There's still a fair bit of uncertainty on the final nature of shadow key acquisition so I thought we could do with a sort of middle road. Occaisionally, when certain conditions are met (anti-mineral disruption?), a stratum may become infested by The Swarm in its attempts to make its way to surface and consume us all. A Swarm Infested stratum would be locked to all knights lacking shadow lair clearance level 1 so that newbies won't accidentally stumble upon it and a warning would be given upon attempting to enter the gate so that you know the stratum x is infested and that you'll have to either turn back or be ready for a real fight.

A Swarm Infested stratum would ignore the usual conditions of the tier and have the same items and stat-scaling as a shadow lair. It would play out like a boss stratum with fixed level types, though a certain amount of randomness to the layout of each level. The final stage would be a boss fight against a 'Large Swarm Agent'; an abomination made up of multiple fragments of The Swarm made to bring its dark influence up to the surface. Ideally there would be multiple types of Large Swarm Agent, with different strengths, weaknesses and tactics.

The reward for defeating the Large Swarm Agent would be a new type of token that brings in new equipment straight from the Spiral Order. Trading in the tokens would allow a knight to purchase bound recipes for new items built off of existing equipment lines from Kozma.

The other way to bring in more swarm is the Quarantine Zone. This would be a new type of danger room that plays like the battle rooms in the Unknown Passage. A Quarantine Zone should be clearly marked as such before a knight even opens the energy gate. Completing a Quarantine Zone would result in a large number of red boxes and crowns, similarly to the end of a boss level in a shadow lair.

I hope that with some creative ingenuity from the OOO crew these concepts could become a new way to bring people that don't want to fork out for a shadow key into the fight against The Swarm.