Monster Nodes

“A snarl left uncut gathers, loop braiding into loop, and the deepest hold shapes the field-records call the Braided.” — The Seamkeeper’s Codex, the Bestiary of Echoes

Monster nodes — the Codex calls them snarls — are attackable Echo clusters, roughly two per territory zone, tiered 1–7 by the zone they tangle in. They respawn after being cleared, so your neighborhood always has work.

Why fight them

• Resources — rewards double per tier (see table).
• Guardian XP — scaled to enemy power; snarls are the leveling treadmill.
• Practice — they have fixed, known compositions, making them the perfect place to learn the triangle.

The tier table

Each tier fields one dominant troop type — which means each tier has a correct elemental answer:

Tier	Force	Champions	Dominant element	Bring	Reward
1	80 × T1 Sylvan Stalker	—	Fire	Water	1,000
2	160 × T1 Ancient Guardian	—	Earth	Fire	2,000
3	280 × T2 Biolume Sprite	Ember Wisp (Fire)	Water	Earth	4,000
4	450 × T3 Sylvan Stalker	Stone Revenant (Earth)	Fire	Water	8,000
5	700 × T4 Ancient Guardian	Tide Warden (Water)	Earth	Fire	16,000
6	1,100 × T5 Biolume Sprite	2 × Ashfiend (Fire)	Water	Earth	32,000
7	1,700 × T6 Sylvan Stalker	2 × Throne Sentinel (Earth)	Fire	Water	64,000

Champions are the Braided of the Bestiary — single heavyweight Echoes with thousands of HP that fight alongside the stack. From Tier 3 up, every snarl has at least one; Tiers 6–7 field pairs.

Reading the table like a strategist

• The cycle rotates Fire → Earth → Water, so the counter-element rotates too. If you main one troop type, your comfortable tiers recur every third tier — Ancient Guardian (Earth) armies feast on tiers 1, 4 and 7.
• Champions don’t follow the dominant element. The Tier 3 snarl is Water-dominant but its Ember Wisp is Fire — your Water troops counter the champion while being countered by nothing. Check both columns.
• Force size roughly doubles per tier while troop tier climbs alongside — Tier 5 isn’t “a bit harder” than Tier 4; it’s ~1.5× the bodies at +1 tier each.

Which tier are you ready for?

The honest answer is always the send-sheet preview — but as a rule of thumb, you want a clear win with wounded you can afford, not a squeaker. If the preview shows the battle going past round 5, you’re at the edge of your tier; if it shows a rout in your favor by round 3, move one deeper next time.

Note

Cleared snarls re-tangle on a respawn timer, and the spawn pass keeps each zone topped up to ~2. There is no “using up” your neighborhood — only outgrowing it.