Idle Skilling Ultimate Guide for Everything You Need to Know

This is a guide I uploaded on kongregate way back in the day, with the help of: odeio7, Gallenn, Harri, hecputaomo, jakkk, Klötzchen & Dest.

It is updated for pets but not spelunking, it will be updated for spelunking soon probably.

A FAQ for answering commonly asked questions.

1 – When should I ascend the first/next time?

It is widely agreed that the best time to ascend for the 1st time is when you have reached around 100AP. After that, the right time to ascend should be whenever you find yourself to be stuck far from the next zone and feel like you could reach your progress easily with your new starting levels and the AP you have accumulated to invest. It is also a good idea to ascend after reaching a new zone, as new perks make getting back where you’ve been faster.

2 – 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.

3 – Should I rebirth?

Rebirth is as important a mechanic as ascending once you reach end-game. It is important to rebirth to be able to progress in farming, especially apothecary, unlock new contracts, smithing tiers and get boosts to ores/fish production and damage.
Therefore it should not be ignored, however it doesn’t need to be rushed if your bp yield is low and ascension still nets you considerable buffs. A general recommendation on when to rebirth would be to rebirth when ascending wouldn’t net you significant boosts, and you have accumulated 500-700 BP.

4 – 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

5 – What should I spend my ap on?

Refer to the Ascension section.

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

The game is supposed to handicap screens you’re not on by 50%, called “away progress”. Any screen you’re on is not affected and thus has 100% progress. The screen you offline on also retains 100% progress. The actual away progress is more like 30-35%, even though it says 50% in game. This isn’t a bug apparently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, a tip with regards to away progress: gains are only calculated once you visit a screen, so if you equip mining cards before visiting mining, you will gain the full benefit of mining cards. Use this to your advantage to swap to a deck before visiting a screen.

7 – How to get gems?

Primarily the arcade, as well as raids, real money, the crypt and your first 3 rebirths.

Try to progress through fighting to obtain monster cards and clear zones, but do not try to push past the point where it takes ages to kill just one monster. When you are not close to clearing a zone and you have collected your daily cards, you should just try to get as much cash as possible or consider ascending. Most of the time, you obtain more cash through fighting an enemy you one shot than one that gives more cash but you don’t one shot, due to the way health/cash scaling works. But look at the cash gain per hour screen to judge 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, then you will waste 0.015 seconds. Not to worry, though, as once you surpass this speed you can increase the toggle of your heavy cash shrine in asylum.

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

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 is important, as crafted weapons are your primary source of base damage, and trinkets give a huge damage boost throughout the game. So more ore gain = more damage.

New tiers of ores can be obtained through higher mining level. Unlocking new ores means higher tiers of smithing items will become available to you, each tier is immensely stronger than the previous tier, so mining level is hugely important.

You can considerably 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 (considerably more expensive). In the new lvl 90 smithing tier there is also a craft that increases mining exp considerably, however by that point it shouldn’t really be a problem.

Mining now can also use crystals, similarly to apothecary, they can provide considerable boosts to essentially every aspect of mining. This is spoken of in more detail in the crystal section.

In fishing you have a certain % chance to catch small, medium or large fish. This % can be increased through hooks and rods. Hooks are unlocked through fishing levels, and rods are smithing items. Further fish are unlocked through fishing level.

The best way to increase the amount 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.

The way power works is that 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 due to the fact the prices keep increasing.

Much 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.

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 are very important for damage, and can provide huge bonuses to mining/spiriting/crusading as well, later on. Initially you should focus on any kind of damage you can get, as well as card drop chance. Try to get different sources of damage as well, 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 larger overall bonus.

Card drop chance is not only important to get you the max amount of cards you can each day, but it also increases 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.

On the wiki you can see the bonuses of every card: https://idle-skilling.fandom.com/wiki/Cards

On this google doc you can see the best deck setups https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vu4VXiqL9GkI9qOgsIBn_Znx-j_iLOCrVGUrgAJYMrQ/edit?usp=sharing

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 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

Bosses also drop BP & AP coupons, arcade balls, asylum keys, gems, candy coupons, safety charms (a crusade misc item), which can be increased by Raid drop luck. This makes raid drop luck incredibly important in asylum, as the potential rewards are great. Here is a spreadsheet courtesy of Chyromyr in the discord, listing the HP and drop rates for the bosses, where you can make a copy of it and input your raid drop luck to see your personal drop rates: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10yruc84LIIKtTUxwYqBMEQTb-IggGKpz79BUbuEyDpo/edit#gid=619220236

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)

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Don’t try to push too hard for a contract like unskilled kills, as it will take away time spent progressing in other areas for only a few merits in reward. Do the contracts that are achievable within a few hours tops, they aren’t worth a lot of time.

The best contracts purchase are the keys, followed by raid drops and acolyte/cultist efficiency.

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

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

Up 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 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, similarly to the mining kits, and passive boosts that can affect that tiller or even all of them.

Due to the way the passive boosts work, it is usually better to always have all tillers farming the same crop, as there are different ways to reach max efficiency for each crop, unless you have all the mystical farmers. 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 wished to produce, for example, keeping them as serfs to have higher grass crop yields.

Apothecary is the main part of farming, and 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 it depends on rng, so if you’re unlucky it might take a long while to get the potions you want. The way it works is that you add 2 ingredients you possess, 1 from tilling and 1 from farming, and according to the “value” of both of them, plus a random modifier, you’ll brew a specific potion, which you only find out after the brewing time is over, with a chance of getting one you already have. The best combinations to brew each specific potion is on the wiki, but it still depends heavily 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, except unlike crafted items they are not reset upon ascension.

Potion brewing allows you to increase the level of the potions you have already discovered by consuming crops and plants, as well as brewing for a certain amount of time. There is a minimum apothecary level you must have to brew each specific potion, which increases by 1 for each following potion and 5 for each color. This won’t affect you much until approximately 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, similarly 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.

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.

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

https://idle-skilling.fandom.com/wiki/Builds

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.

In Crusading, damage is king. Getting bosses to a higher rank will immensely increase your materials and XP gains. HP, HP gain and shields are not all that important in crusading, as you take more damage with every attack, making long fights turn into sudden death after a certain point.

Additional crusaders and crusade multiplier is very important, as crusade multiplier increases the materials you gain as well as xp.

Materials cycle in difficulty, with some materials only being obtainable in lower tier difficulties, which is something that is subject to change as Lava has expressed that was a dumb decision. But the best materials are only accessible in higher difficulty crusades, making ranking them up to the breaking point your first priority.

To increase your crusading level faster put all your crusaders on the boss you most recently unlocked, as 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 lvls to unlock a new boss, then 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 make use of the materials gained through crusading to gain huge boosts to your damage, fishing, mining, cash, etc. The best strategy to rank up tinkering is usually to craft as much ♥♥♥♥ as you possibly can, no matter if it’s low tier or not. Higher tiered equipment does give more xp, but is much harder to obtain the necessary materials, so they are only worth aiming for when you want the bonuses from them.

A lot of tinkering equipment is useful, some providing boosts to rift xp or strength xp, though small, still a nice addition. But the real bread and butter of tinkering is the boost to damage and ore gain you can get, and equipment that give 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.

On the wiki you can see what boss drops what and at what difficulty: https://idle-skilling.fandom.com/wiki/Tinkering

Hatchery

In Hatchery you can breed pets together for a chance to get a new pet, with the progression of pets being linear, for example: breeding pet 1 with pet 1 can net you either another pet 1 or a pet 2, breeding pet 1 with pet 2 can net you either pet 1,2 or 3. The chance to get pet 3 does not go up if you use two pet 2, instead of one pet 1 and one pet 2, so use your highest species pet with your highest lvl pet. Note level gains go up the higher the species is.

Breeding is capped at a 10 minute minimum. When trashing an egg you obtain an egg shell, which can be used to upgrade nests.

When a nest’s progress bar finishes, two things happen:

A new egg is created if it is not full.
There is a chance an egg is upgraded in rarity.
The more eggs are in a nest, the higher chance one of them will be upgraded.

Trekking

In trekking you can have up to 4 fighting pets and 4 support pets, depending on the order you put them in. Fighting pets each have a default attack and can use genetic attacks, while support pets can not attack but can provide genetics for combos as well as HP to the team based on their level. High level pets is important for your fighting pets, as that determines both your damage and health.

Combos of genes give big bonuses that you should aim for, but I recommend going for more x3 or x6 combos rather than one or two x9.

Gaining kills in trekking gives you meters and vessels, meters are like kills, progressing you to the next monster, and vessels can be spent in research.

https://idle-skilling.fandom.com/wiki/Builds

Research

Tanks have 3 effects each, with one unlocked from the start and 2 unlocking by leveling the previous bonus. You can level up the bonuses by putting RP into them, which nets them XP over time. Adding RP to a tank replaces the previous RP you had invested in it, so you shouldn’t replace 10 with 11, as that would provide a negligible bonus, instead you should wait until 15-20. But, the more RP you have, the less you gain, so you have to decide on your own whether to invest now or save up. Each tank gains RP if they have the valve enabled, you gain less RP in each of your tanks for every valve enabled, so you have to choose which ones you want to level up.

You can insert a pet into a capsule in research, giving varying permanent bonuses, they gain experience while in the capsule, but the bonus stays even if they aren’t in it. Under the H2O bar you can see which pet(s) are in your capsule(s)

There is a very small chance of obtaining a unique pet from raids/asylum, though it is going to be raised next week, so I suggest saving your tickets/keys.

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

Secrets give some really good bonuses, if you want to you can see where they all are on the wiki:
https://idle-skilling.fandom.com/wiki/Secrets