In Rogue Rider Mode, the game will generate a whole new world to explore each time you play. You start from the castle at the center of it, and travel across the land exploring different stages. It is not endless, but it can extend for a long time: The catch: death is permanent and you only have one life (initially).

The goal of Rogue Rider Mode is to explore long enough that you reach the seven Wonders of the World, which will remain in your profile after you die. Usually, you will only manage to see one in every playthrough, cause the Wonders do not have a fixed location and will spawn in different places in each playthrough.

Rogue Rider incorporates the food element of Endless Mode’s “Starve or Blow Up”, while adding new things like armor quality, treasures, an inventory system and shops.

Like in Endless mode, you have separate food meters for both horse and rider, with the difference that you can see them now, on the inventory screen.

The horse eats sweet foods like carrots, donuts or cake, while the salty foods like sausage, steaks and burgers are rider food. You will find these foods scattered across levels, or at the food shop.
If any of your food meters reach zero, your rider or your horse will starve to death. But if your meter maxes out and you eat one more piece of food, you will explode. So the trick is to keep them both at around 75% of their capacity and just eat small pieces of food to maintain that.

In the first stage of Rogue Rider, you’ll find nothing but food, so fill up with as many pieces as you can. As you get closer to the end (i.e. one of the Wonders of the World), food may become scarce and you will risk starvation. That’s where you should equip a “+digestion” hat (they make food last longer in your stomach).

The armor has 4 levels of strength. At first, you start with 1 hit point, and you automatically receive the Tier 2 armor after the first stage (it has 6 hit points).

Tier 3 has 10HP and it’s purchased from the Blacksmith, usually for 15000 gold. It also comes with fireball and tongue protection, meaning you can survive a dragon or toad attack but it’ll cost you 5HP. Tier 4 is the ultimate armor, it has a total of 14HP and in addition to Tier 3 protections it’ll also help with damage caused by destructibles.

Upgrading your armor will also repair the previous one, so you don’t need to repair the old one if you're buying a new one.

There’s another, special 3hp armor, worn by the Squire, but more on that later.

Every level after the first has an icon on top, which signals the type of shop you will find after completing it. There’s also a Treasure Chest icon, which means you’ll get to open a chest. This chest may contain gold, diamonds, food items, or ‘spells’ (the powerups from Endless mode).

If you don’t find a Chest, you’ll find a Shop. There are four types.

• Blacksmith: Signaled by a hammer icon, it’s where you buy the armor upgrades. You can also repair your current armor for 5000 gold, and you can purchase attack items like boulders or mines (press E to deploy during a stage).
  
• Food Market: This lady will sell you food that you can either store for later use (in your left inventory slot) , or consume right away (move to the right slot, then click on the fork & knife). Be careful not to buy a food item that makes you explode!
  
• Wizard’s Hut: Remember the Endless Mode powerups like Ghost, Rainbow Bridge, the Clock, Wings, the Cannon or Shield? You can purchase those from the Wizard. And just like food, you can use them right away or store them for later (for that Isles stage two stages over, for instance). If you choose to activate the item, it will stay active through ALL of the next stage, making items like Pegasus Wings super useful in lava or isles stages.
  One thing about the Ghost item, though: It seems like food pickups don’t count during the stage, so think about your food meter when you activate this item.
  
• Jewelry Shop: In here, you can sell the diamonds you might have found across each stage or in treasure chests. Prices may vary, as indicated by the arrows. If you see a down arrow, you might want to skip selling that type of diamond until the next jewelry shop (this also applies to the other types of shop).

Villages act as a hub containing all the previously mentioned shops, plus two important additions:

• The Tavern: When you enter the tavern, you’ll see a blurry view of the drinking hall and you can eavesdrop on the conversation of the patrons. Eventually, you will see big phrases like ‘THE TREE OF LIFE’ followed by a direction like ‘NORTH’ or ‘NORTH WEST’. This means the aforementioned Wonder is located that way, starting from the castle. So even if you get ‘bad’ information i.e. they talk about a wonder that you’ve already visited, it still helps you to rule out certain zones of the map. Tavern conversations can include up to 3 hints of different wonders, and they vary from village to village.
  
• • Recruitment Barracks: BIG part of Rogue Rider. In here, you can hire a Squire for 20000 gold to continue your legacy after you die. If you wipe out close to a Wonder, you can retry that stage and keep going. But the Squire will start all the way back at the village where he was hired, so if you retrace your exact route you will find no enemies (good), but very little or no food either (bad!), which means the squire has a bigger chance of starvation at first (tip: save a +digestion hat for this).
  The first stage as a Squire will be pretty similar to your first stage of the game, only with a 3HP bucket armor instead of 1HP. After that, you will ‘inherit’ the money and tier 2 armor of your predecessor, and the game will continue normally.
  The fact that the Squire rolls back progress to the village can also be used in your favor, if you died following a bad route. Just choose a different path and explore a different area.

Ah, yes. Collectible Hats, the mark of a successful game. In Endless Mode, hats are merely cosmetic and found along the stage in gift boxes. In Rogue Rider, however, have different properties that help or sometimes impair your character.

There’s the plain hat (no effects, grey box in the inventory), the magic hat (yellow box), and the Legendary hats (yellow with a star). The effects are randomly generated and can be: stomach strength (larger food meter), digestion power (food lasts longer in the meter, very useful in later levels), additional armor, increased jump length, faster strafing speed, protection against scratches, invulnerability against certain objects (mushrooms, targets, snowmen) or other hazards (lightning, win-every-duel) and most important of all, Intelligence! (just kidding, it does nothing).

Hats can also have adverse effects, usually in the form of visual impairments. Some might be trivial like dancing plant effects, but others might alter the shape of the world into a sphere, or make items wobble around. Stay away from those unless the positive effect is good enough.
Finally, hats are lost when you die, even if you had a Squire to continue.

• Don’t start wearing that super +9 armor hat from the get go in case you die in a dumb way, save it for that long cave level at the end perhaps.
  
• Food will be a problem throughout the whole run, at first you’re in risk of exploding and by the end you will start to run out. So don’t use a +digestion hat at first, and make sure to have one ready for later levels.
  
• If that jewel shop offers to buy your red diamonds for less than 1000 gold, don’t sell.
  
• Learn the music cues that signal enemies spawning, they might save your life after turning a sharp corner.
  
• Sometimes the best route isn’t a straight line. Personally, I tend to avoid lava levels if I can, cause the light plays tricks on me and I step in the wrong place.
  
• If you're like me and have trouble seeing enemies or hazards in graveyard or volcano areas, try turning off the ‘Lightshafts’ under Advanced graphic options. The huge rays of light from mausoleum and volcanoes will be replaced by a smaller glow that doesn’t obscure enemies as much.