What kind of game mode is Egg Heist?

Nothing you pick up is yours until you hand it in at the boat. Die or faint first and you lose your carried items, your backpack and your equipped gear, so every run is a choice between pushing on for more and leaving with what you have.

Egg Heist is also PvP. Teams compete for the same rare eggs inside the sanctum ruins and fight other players on the way out, so the main threat to your haul is usually another team. The mode also goes by the name Diamond Egg Heist.

Where the eggs are in Egg Heist

Eggs sit in nests at fixed spawn positions in the sanctum ruins, and only in certain room types such as large rooms and locked key rooms. Each position only has a chance of holding an egg, and some positions are more likely to than others. In a Chaos run almost nothing lies in the open, so you are effectively hunting the locked key rooms. Dungeon eggs have a vivid colour and sheen that makes them easy to spot from a distance.

The layouts are fixed, so learning them pays. Community map tools such as the Lost Sanctum Maps section of Aniimo Tools mark egg and key positions, and knowing the map lets you route straight to keys, eggs and chests instead of wandering.

What a successful extraction gets you

The eggs you bring home go into hatchers or home incubators, where they hatch rewards. Extracting with a higher total item value, and an egg counts for a lot, also raises your end-of-match rating and experience, which makes egg runs a fast way to rank up in the mode.

Whoever digs out the central giant egg turns into it and loses all combat abilities until the team extracts, so the rest of the team plays escort. The linked article on egg carrying and extraction covers how that works.

Not settled: The number of eggs in a run is not settled. A run holds at most three, usually one and sometimes two, and some runs have no eggs you can find at all.