STR56: Phobos Anomaly (Stronghold: On the Edge of Chaos)

STR56: Phobos Anomaly is the fourth secret map of Stronghold: On the Edge of Chaos. It was designed by Björn Ostmann (Vader) and Daniel Gimmer (Tormentor667), and uses a custom music track.

This level uses the "Core" mode, where the objective is to prevent monsters destroying a computer core.

Essentials
As the level starts, there are two passages to the left and right of player one - the left (west) passage leads to the core room, while the right (east) leads to a room with two health, two ammo, one weapon and one powerup pad. Head north from the starting point to find a shotgun and shells, then follow the passage up to a pentagram arena and continue heading north to find a chaingun at the north point of the pentagram.

Monsters will spawn from a magma pool at the north end of the level and head south until they reach the pentagram arena; they will then head south-east or south-west around the arena to some teleporters that will send them to the glowing pentagram in the middle of the arena. From this point they will head south to the players' start point then west to reach the core.

Completing this level will award 1,500 bonus credits.

Secrets
There are no official secrets on this map.

Speedrunning
As this level does not contain official secrets, the NM 100S category is redundant.

Current records
The records for the map at the Doom Speed Demo Archive are:

The (absence of) data was last verified in its entirety on February 21, 2022.

Things
This level contains the following numbers of things per skill level:

Inspiration and development
This level is based on the pentagram arena from Knee-Deep in ZDoom's Z1M8: Phobos Anomaly. After completing the first wave, a message is displayed asking if the player feels nostalgic before jokingly noting that the level looks nothing like the Phobos facility.