Retro Tower Defense Endless Mode: Upgrades and Best Towers

How Endless differs from the main modes

Endless arrived with the Endless Mode event on 30 January 2026 and works nothing like Casual through Insane. There is no wave count and no clear condition — enemies keep scaling and you play until your base falls.

It has its own three difficulties, separate from the four main ones:

• Casual — lower enemy health, a forgiving early game. Recommended for hard maps, particularly three-path maps like What The…?.
• Standard — the default recommendation. Only slightly harder than Casual early if you play it properly.
• Hardcore — the top end.

Placement limits are the real currency

In Endless you buy extra placement slots for individual towers, and the cost scales by rarity. The formulas are published:

So a Unique like Jolly Elf runs 25,000 → 50,000 → 75,000 for successive slots. Two exceptions matter: Bloxxer’s placement limit cannot be increased at all, and Tycoon caps at two purchases with its own steeper formula (17,500 + x × 32,500). Fire Mage has a placement limit of 2, and Jeff breaks pattern at 45,000 → 150,000.

The three team upgrades

Bought once per run and shared across the team:

• Tower Placement (5 levels) — +5 to the total tower cap per level. This is the strongest upgrade in the mode by a distance, because it is the only one that raises your ceiling rather than delaying your floor.
• Enemy Speed (3 levels) — 3% slower per purchase. Looks trivial, and is not: it multiplies with slowing towers like iTrapped, Dusekkar and Freezer.
• Base Health (5 levels) — up to a maximum of 3,750 HP. Useful early and mid-run, close to irrelevant at high waves where a single leak ends you regardless.

Priority: Tower Placement first, then Enemy Speed if your board leans on slows, Base Health last.

Towers that scale rather than plateau

Endless rewards towers whose output grows with the run, not towers with a high fixed number. The ones that do:

• Jolly Elf — a snowballing ability that scales damage indefinitely. Also the cheapest damage per Tix in the game at 117.
• Yorick — reanimates enemies killed near him, so your total DPS grows as waves get denser. No published damage figure of his own, which is exactly why the tier list groups him as support.
• iTrapped — 147.5 DPS while freezing, which clusters enemies for everything else on the board.
• Dusekkar — damage amplification plus slow. Stacking several drastically cuts enemy speed.
• Rocket — crowd control that gets better as waves get denser.
• Noli — high AoE on a short cooldown at cap, plus explosive tripmines.
• Darkheart — sustained base healing off an infinite enemy supply, while still holding solid DPS.
• Venomshank — strong into high-HP enemies and bosses; set targeting to Strongest.
• Jeff — damage over time plus slow, effective against tanky waves.

Note how many of those are support or utility towers. The tier list bands towers by raw DPS because that is what is published — Endless is the mode where that ordering is least useful, and the snowball towers above are worth more than their DPS row suggests.

Endless and the Forsaken collab

Endless is the second source of Forsaken Tokens, but only on Forsaken maps. If you are chasing Chance before 4 September, an Endless run on Pirate Bay counts; an Endless run on Crossroads does not.