Phasmophobia: Custom difficulty, the only gateway to x10 and x15 in the Apocalypse Challenge — and the game's true training room

A single number is enough to settle the debate over Phasmophobia's custom difficulty: x6. That's the cap for Insanity, the most demanding of the game's five preset difficulties. Yet the Apocalypse Challenge requires a multiplier of x10 for its silver tier and x15 for its gold tier. Both rewards are therefore out of reach as long as you stick to the menu difficulties.

Custom difficulty, unlocked at level 50, covers a documented range from x0 to x15. It is the only path to these tiers, and many players overlook it, filing it away as a masochist's whim. That's a misreading: at the other end of the same slider, x0 turns any of the 14 maps the game counts as of August 17 (7 small, 5 medium, 2 large) into a training room, where you can repeat the same situation for a fraction of the usual cost.

Here's what this mode costs, what the multiplier inflates and what it never touches, and what the Tuesday, August 25 update will change about it. For the weekly challenge rotation, see our Challenge mode guide from August 6; for calculating a contract payout, our money and XP guide from August 9.

Insanity tops out at x6: the silver and gold tiers remain out of the menu's reach

The scale of preset difficulties is short, and its ceiling is lower than what the Apocalypse Challenge demands.

The multiplier, however, is only one of the Apocalypse Challenge's conditions. You must also play solo, on Sunny Meadows Mental Institution — and nowhere else —, complete the three optional objectives, bring back a piece of ghost evidence, correctly identify the entity, and make it out alive. The difficulty setting opens the door; it excuses none of the other five boxes.

A player who climbs to Insanity and settles there believes they've reached the game's peak. In reality, they're stuck at x6, well below the two tiers that actually matter: x10 and x15 don't unlock at the next level, they're built setting by setting in the custom difficulty menu. Better to understand the economics of it before diving in with a full bag.

The multiplier ignores the collected Bone and the insurance refund

Second, costlier misunderstanding: the difficulty coefficient doesn't multiply the entire end-of-contract summary. It applies to entity identification, objectives, evidence brought back, and bonuses. It does not apply to the collected Bone — this exception dates back to version 0.9.0 — nor to the insurance refund.

Practical consequence: the higher the multiplier climbs, the more insignificant the fixed lines become. At x15, the Bone paid at its base rate is nothing but a speck in the total, whereas its photo counts as evidence and does follow the multiplier. The full breakdown of the calculation is in our money and XP guide; the takeaway here is that custom difficulty distorts this calculation, it doesn't replace it.

Insurance disappears once the multiplier exceeds x2

This is what determines the real cost of training: reimbursement for lost equipment doesn't depend on the difficulty's name but on its multiplier, and it fades away quickly.

This mechanic shapes two opposite approaches.

• The training setup: you only toughen up the settings you want to work on and keep the multiplier at the floor, at x1 or less. Result: 50% of lost gear comes back, and you can try again.
• The Apocalypse setup: at x10 or x15, there's no safety net. Every EMF Reader, every D.O.T.S. Projector, every Ghost Writing Book brought into the building is a dry bet, lost in case of death.

Hence a simple rule: only raise the multiplier when the contract targets a specific tier, with a loadout built to be lost.

Dying in the last minute cancels the entire contract's multiplier

The penalty is the same everywhere, but it hurts a lot in custom difficulty at a high coefficient: if the player dies, any multiplier above x1 is not applied, remaining earnings are halved, and the Investigation Bonus is lost.

In other words, a contract carried out cleanly at x15 and failed on the last hunt doesn't pay a bit less: it pays like a run with no multiplier, cut in half. The risk is concentrated at the end — hence the habit, at x10 or x15, of leaving as soon as the three objectives, the media evidence, and the identification are locked in, without lingering a minute longer in the building.

x0, the other end of the scale — and what August 25 will bring to it

The range goes all the way down to x0, and that value is far from absurd. A contract set to a zero multiplier pays nothing. However, it still counts toward progression today: that's precisely what the August 25 update is going to change, since Kinetic Games has announced that custom difficulties with a 0 multiplier will then stop contributing to progress, achievements included. From that date, x0 will therefore become a genuine training room, with no polluted stats.

The method itself doesn't change: redoing the same map ten times to learn where evidence turns up, getting used to the D.O.T.S. Projector's grain, building the reflex for the Spirit Box (the studio kept the English name in the French version), placing a Sound Sensor or a Sound Recorder in the right spot, or memorizing the Fuse Box's position at 13 Willow Street without having a x6 contract breathing down your neck.

On August 25, custom difficulty should be able to target a specific entity

The second quality-of-life update, announced on August 11 and dated for Tuesday, August 25, 2026 on all platforms (the time hasn't been announced), is set to add the ability to choose the entity type in custom difficulty. The official wording specifies that this choice sets the multiplier to 0.

Caution on this point: the update hasn't been released yet, and the exact mechanism still needs to be verified at launch. We had already announced it in our August 13 article, where we wrote that custom difficulty would remain subject to its own multipliers: it's indeed the reset to 0 announced by the studio that stands. For a recent entity like the Deildegast, which arrived with v0.18.0.0 on July 21, this would shift from a lottery to a repeatable exercise.

Key dates to remember

• Today: the live version remains v0.18.0.1, the hotfix from July 28, 2026, and nothing has been released since.
• Tuesday, August 25, 2026: second quality-of-life update, all platforms, time not announced. It should bring entity type selection in custom difficulty, as well as the Restricted versions of Prison, Brownstone High School and Point Hope, covered separately.
• October 2026: this is the timeframe expected for the move to Unity 6, not in this summer's updates: this project wasn't part of v0.18.0.0.
• Level 50: the only prerequisite to unlock this menu. Below that, the silver and gold tiers of the Apocalypse Challenge remain inaccessible.