Meteorite Manual

Last update: Sep 25th 2025

• Introduction
  • Differences to other Auto-battlers
• Game Concepts
  • Units
    • Stats: Strength, Stamina & Speed
    • Abilities
    • Actions
      • Action Targets
      • Chance Actions
    • Tactics & Movement
    • Artifacts & Artifact Slots
  • Warbands
    • Unit Tiers & Constructing Warbands
    • Unit Play Status
  • Battles
    • Arena
    • Objective & Attunement
      • Attunement Tendency
    • Turn Structure
      • Unit Activation
      • Refresh
    • Ending the Battle
• Gauntlet Game Mode
• Advanced concepts
  • Triggers, Effects, Steps & Stacks
    • Replacement Effects

Introduction

Meteorite is an *deep breath* Asynchronous Multiplayer Warband Tinkering Tactics Auto-battler set in a strange fantasy world where small warbands are scrambling to find and secure precious meteorites. In this game, you build a warband: a group of units (specifically unit cards), and pit that warband against other war bands, in 1 versus 1 games of "hold the objective" battles. These battles resolve automatically, so the game is really about which player can build the best team with the cards they have.

Differences to other Auto-battlers

This game builds on the genre pioneered by the Dota 2 Auto Chess Mod, that spawned several similar games and mods, including the Hearthstone Battlegrounds mode. This game does make some changes from all those games that codified the genre:

• The game is asynchronous, meaning that the gameplay aspect of building your warband has no time limit. Generally, auto-battlers are structured around a real-time mini tournament draft environment, where players have to make choices on the fly. Instead, in this game you fight "ghosts" of other players, who do not even need to be online at the time.
• This game does not follow the usual buying and upgrading structure. There is no shop to upgrade, and you don’t get better versions of units if you collect three of the same. Instead, this game follows the deck construction of games like Magic: The Gathering, where players collect a pool of cards, and choose which ones go in the deck. Which unit cards you have available is part depends on the game mode, but generally you earn more units by playing (and hopefully winning) battles.
• As this game doesn’t follow the mini-tournament structure, the game doesn't form around each player having a player health-pool and player elimination, instead the player will gain points based on how well the warband played during each battle. Should there be a tournament mode, it will behave differently.

Game Concepts

Units

Units are the main elements of this game. They are depicted as cards, with some nice card art and a sleeve. Each unit has stats and abilities, and will move and act on its own. Units are summoned from your warband automatically at certain thresholds during a battle. They can also be summoned by other effects (they are then called token units). Summoned units can be either exhausted or unexhausted, which governs whether they can be activated or not. Summoned units generally enter exhausted.

Stats: Strength, Stamina & Speed

Units have three main stats: strength, stamina and speed.

Strength (STR) determines how much damage a regular Attack action from the unit will do, and how much damage it does when hit by another unit.

Stamina (STM) works like the unit's health and defense. If the unit gains damage equal to its stamina, or if the stamina equals 0, they die and leave the arena.

Speed (SPD) determines how many steps the unit can move, when doing a Move action.

Abilities

Units can have any number of abilities, and there are several types: labels, keywords and counters. Throughout a battle, a unit can gain and lose abilities by effects.

Labels are signifiers. They don't have any rules of their own, but are used by other abilities and effects. For example, a special attack might only attack units with the Undead label. (Note: these are similar to types and subtypes in other card games.)

Keywords are the unit's passive abilities. Each keyword has a bit of rules text associated with it. For example, a unit with the keyword Confused shuffles their actions each time it is activated.

Counters are similar to keywords, but the unit can have multiples of them. For example a Shield counter reduces the amount of damage taken for each shield counter the unit has.

Actions

Units also have actions that let the unit do effects such as moving and attacking whenever it is activated.

Each unit has a list of actions, and it will attempt to do them in order from top to bottom. When the unit is activated, it will start to evaluate if it can perform the first action in the list, then if it can't, it will go to the next one and so on.

Once the unit finds an action it can perform, it will execute it and exhaust itself (meaning it is done for the turn, and cannot be activated again until it is refreshed). However, some actions are free actions (noted by an f in the action list), and they will be performed without exhausting the unit. If a unit has gone through its action list and still isn't exhausted, it will get exhausted anyway.

Example:

Actions:
├ f Move 1		// free move action, the unit will do this and continue performing actions
├ Attack		// if the unit can attack it will, then exhaust itself
├ f Meditate 	// also free, it will do this free action whether it is exhausted or not
├ Shield		// if the unit isn't exhausted, it will do this action, then exhaust itself
↓				// if the unit has gone through the list and still isn't exhausted, it is exhausted anyway

Units can gain and lose actions in their action list throughout a battle.

Actions can also be triggered passively by abilities, even on other units' turns. In these cases, the action will be executed even if the unit is exhausted, and it won't exhaust the unit as a result of the action execution. (Example: the keyword Enter: Move would cause the unit to do one move action when it enters the arena.)

Action Targets

Most actions have one or more targets, and they come in a few different variations: no target, self, neighbors and any.

• No target
• Self (does something to the unit performing the action)
• Neighbors (can target any unit in the 2 spaces adjacent to the unit, the enemy unit across, and the unit itself)
• Any (can target any unit in the arena, including itself)

In addition, each action can target enemy units or friendly units (or both).

An action can have multiple targets (for example, targets 2 neighbors, or any 3 units). If there are more possible targets than required, they are chosen at random. However, if any of the targets is the objective holder, they are prioritized!

Chance Actions

Some actions have a "chance" icon and value. These actions can fail or succeed randomly, where the value is a percentage of likelihood (100% will always succeed). Once it's determined that the unit will try to execute the action (i.e., it found a relevant target), a "chance check" will happen, determining whether the action will go through. Even if the action fails, the unit will still be exhausted (unless if was a free (f) action).

Tactics & Movement

Each unit will follow specific priorities when choosing where to move on the arena. This is the unit's tactics. Generally, a unit will always try to move towards the objective or the objective holder, but this tactic could be changed by game effects or abilities.

Artifacts & Artifact Slots

Artifacts are special items that you can get while playing the Gauntlet mode. Each unit can have up to 3 artifact slots (you will generally see more slots on higher tier/higher rarity units). On the warband builder screen, you can equip artifacts from your artifact pool (your owned artifacts) to your units. Each artifact will change the unit somehow, for example adding abilities, changing stats or adding actions.

Warbands

In a battle, the two players have each prepared a warband of units that will be summoned throughout the battle. The warband is divided into three tiers, where tier 1 units are generally weaker than tier 2 units, and so on.

Unit Tiers & Constructing Warbands

Units are all assigned a tier. A higher tier means that the unit will be summoned later in the battle. When constructing the warband, you assign units to each warband tier and the position the unit will be summoned in (there are 5 spaces). Each warband tier must have 3 units each.

As a battle begins, all your tier 1 units are summoned to the arena. Each time you unlock the next tier(which happens when the player has enough tendency), the units assigned to the unlocked warband tier are queued, and will summon into their assigned positions once that space is empty during your turn.

Tip! The objective always start in the middle space, so units in that space will usually be at the center of the action!

Unit Play Status

During a battle, your units always has one of these statuses: idle, queued, in play or in graveyard. At the beginning of the battle, units start as idle, then when a warband tier is unlocked, the units in that tier are queued. When a unit is summoned, it is then considered in play until it dies, it is then considered in graveyard.

The reason this is important is that some game effects may care about how many units you have in play, or in graveyard, for example.

Battles

Arena

The battles play out in the arena. The arena is formed by two front lines of five spaces each, one for each team. Units are summoned on each line on their assigned spaces, and can move on their line (with Move actions). If a unit moves into a space already occupied by another unit, that unit is pushed to an empty space next to it. If it can't (because there is no empty space), the units swap places.

Enemy units in the same position on the opposite line is considered across, and can be targeted with neighbor actions, such as Attack.

Objective & Attunement

In the middle space of the arena sits the objective, a fallen meteorite. To win the battle, the players need to attune with the objective. Attunement is gained by holding the objective: any unit that ends their turn on the objective space picks it up and becomes the objective holder. Whenever the objective is picked up, that unit immediately attunes by a small amount (generally 1%). The objective holder also gains the Holder keyword, and loses all their speed — the objective holder cannot move, and cannot "swap places" with another unit (there are however other effects that can move the objective to another space). If the objective holder dies, it will be dropped on the dying unit's current space.

On the scoreboard is a meter that represents the objective's current attunement. At the start of each player's turn, if any of their units hold the objective, the objective will attune with that unit's player, moving towards that end of the meter. When the objective is fully to the left/right of the meter, the objective is fully attuned, and that player wins.

Attunement Tendency

Each time the objective attunes, it moves in steps according to the player's tendency. This value starts at around 10% (a little less for the starting player), but will increase by 1% each turn, unless the player is currently holding the objective. The tendency value can go up to 200% (the attunement meter goes from -100% to 100%).

Turn Structure

Each battle is broken up into turns, alternating between both players.

Turns are broken into a few different phases:

• Start of turn (used as a marker for some abilities)
• Tendency & Attunement (tendency increases, and the objective is attuned (see Objective & Attunement))
• Main phase, which can be either:
  • Unit Activation (see Actions)
  • Refresh
• End of turn (used as a marker for some abilities)

Unit Activation

If the player has any unexhausted units on their turn, a random one is picked as the turn enters the Unit Activation turn phase. An activated unit will perform actions and exhaust itself.

If a unit does not have any actions at all, it can't be activated, and another unit is picked instead.

Some abilities and effects can start a unit activation during another turn phase (or during another unit's activation). In this case, the current turn phase ends immediately and a Unit Activation turn phase begins for the newly activated unit.

Refresh

If the player has no unexhausted units left, that player refreshes their all their units (they become unexhausted).

Ending the Battle

The battle ends the moment one player has fully attuned with the objective, however the game can go into a sudden death if one player has all their units in the graveyard. When it is triggered, after 3 turns the game end with the player who has the most attunement declared winner.

Gauntlet Game Mode

In this mode, players play a gauntlet, a run of battles of increasing difficulty, starting with a suite of Basic "Commoner" units (They are 1/1/1 with the Tier Bonus keyword) and a few drafted units.

As you enter this game mode, you enter the warband builder screen, where you can tinker with your warband. On this screen you can:

• Add or remove units to/from the warband tiers.
• Choose the position placement for each unit and tier.
• Equip or unequip artifacts to units in your warband with available artifact slots (Note:currently you can only unequip by removing the card from the warband)

Note that for the warband build to be legal, it has to have 3 units in each warband tier.

When you are ready, you will get to choose an opponent (a ghost of another player's warband) from two options. You can see what unit reward types you will get for choosing the fight, and what exact artifact you can get. The quality of the unit rewards differ depending on how many wins the opponent has compared to you.

When the battle is over, and you come back to the warband builder, you either get both the unit rewards and the artifact if you won, or you can choose between either units or the artifact if you lost.

Unit rewards come in different qualities. When you open a unit reward, you get to pick between 3 choices of unit cards to add to your unit pool. Each unit can either be a common (gray), uncommon (blue) or rare (gold). If a unit reward is golden, you are guaranteed at least one option to be of that rarity.

At the end of the last battle, you will get a screen with your Win/Loss ratio (TODO: this will be much more interesting!)

Advanced concepts

Triggers, Effects, Steps & Stacks

A battle is played out in steps, where each step can contain a stack of game effects. Effects are usually unit actions, but also things like drawing or scoring.

A stack of effects will be executed, one by one from last to first. Some effects will add more effects to the stack, but generally effects will be added to the next steps' stack.

Many abilities and effects have associated passive triggers. Between each step, all passive triggers are checked, and if triggered, can lead to more effects being added to the next stack. An example of a trigger can be a unit getting damage equal to its stamina, which would cause it to die (and also trigger any on death effects).

Replacement Effects

Effects can, when executed be replaced by other replacement effects. For example the effect of attacking could be replaced for with another special attack.

When an effect is replaced, it will skip the current effect and the replacement effect is added to the top of the current step's stack (meaning it will be executed next).