishes based on the enemies present in your current cycle.

Loot Tables and Rift Rewards

Progression in Forever War mode is driven directly by combat victory rather than city scavenging. Completing an encounter opens an interactive dimensional rift on the battlefield. Touching this rift summons a supply chest containing weapons, ammunition components, and randomized mods.

Defeating encounters adds newly discovered weapon classes and parts into your account's permanent loot table:

• Primary and sidearm firearms include the Boomer explosive launcher, the Roaster flamethrower, the Shredder machine gun, the Rattler, and the Stumper shotgun sidearm, detailed further in our overview of weapons.
• Gun parts cover scopes, muzzles, magazines, and stocks. Fitting components such as a Terragonian muzzle increases maximum damage range and reduces reticle bloom at the cost of increasing the AP requirement for the weapon's initial shot.
• Epic parts introduce specific combat perks, such as triggering an explosive blast over an area after landing three consecutive headshots.

Scrap collected from fallen Rifters and dismantled gear is used at the hideout workbench to craft parts shown in the weapon attachments guide. Because rewards drop immediately following skirmishes, you can cycle through high-heat encounters, claim rift equipment, and continuously tailor your squad's loadout as each loop ratchets up the combat challenge.