Idle Skilling - Ultimate Beginners Guide (2024)

A comprehensive guide for (almost) all parts of the game.

Getting Started Guide with Useful Tips

FAQ

A FAQ for answering commonly asked questions.

When should I ascend the first/next time?

Most people agree that you should ascend for the first time when you have around 100AP. After that, ascend when you’re stuck far from the next zone and feel like you could get back to where you were easily with your new starting levels and the AP you have to invest. It’s also a good idea to ascend after reaching a new zone because new perks make it faster to get back to where you were.

Should I buy increased starting levels? Won’t I be losing perk points?

Starting levels are one of the best ways to progress in the game early on. Increasing your starting levels increases the EXP required to level up slightly, but not as much as a normal level does. It is still very much worth it to get starting levels.

Should I rebirth?

Rebirth is just as important as ascending when you reach end-game. You need to rebirth to progress in farming, especially apothecary, unlock new contracts, smithing tiers, and get boosts to ores/fish production and damage.

Don’t ignore rebirth, but you don’t need to rush it if your bp yield is low and ascending still gives you good buffs. A general recommendation is to rebirth when ascending wouldn’t give you significant boosts and you have 500-700 BP.

What resets upon ascension/rebirth?

Ascension

Currently ascension resets

• Fighting progress
• Training skillers & levels
• Mining, Smithing and Fishing levels (But not the materials you obtained, though it does reset your crafted items)
• Spiriting and rift skillers/levels (you keep 20% of your souls)
• Your gold is reset to 1% of the amount you had before ascending (can be increased with cashback ascension perk and Smalloan potion)

It does NOT reset:

• Crusade
• Farming

Raid upgrades and trophies earned.

Contracts

Completed contracts, merits & contract shop purchases remain, however progress on contracts resets.

Rebirth

Currently rebirth resets.

Everything usually reset by ascending.

Farming levels, but not potion levels.

• Ores and Fishes

It does NOT reset…

Crusade:

• Raid upgrades and trophies earned.
• Contracts.
• Completed contracts, merits & contract shop purchases remain, however progress on contracts resets.

What should I spend my ap on?

Refer to the Ascension section.

Progress is slower when I’m not on a screen?

The game is supposed to slow down screens you’re not on by 50%. This is called “away progress”. Any screen you’re on is not affected and has 100% progress. The screen you offline on also keeps 100% progress. The actual away progress is more like 30-35%, even though the game says 50%. This is not a bug.

Here’s a tip about away progress: gains are only calculated when you visit a screen. So if you equip mining cards before visiting mining, you will get the full benefit of the mining cards. Use this to your advantage by swapping to a deck before visiting a screen.

How to Delete Your Save

1. Close idle skilling.
2. Delete the idle skilling folder in %appdata%.
3. Search for the file “1048370”: programmes(x86)/steam/userdata.
4. Do a backup of this file just in case and then delete it.
5. Turn off the steam cloud save feature on idle skilling.

After point #5 and have setup the correct name, you can exit from the game and re-enable the cloudsaving in steam: it will showup the cloud saving conflict screen, then by selecting cloud, the previous cloud will be overwritten and everything will come back as if never happened.

Fighting

Try to progress through fighting to get monster cards and clear zones. Don’t try to push past the point where it takes a long time to kill just one monster. When you’re not close to clearing a zone and you have collected your daily cards, try to get as much cash as possible or think about ascending. Most of the time, you get more cash by fighting an enemy you one-shot than one that gives more cash but you don’t one-shot. This is because of how health and cash scaling works. But look at the cash gain per hour screen to decide what to farm for cash.

The animation time for monsters to spawn is 0.025 seconds. So if your attack speed is 0.01 and you one-shot the monster, you will waste 0.015 seconds. Don’t worry, though. Once you go past this speed, you can increase the toggle of your heavy cash shrine in asylum.

Mark, Valor, and Vision affect offline gains. Turn those on before leaving the fighting screen or going offline.

Training

Training is pretty simple, just upgrade your skillers relatively evenly, though the first skiller costs less to upgrade and is the fastest, it provides the least xp per minute, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth upgrading. Upgrading all the skillers is still the best strategy. Gym is bugged so that offline gives way more than online/away, so offline on gym.

• Reps = the speed of your trainers.

You only have a 70% chance to gain skill xp on every skiller rep, but this can be increased by exp chance. Exp chance can go over 100, giving a chance to give double xp, and at 200% giving double xp every time. So exp chance is very valuable. You always gain h2o from reps.

Training perks are unlocked through the ascension perk, with each perk requiring a certain amount of training upgrades to access, training upgrades being the total level of value and speed upgrades on all skillers. You can obtain points to put into these perks through the Ascension and Rebirth trees, as well as gaining one every 3 H2O levels. The first respec is free, and consequent respecs are 20 gems.

Here’s a list of the training perk effects and a ranking of 1-5, with 5 being best.

• 5% dmg, 10% accuracy 2/5
• 1% health per end lvl 1/5 (doesn’t work)
• 15% cash 5/5
• 8% ore and fish, 5% mining exp 5/5
• 1 crusaders 1/5
• 12% cauldron speed 3/5
• 20% dmg, 5% accuracy 3/5
• 10% crops 2/5
• 2% chance for rift 2x lvl up 1/5
• 25% cauldron speed 5/5
• 3% rebirth points 5/5 (respec to it before rebirthing or using a coupon)
• 2% RP gain for all tanks 5/5
• 2% asylum traces 5/5
• 50% damage 5/5
• 2% kills 1/5
• 0.1% chain lvl 4/5

Mining

Mining is important because crafted weapons are your main source of base damage, and trinkets give a huge damage boost throughout the game. More ore gain means more damage.

You can get new tiers of ores by having a higher mining level. Unlocking new ores means you can get higher tiers of smithing items. Each tier is much stronger than the previous one, so mining level is very important.

You can increase the rate at which you gain mining exp by using mining exp cards. However, the best way to reach higher levels is still by increasing starting level on the raid gift shop, contract shop, or ascension perk (much more expensive). In the new lvl 90 smithing tier, there is also a craft that increases mining exp a lot, but by that point, it shouldn’t really be a problem.

Mining can also use crystals, just like apothecary. They can provide big boosts to pretty much every part of mining. This is talked about in more detail in the crystal section.

Fishing

In fishing, you have a certain % chance to catch small, medium, or large fish. You can increase this % through hooks and rods. You unlock hooks through fishing levels, and rods are smithing items. You also unlock more fish through fishing level.

The best way to increase the number of fish caught is actually by leveling related smithing crafts that give you more fish per catch and the enigmatic booster. But investing your money into more power is still important.

Power works like this: power, power+, and power++ each increase power by a fixed amount (affected by multipliers). So the more you buy each of them, the less efficient it is because the prices keep going up.

Just like fighting, there is a visual cap in fishing that is very long. So once your speed reaches a certain point, it is much faster to leave the screen. The fishing speed caps at 0.2 seconds.

Smithing

You should try to get everything but focus on damage, except for the cash over time items, those are not good (unless you have the hourglass potion).

Enigmatic booster is notable as it increases your AP, monster kills per kill and fish gain if you have all secrets unlocked.

Cards

Cards are very important for damage and can provide huge bonuses to mining, spiriting, and crusading later on. At first, focus on any kind of damage you can get, as well as card drop chance. Try to get different sources of damage too. For example, instead of two cards giving 12% and 15% idle damage, it would be better to have one card that gives 15% idle damage and another that gives 12% base damage or total damage. Spreading out your card bonuses gives a bigger overall bonus.

Card drop chance is important not only to get the max amount of cards you can each day but also to increase rarity for some reason. So that’s even more reason to get cards that give this stat. Dryic Relic has the second highest card drop chance in the game until you reach purgatory, and you get it in the desert, so it’s very much worth maxing out.

The max star card limit is per zone, so make sure to farm every zone every day. To maximize card gain, afk on a monster that you one-shot. When you open the game, a large number of cards will appear on the screen. If you are aiming for higher rarity cards, you can close and reopen the game until you get the desired cards.

There are farming cards, which drop in the following manner:

• In botany you obtain cards on harvest, this chance is increased by overgrowth, with overgrowth 12 virtually guaranteeing a card for lower flowers. There’s one card for each flower.
• In tilling you obtain cards on each tilling cycle, e.g. the speed of your tillers. There’s one card for each crop.
• Apothecary works the same as tilling, where you have a chance to get a card on each cycle, depending on which color potion you are brewing. You do not need to level up a potion, you can brew a potion you can not afford and still get a card.

Currently you need to be on the screen to obtain them, they do not drop with away/offline progress, this will be added in the future however. They do autocollect fortunately. These are not affected by card drop chance.

Demon Z and Sentinel Z are bugged so that they apply only when you return from being offline, and work for the entire session until you go offline again, so put them in your training deck and always offline on training.

Raids

In raids you should focus on getting the good cards mostly, and spending your trophies on everything, but mostly mining and strength starting levels. The good cards are as follows: King X, all the entertainer cards and all the demon cards.

• Daydream = X, Chaotic = Y, Nightmare = Z

The raid boss cards are not affected by card drop chance, nor raid drop luck, your only hope is to pray.

Nightmare is more trophy/ticket efficient than other difficulties. Mark affects your trophy gain, so if you have spare perk points and can kill Demon Z comfortably, you could try your hand at a marked Demon Z.

It is recommended to either always fight the strongest boss you can currently face, or choose one that has a good card and try to farm it, starting with King X. However, once you can safely face Demon X, it is recommended to move into farming him, due to the high amount of trophies he drops and his card being essentially the best damage card obtainable at raids.

• Raid drop luck affects drops like tickets, gems and coupons.
• Raid drop luck is capped by what you can buy in the contract shop. What this means is if you have raid ticket raid drop 10 bought, then the chance that you will get raid tickets from raids is 50%, and additional raid drop luck will not increase this. The cap for gems is 20%.

However, drop luck affects the rarity of the drops, making it so that when you do get drops it is more likely to be a higher tier one, such as candy coupons.

Starting levels do affect the amount of xp you need to level up compared to level 1 somewhat, but they are absolutely worth it.

Asylum

Asylum is similar to raids. There are 4 bosses with 4 difficulties each. They are called Daydream, Chaotic, Hectic, Nightmare and cost 1/3/7/15 keys. With 1/3/9/20 loot rolls each, so it’s more efficient to fight higher levels if your damage is sufficient. In addition to this Nightmare difficulty bosses have a mechanic to raise their difficulty for a higher trace drop amount. Each bell ring increases the boss hp by XY and traces dropped by XY.

Here the bosses drop traces, which you spend on upgrading shrines, but in addition to boss traces you also need traces from other screens, here’s a chart showing which screen gives what.

Here is what the trace drops are based on:

• Mining = Ores per minute
• Smithing = Item tier, item level, levels per craft
• Fishing = Fish per catch
• Tilling = Dirt owned (NOT clay)
• Apo = Potion level, potion number. Partly bugged, doesn’t benefit from tperk (potion levelup)
• Botany = Flowers dropped, flower type, overgrowth

The traces dropped by the Asylum bosses can be used to upgrade shrines in the Asylum shop. These shrines give additional bonuses that can’t be found elsewhere in the game (for the most part), and the bonuses given are very useful. Each shopkeep is a different color, and the color and order corresponds to the order the bosses are fought in. Each boss has 3 shrines, and each shrine only uses the boss traces of the boss they represent.

Here’s a list of the shrine’s effects and a ranking of 1-5, with 5 being best. This doesn’t mean shrines ranked lower than 4 or 5 aren’t worth upgrading, they very much are. All shrines are very good. This is simply a priority list.

Emigdala Shrines

• Wrath: +1% damage for every strength level above 50. +1% per level, and caps at 50%. 4/5
• Prodigious: +1% bonus to all tinkering equipment. +1% per level, and caps at 50%. 4/5
• Recoup: +1.5% chance to not consume materials upon smithing and brewing. +1.5% per level, and caps at 75%. 5/5

Occulon Shrines

• Scavenge: +5% bonus to resource collection. +5% per level, and caps at 250%. 5/5
• Heavy Cash: First level increases idle speed and cash gain, further levels reduce idle speed while increasing cash even further. Vital for when you go past 0.025 idle speed. 5/5
• Talent: Start with 0.6% exp when any skill levels up. +0.6% per level, and caps at 30%. 4/5

Scallius Shrines

• Eviscerate: +1.5% kills affect the next monster. Affects only the next monster. +1.5% per level, and caps at 75% and next 3 monsters.. 4/5
• Hydrate: +2 H2O starting levels, and +1% chance to level H2O twice. +1 starting level and +1% double level chance per level. 5/5
• Best Rest: +0.5% idle gains on all screens. +0.5% gains per level. 5/5

Gorshank Shrines

• The Power: +10% Damage, +15% Health, and +4% Hatchery EXP per level. 3/5
• Chain Level: +3% chance to trigger a chain when leveling up a skill. +1% per level. A chain is when you level up a gym skill (Attack, Strength, and Endurance) due to a level being gained somewhere else. This is only one level to one skill, and the chain level does not trigger another chain. 5/5
• Brewery: Potions start with a +1% full brew bar after they level up. +1% per level. 2/5 (bugged, doesn’t provide as much as it should)

The Perk Tree

Here is a rough chart that you can follow as much or little as you want, it is tailored around beginners so you may feel it is not suitable to your current needs depending on where you are in the game.

Priority number one is unlocking new areas like gym, mining, spiriting, etc. I have left the attacks to your discretion, but generally claw and smite are the best.

Here is the legend for this chart:

• Teal – Amazing, invest into as much as possible.
• Green – Good, invest into a lot.
• Yellow – Decent, invest into an ok amount.
• Orange – Meh, invest just a lil bit.
• Red – Bad, don’t.
• The perks themselves are rated by color, the color of the perk tree has no relation.

Ascension

Ascension is great, but you shouldn’t do it all willy nilly at any point you can, you need time to build up an ascension, then when you’ve hit a roadblock and can’t progress much more, that’s when you ascend. Or you could ascend when you feel like the gains of the ascension would outweigh the time spent to build up the new ascension.

Try to push for clearing a zone before ascending, to unlock more ascension perks.

For your first ascension try to aim for 100 AP.

Gems

There are three ways to get gems: Events, Asylum, and Raids after you purchase the gem drop chance in the contract shop. They are also obtainable in the ‘buy gems’ screen, by clicking a few links you can get 60 gems.

This is simply a rough idea of what’s best, it does not mean you have to get the best things first and none of the other things until the best things are maxed out.

Here are the priorities for gem purchases:

• 0 – Godly potions – Ignore this if you don’t have a crazy amount of gems to spend.

If you are p2w, godly potion coupons are the best way to get strong fast, giving crazy boosts that are completely beyond reach for a new player, with the downside of being RNG reliant. Press the odds button in the gem menu for odds.

• 1 – Infinity forge – Best gem purchase straight up, not having to worry about forge recharge time is amazing.
• 2 – Gem rift – Invest 500 gems to get 1500 gems, 1000 gem profit, easy buy.
• 3 – Shiny vat – Research is really good, and shiny vat’s initial bonuses are really good. Can be upgraded further, but gets less efficient the higher you upgrade it, I would recommend not upgrading it much at all unless you have most other gem purchases.
• 4 – Card slots – Cards are amazingly versatile and provide huge boosts to almost every part of the game.
• 5 – Double AP – AP is always super good. Get 2-4 of them if possible, but one or two will be just fine.
• 6 – Golden nest – Getting new pets gets very hard, this makes it easier.
• 7 – Arcance carpet – Trekking genes and combos are really good, and this double dips on value and number.
• 8 – Eternity cauldron – When you reach farming, you will want at least one of these for the 30% chance to double brew, and for the x4 speed to discover new potions and brew ones you have.
• 9 – Double BP – Obviously only once you have access to rebirth. Get one or two, after that it gets less efficient.
• 10 – Crystals – Crystals are really good, but getting the optimal setup with crystals costs thousands of gems, so with a budget purchase one set of Supreme crystals, then Premium crystals, then 3 slots for apothecary. Repeat this order until you have 6 of each crystal purchase and all apothecary/mining slots and you’ll have the optimal setup. For a more budget option just buy a few of everything.
• 11 – Mystical tiller – Pretty simple, more crops, and crops are the biggest hurdle for potion-making.
• 12 – Friendly mushrooms – Flowers aren’t that hard to obtain compared to crops, so I don’t recommend getting more than a couple of these.
• 13 – Scavenger’s Wit – Asylum shrines are really good, so boosting your trace gain is also really good.
• 14 – Hyper spiriting – More souls, more rift levels, more goodness. It can help you get over the initial hurdle of getting enough blue/purple/white to unlock new rifts.
• 15 – Overclocked glyphs – Very cheap for a decent boost, pretty gem efficient.
• 16 – Overlord miners – Ore gain is really good, the reason this is so low on the list is that compared to the highest mining kit, overlord miners are only about a 30% increase, for 420 gems. That’s not very gem efficient.
• 17 – Second necklace slot – Only good once you get crusading/tinkering high enough to have two good necklaces.

QOL

• Card decks – Cards are really powerful, but swapping out cards before visiting a screen is incredibly tedious, so this is integral QOL.
• Deck linking – Swapping card decks before visiting a screen is a bit annoying.
• Pet slots – you need a lotta pets get em good
• Tinkering decks – Same as card decks, but you don’t need as many tinkering decks, you can make do with 2-3.

Anything not on this list is probably not worth getting unless you have an obscene amount of gems.

F2P Gem-Purchase List

• 1 – Infinity Forge
• 2 – Only one Double AP
• 3 – Gem Rift
• 4 – Some Card slots*

*Depending on how many good cards you have, you should get a card slot here and there. Last time I maxed my card slots somewhere at Maelstrom progresswise with terrible card luck. Rather swap some cards in and out if really needed. Also rather dont get more than 1 card of the same type of bonus early on and think a bit ahead.

• 5 – Only one Desolator progresswise you should be around Purgatory+.
• 6 – Only one Supreme Crystal progresswise you should be at purg+, even better bog+
• 7 – Only one Eternity Cauldron
• 8 – Only one Mushroom
• 9 – Only one Canary
• 10 – Only one Golden Nest
• 11 – Only one Iodized Builder

Arcade

The arcade is pretty easy to understand, just complete as many tasks as you can and collect the balls once every 8 hours. You can see potential rewards by pressing the reward tiers in the top right. There is currently an event (ends on June 16th), where you can buy bonuses with eggs you gain from launching balls. Here is the order of priority on the purchases: AP, Cash, Damage, Crops, Kills, BP, Odd nest, Blue hero. The event cards are last because blue hero isn’t very useful, and odd nest gives a bonus to a screen that isn’t in the game yet. Event bonuses are kept after the event.

The task list increases the rate at which you earn balls, while the cap for balls stays at 8 hours. Try to make completing tasks a priority, as it’s one of the few ways to attain more gems.

The Gem Prizes for Card Hand in Arcade are:

• Trash: 5
• Pair: 10
• Two Pair: 40
• Trips: 80
• Straight: 125
• Flush: 200
• Full House: 400
• Quads: 800
• Straight Flush : 2000
• Royal Flush: 10000

Spiriting

Here are some charts explaining how spiriting works, courtesy of Cacely from the Idle Skilling discord.

Contracts

Don’t try too hard for a contract like unskilled kills. It will take time away from progressing in other areas for only a few merits as a reward. Do the contracts that you can finish within a few hours at most. They aren’t worth a lot of time.

The best things to buy with contracts are the keys, followed by raid drops and acolyte/cultist efficiency.

Auto progress is a nice quality of life purchase, but it only works when the game is open.

Summoning

Rifts won’t provide too big of a bonus until you get more acolyte/cultist efficiency, but they’re still pretty good, here’s the order I’d recommend upgrading them in:

• Rift Rift
• Power Rift
• Water Rift
• Mining Rift
• Mega Ap Rift
• Atk Speed Rift
• Health Rift
• Gold Coin Rift

Tilling

Until you reach high apothecary levels, tilling is usually the biggest bottleneck in farming. It works similarly to mining, and you can have up to 8 tillers producing each of the different crops. However, there are a couple of new mechanics.

There are 3 ways you can upgrade your tillers. Value and speed work just like in every other skiller up to this point. However, when you click the crop and select the upgrade option, you get another upgrade option similar to fishing, with small, medium, and large upgrade options. These options increase the tier exp your tillers get per min, allowing them to unlock higher tier tillers, similar to the mining kits, and passive boosts that can affect that tiller or even all of them.

Because of how the passive boosts work, it is usually better to always have all tillers farming the same crop, unless you have all the mystical farmers. There are different ways to reach max efficiency for each crop. In my experience, what has given me the best results was to leave my first half of the tillers on the higher tier they have unlocked, and the second half on whatever tier offered buffs to the production of the crop I wanted to produce. For example, keeping them as serfs to have higher grass crop yields.

Apothecary

Apothecary is the main part of farming. It’s where you brew the potions that give you buffs to pretty much everything else in the game. There are 2 parts to it: potion discovery and potion brewing.

Potion discovery is a long process and depends on luck. If you’re unlucky, it might take a long time to get the potions you want. The way it works is that you add 2 ingredients you have, 1 from tilling and 1 from farming. Based on the “value” of both of them, plus a random modifier, you’ll brew a specific potion. You only find out which one after the brewing time is over, and there’s a chance of getting one you already have. The best combinations to brew each specific potion are on the wiki, but it still depends a lot on luck. The potion discovery process is not affected by the 50% away progress penalty, but normal potion brewing is.

Potions are permanent and not consumable, like smithing items. But unlike crafted items, they are not reset when you ascend.

Potion brewing lets you increase the level of the potions you have already discovered by using crops and plants and brewing for a certain amount of time. There is a minimum apothecary level you must have to brew each specific potion. This increases by 1 for each following potion and 5 for each color. This won’t affect you much until about level 60, but after that, it becomes much harder to reach higher levels than unlocking new potions. If you have an eternal cauldron, you should always brew potions on it since it gives a 30% chance for double brewing, similar to double craft from smithing.

There are many different potions that affect each aspect of the game, and some may be better to you in your current situation than others, however in general, the priority on brewing potions should be the following:

1. Apothecary (speed, cost reduction, double craft)
2. Tilling (speed, increased exp, crop yield)
3. Farming (plant growth speed, plant gains, exotic flowers)
4. Damage (+%damage per X, total damage, crit damage, idle damage)
5. Cash (all cash potions)
6. Mining (exp, ore gained) Idle speed (+idle speed %) and smithing (smithing cost)
7. Those not mentioned above. For ex. Farming exp
8. But you should brew at least some levels in every potion, as they are all good.

If you’re struggling with apo lvls, rebirth. It applies any starting lvl bonuses from the contract purchase and AP perk. As well as the rebirth perk of course.

Rebirth

You unlock the ability to rebirth when you reach the dungeon, these are the following things that net you BP:

• Unspent crops (Diminishing returns, with a few hundred T giving 253BP, and a few hundred Q giving 357BP, capping out at 750BP)
• Banked AP (Diminishing returns, with 1k AP giving around 10BP, 5k AP giving around 25BP, 100k AP giving around 89BP, 10M AP giving around 377BP and capping out at 1500BP with 5 to 5.5B AP)
• Fighting progress (Capping out at 351 at the final mob of lunar isles, not including glitches)
• Pot/Tiller levels over mythic (Capping out at 1250BP)
• Flowers discovered (Highest flower gives 576BP)
• Miscellaneous (A smithing item and a few cards)

It would be most efficient to ascend to get some banked AP, then progress to the highest enemy you can, (or dungeon, as that would be faster and fighting bp isn’t very big,) then rebirth. Spend about half of the AP you earned on AP perks, then use the rest for BP.

Rebirth resets everything ascension does in addition to stocked up ore/fish and anything farming related with the exception of potion levels.

As for the rebirth perks themselves, everything is good except for botany starting lvls. Get what you need most at the time, smithing xp if you need more lvls for the highest tiers, dmg if you’re just about to clear a zone, etc. Check the wiki for what to use your keys on, they’re pretty straight forward.

Crystals

Crystal slots can be unlocked through rebirth, up to one per cauldron/miner. With gems you can buy 3 slots for one cauldron/miner. Crystals themselves can be bought with BP or AP, or with gems.

Here is a list of the effects of the free crystals:

• Yellow is exp
• Red is speed
• Purple is cost reduction / % ore
• Blue is double brew / double ore

The best setups are as follows:

• Premium crystals (all 3 slots have the same color)
• Apo speed: orange/pink/pink/pink/pink/orange (can swap some pinks for greens to save some gems)
• Exp gain: orange/orange/orange/green/pink/green
• Double brew/cost reduction: orange/orange/orange/black/green/black

Non premium:

• Apo speed: all red
• Exp gain: all yellow
• Double brew: blue/rest red
• Cost reduction: purple/rest red

Here are the setups for mining:

Premium:

Ore gain:

• 2G1R/black/orange
• Black/2G1R/orange (note: there is another setup that’s just 4% less efficient, which would be to replace the entire bottom row with orange)

Exp gain:

• Orange/pink/orange
• Orange/pink/orange

Non premium:

• Ore gain: all purple
• Exp gain: all yellow

Botany

Similarly to tilling, there are two screens you can toggle for each plant, “upgrade” that allows you to upgrade value and speed for the pot, and also shows the passive upgrades you get from your pot tier that, unlike tilling, doesn’t need any investment but instead gains xp as you harvest flowers.

And “grow” allows you to choose what plant you wish to grow and how much you wish to use as fertilizer from dirt and the previous flower. Fertilizer increases the amount of plants received, the experience and the chance to get a higher tier flower, but have diminishing returns, so only use as much dirt as you can reasonably sustain.

Overgrowth gives you double reward for five times the growth time, so if you want to be as efficient as possible then you should never overgrow. The time multiplier can be reduced to four with the last perk of the yellow perk tree and and further reduced with some of the cards.

The % under the growth time is the chance for you to get a higher tier flower upon harvest, which can be increased by exotic flowers potions, cards or a contract shop purchase.

Crusading

In Crusading, damage is the most important thing. Getting bosses to a higher rank will greatly increase your materials and XP gains. HP, HP gain, and shields are not that important in crusading because you take more damage with every attack. This makes long fights turn into sudden death after a certain point.

Additional crusaders and crusade multiplier are very important. Crusade multiplier increases the materials and XP you gain.

Materials cycle in difficulty. Some materials are only obtainable in lower tier difficulties. Lava has said this was a dumb decision and might change it. But the best materials are only accessible in higher difficulty crusades. So ranking them up to the breaking point should be your first priority.

To increase your crusading level faster, put all your crusaders on the boss you most recently unlocked. Higher level bosses give more XP. But if you only focus on leveling crusading, you will never get any good equipment. So it’s recommended that you focus on equipment first, then try to get more levels to unlock a new boss, and repeat.

Card drop chance affects your chance to get crusade cards, as well as fight bonus. Fight bonus also increases the amount of loot you get when actively fighting crusades.

Tinkering is where you use the materials gained through crusading to get huge boosts to your damage, fishing, mining, cash, etc. The best strategy to rank up tinkering is usually to craft as much *** as you can, no matter if it’s low tier or not. Higher tiered equipment gives more XP but is much harder to get the necessary materials for. So they are only worth aiming for when you want the bonuses from them.

A lot of tinkering equipment is useful. Some provide boosts to rift XP or strength XP, which is small but still nice. But the real bread and butter of tinkering is the boost to damage and ore gain you can get. Equipment that gives those should be your focus.

The best strategy for boosting is just to use the highest booster/mutator combo available to you and pray. That’s it. I wouldn’t consider using misc items on anything but the highest tier of equipment.

Pets

Hatchery

In Hatchery, you can breed pets to get new ones. The pets go in order, like pet 1 + pet 1 can give you pet 1 or 2. Pet 1 + pet 2 can give you pet 1, 2, or 3. Using two pet 2 doesn’t increase the chance of getting pet 3. Use your highest species pet with your highest level pet. Higher species pets give more level gains.

Breeding takes at least 10 minutes. When you trash an egg, you get an egg shell to upgrade nests.

When a nest’s progress bar finishes:

• A new egg is made if there’s space.
• An egg might be upgraded in rarity.
• More eggs in a nest means a higher chance of an upgrade.

Trekking

In trekking, you can have up to 4 fighting pets and 4 support pets. Fighting pets have a default attack and can use genetic attacks. Support pets can’t attack but give genetics for combos and HP to the team based on their level. High level fighting pets are important for damage and health.

Gene combos give big bonuses. Aim for more x3 or x6 combos instead of one or two x9.

Kills in trekking give meters and vessels. Meters are like kills and progress you to the next monster. Vessels can be spent in research.

Research

Tanks have 3 effects each. One is unlocked from the start, and 2 unlock by leveling the previous bonus. Level up bonuses by putting RP into them for XP over time. Adding RP replaces the previous RP, so don’t replace 10 with 11. Wait until 15-20. The more RP you have, the less you gain. Decide when to invest or save up. Tanks gain RP if the valve is enabled. You gain less RP in each tank for every valve enabled. Choose which ones to level up.

You can put a pet in a capsule in research for permanent bonuses. They gain experience in the capsule, but the bonus stays even if they’re not in it. Under the H2O bar, you can see which pet(s) are in your capsule(s).

There’s a very small chance of getting a unique pet from raids/asylum. It will be raised next week, so save your tickets/keys.

To unlock perks in the infinite skill tree and new potions, visit the dairy aisle. To visit the dairy aisle, you need to unlock the zone ‘oblivion’.