How to Identify a Seed in Deep of Night

What Deep of Night can hide

Deep of Night is the ranked mode. It picks the Nightlord and the map for you, with no DLC restriction on either, and deeper layers open up as you earn points, to a maximum of depth 5. Each layer behaves like NG+ in the Souls games: more enemy health, more enemy damage.

From depth 3 onward a run can also hide something from you. Either the Nightlord is withheld, or the points of interest on your map are. It is a chance and not a rule. It becomes more frequent the deeper the layer, and it is still not what happens on most runs. And it is never both in the same run: whichever one you draw, the other is in front of you as usual.

Both kinds pay more for a win than an ordinary run at the same depth, and take slightly less off you for a loss.

What a depth actually is

The game explains this in the Visual Codex and almost nobody reads it, so it is worth restating before the rest of this guide leans on the word. Depth is a bracket on a rating, and the rating moves with your wins and losses. There are five brackets: depth 1 covers rating 0 to 999, depth 2 covers 1000 to 1999, depth 3 covers 2000 to 3999, depth 4 covers 4000 to 5999, and depth 5 is everything from 6000 up.

Two of the brackets have a floor built into them. Once you have reached depth 2 you cannot fall back to depth 1, and at depth 3 your depth is held for several expeditions before it can drop at all. Losing a run at depth 3 costs rating, not progress.

Matchmaking starts by pairing you with players at your own depth and widens after a while if it cannot fill the squad, which is why an unexpected depth sometimes turns up in a lobby.

When the Nightlord is hidden

The map is drawn the way it always is. Every landmark sits where the seed put it, so nothing about the identification changes: pick the map type, mark what you can see, watch the count fall. The only difference is that the Nightlord field stays empty, because you have nothing to put in it.

What you get back is the record, and the record carries the Nightlord, along with the status card showing what it is weak to. This is the one place in the whole tool where the Nightlord is an output instead of an input. Everywhere else it is the first thing you hand the finder.

Expect to read more of the map than you usually do. A Normal map starts at 240 candidates, and the Nightlord is what normally removes most of them before you have marked anything.

When the points of interest are hidden

What the run hides is the points of interest, and nothing else. The terrain is drawn in full, so from the first second you can see which map you are on: the Crater, the Rotted Woods, or no Shifting Earth at all. The Nightlord medallion is in its corner, because the Nightlord is never the half being hidden on this kind of run. And your own position updates live on the map, so you read your spawn off it on the way down.

The finder works from four things: map type, Nightlord, spawn point and marked locations. This run withholds one of them and hands you the other three before you land. The Nightlord alone takes a Normal map from 240 candidates to 25, and reading where you came down usually takes it to about three, because every seed carries exactly one landing point. Across the 240 Normal records there is no pairing of Nightlord and landing point that leaves more than seven.

Those are counts of records in this dataset, not odds on what the game will give you. And the finder does not know where you landed: you read your own position on the way down and mark it yourself, once you are sure which location it is. After that, a building or two walked to finishes the job.

Reading those buildings is the part that needs care. Distant structures are visible from the air and an experienced player can guess at some of them by silhouette, but a silhouette gives the category and never the variant: a shape that reads as a Main Encampment does not say whether it is the fire one or the lightning one. That is what the two-pass rule in How to Identify a Nightreign Seed Efficiently is for. Mark only the category you are sure of, and confirm the variant on the ground before you select a more specific icon.

The game hides one of the two, never both

A run takes the Nightlord away or it takes the points of interest away. It does not take both, so the finder never loses more than one of its inputs. With the Nightlord hidden you still have the whole map to read. With the points of interest hidden you still have the map type, the Nightlord and your own position.

The return is also larger here than in an ordinary run. Normally the map is already filled in, and what the finder adds is the part the game never prints on it: the events, the boss labels, the night bosses, what each location holds. On a run with the points of interest hidden it fills the map back in for you, off a building or two you walked to.

What it still cannot tell you

Three limits do not move in this mode. The circle is not in the seed, so where it closes is not something the finder can show you. Cataclysm is not governed by the seed either, and the same seed produces it in different places, so the tool is no help there even in principle. And whether the Nightlord arrives in its Everdark form is not carried by the map pattern; the game reveals that at the end.