Global Infestation Level

Global infestation level represents how widespread the Dream Plagues are around the world.

Effects
Global infestation level is represented with skulls, and it determines which landing destinations are available in the destination selection screen after taking off. Landing options include maps with the same difficulty as the global infestation level, and one level above or below.

The landing map difficulty will affect the starting Threat Level, the difficulty of enemies roaming the map, and the amount and type of Resources that are available in the map. Some Biomes and Resources are only available in higher difficulty landings.

Over Time
Unless disabled in the difficulty settings, the infestation level increases over time. Unlike Threat Level, flying to a new destination does has no effect on the infestatyion level, so spending one hour in a single map or spending half an hour on two different map will result in the same increase.

The rate of increase in global infestation is affected by some modifiers, such as difficulty settings, equipped modules and map modifiers. The rate of increase also has a small element of dynamic difficulty, so if the game notices that your progress is well beyond your current global infestation level, the infestation will increase at a faster rate until it catches up with your progress. The opposite also applies, if your city is behind and the infestation level is high compared to your progress, then it will increase at a slower rate, giving you a chance to catch up. The dynamic difficulty element is fairly mellow and you can still find yourself left behind and unable to catch up, if you make too many mistakes.

Manually
You can increase the global infestation manually by selecting a landing destination of higher difficulty than the current level of infestation. When that happens, the infestation level will immediately increase to match the selected map difficulty, and the time for the next increase will reset. When playing with increase over time disabled (through difficulty settings), this is the only way to increase the infestation level and get access to higher difficulty maps and the resources they contain.

Items
Some consumable items can decrease the global infestation.