A naive little wizard was practicing magic one day, and suddenly the entire wizard school is on fire! The raging inferno burned the entire school down, and with it the seal stone that was holding back an entire army of monsters hellbent on destroying the world. What’s a young wizard supposed to do?
Idle Defense: Dark Forest is an tower defense game with idle clicker elements mixed in for good measure. As the young wizard, you will build towers and summon familiars to help you defeat the monsters from the Dark Forest.
In our Idle Defense: Dark Forest tips and tricks guide, we will go over the basic gameplay loop and how to maximize your towers. Let’s get started with our Idle Defense: Dark Forest cheats, tips and tricks strategy guide to surviving the forest!
Choose your tower spots carefully!
When you first start out Dark Forest, you will have spiral-shaped maze. The fragmented core lies within the center, and the monsters will spawn in from the top left corner and work their way around the spiral shape to get to the core. Should a single monster reach the core, the world is doomed!
To take out the monsters, you can utilize mechanical towers to reign chaos upon them. There are a total of 18 plots on the maze where you can build towers, but you unlock them with gold. Plots become more expensive to unlock every time you buy one, so choose carefully where you want to build.
You start out with only three plots, but you can quickly buy more to reinforce your defenses. Think carefully about where you want your choke points to be!
Use the Lightning skill to get you through!
You can actively help out your towers by using the Lightning skill. This is the start skill and every time you activate it you will zap the monster in the lead with lightning, dealing a small amount of damage. Depending how your tapping speed, you can do some pretty good damage with this.
Early on you are going to have to rely on the Lightning skill in order to get you through some of the levels, as your towers will not cut it and you will not have enough gold to upgrade them sufficiently. You can upgrade Lightning to increase the amount of damage it does per tap, but this costs quite a lot of gold.
Work your way up from the Wooden Arrow tower!
Your beginning tower is the shoddy but reliable Wooden Arrow tower. This thing does basic physical damage and is your starting point before you get into other other towers. Start off with a bunch of these – you are going to need them!
Eventually the game will go over the evolution mechanic after you have passed enough levels, and it is basically the “merging” mechanic from merge-type games. In order to evolve a tower, you must raise it to max level then merge it with another tower of the same rarity. It does not need to be the same type of tower.
Each type of tower, when merged with another, will provide you with two evolution options. This is how you discover new types of towers, and once you discover a tower for the first time you can buy it right away without having to merge to it, although this is very pricey.
Use physical and magical towers!
Towers are split between two different damage types: physical and magical damage. You will want an even amount of both, as there are some enemies that are more resistant to physical or magical damage, so you want to cover all of your bases.
Later on in the game, you will encounter enemies that have blue shields around them. Physical attacks barely make a dent in them, but magical attacks shred through shields like swiss cheese, so it is important to have both.
We know it is tempting to use your existing powerful towers to merge, but trust us when we say that you want to always have at least one physical and one magical tower up at all times.
Complete the quests!
The amount of gold you get from taking down monsters slows down exponentially once you are a few chapters in, so you have to rely on the quests in order to get a good amount of gold.
Your recommended main quest is shown at all times at the bottom right corner of the screen. Not only do these quests reward you with a hefty amount of gold and gems, but they also lead you down the general progression route making sure that you are sufficiently prepared for the battles ahead.
Resurrect often to gain access to powerful research!
Upon clearing level 5 and reaching level 6, you will unlock the ability to resurrect. Resurrection is the prestige mode of this game, and activating it will send you back to level 1 in exchange for a powerful currency known as emerald.
There are a few things to keep in mind when resurrecting. First off, you do NOT lose your towers, resources, skills, or upgrades – the only thing that gets reset is your level progress. The more turrets you have and the higher they are upgraded, the more emeralds you will earn in the process.
Before you commit, you can see exactly how many emeralds you will earn before you perform the resurrection. Emeralds are used for unlocking powerful research, which grants you permanent boosts to various aspects of your towers.
For example, the first boost costs 500 emeralds and increases the strength of ALL your physical damage towers by 50%! You can enhance them even further after that, making your towers unstoppable power machines.
The research can really boost your tower damage significantly, so it is best to resurrect often. The longer you wait, the more emeralds you get, so the best way to do it is to go as far as you can and when the gold stops coming in and the monsters are just too tough to beat, it is time to resurrect.
Summon demons to aid you in battle!
Demons also unlock once you pass level 5. Demons are otherworldly entities that you summon through the use of relics. You must possess a certain amount of relics before you can summon the demon. Common demons require 20 relics and rare demons need 40 relics.
Once you have summoned a demon, you must equip it in one of the three slots. You start will only one slot and can unlock the other two with the use of two diamonds. When a demon is equipped, they will give you various boosts. Here are the possible boosts:
- Physical damage increase
- Magical damage increase
- Gold earning
- Lucky Point (we’re not sure what this one does)
- Skill cooldown decrease
Battle, earn gold, upgrade and merge!
And that is the main loop of Idle Defense: Dark Forest. Fight off monsters, unlock plots, build more towers, merge old towers into new, powerful ones, research, complete quests, and unlock demons. If you are ever looking to power up your towers, just do one of the various things listed!
And that concludes our Idle Defense: Dark Forest guide. If you have any other tips or tricks to surviving the dark forest, let us know in the comments below!
Published: Jan 10, 2020 08:30 am