Your first sessions

The loop

1. 01Roll the dice to get units.
2. 02Place your best units on the plot pads. An empty pad is wasted income, so fill every slot even with a weak unit.
3. 03Spend the cash on better dice and on skill tree nodes.
4. 04Raise your luck, then roll again.
5. 05Improve the units you are keeping with grades, traits and mutations.
6. 06Rebirth once your income rebuilds quickly, and keep the dice you bought.

Spend on money before anything else

Every other system is gated behind cash. Better dice cost cash, skill tree nodes cost cash, and both feed back into getting more of it. During your first session the correct answer to almost every spending question is the money upgrade.

The exception is a unit rare enough to keep. Spending on a unit you will replace in an hour is the most common waste of early resources, because grade and trait multipliers land on top of a base income that is about to become irrelevant.

Buying dice

Luck roughly doubles per tier while price roughly quintuples. That means an intermediate tier you intend to discard costs far more cash than it costs luck, so skipping a step is often correct. The dice ladder lists all eight with their prices.

When to rebirth

A rebirth resets your cash, gives a permanent cash multiplier, raises your luck multiplier and adds a plot slot. The test is simple: if you can rebuild your previous cash total within a few minutes, rebirth. If rebuilding takes a long session, you are not ready and the reset will set you back.

Buy dice before a rebirth rather than after. Dice persist through the reset, so buying first gives you the tier and the multiplier from it. Buying afterwards means rebuilding from a smaller base to afford the same thing.

Where the multipliers stack

A unit's final income is its base rate multiplied by grade, trait and mutation together. Because they multiply, a good grade on a high-income unit beats a great grade on a cheap one.

Four mistakes that cost the most

• Rerolling a unit you will replace

  Trait Rerolls are the scarcest item codes give you. Spend them on a keeper.

• Leaving plot pads empty

  An empty pad earns nothing. A common unit in the slot still beats no unit.

• Selling without checking

  Grade, trait, mutation and size all change a copy's value. Two copies of one unit are rarely equal.

• Over-investing in temporary units

  Early income is about to be dwarfed. Keep the upgrades for the units that survive a rebirth.