[GemCraft chapter 0] Easy-Cheap Journey Amulets (Premium only)

This may be common knowledge, but I figured I’d share it anyhow. There’s a bunch of Journey Amulets that are just really tedious to get by normal means, but with Premium, you can get them super-cheap just by using Endurance mode. Just max out Wild Gem, Flexibility, along with any other relevant skills, and put the rest in Focus. Expand mana pool large enough not to waste any of the Wild Gem, sacrifice wild gem, and then do your thing (whatever amulet you’re working towards), and then kill yourself (or let the monsters do it for you). You’ll work up to those tedious amulets pretty quickly.

The ones I’m talking about are any of the “Build X <structures>” ones (though you’re likely to get some of those with just normal game play), “Destroy X <blank> with <blank>” ones, “Expand your Mana Pool”, etc. Pretty much anything that doesn’t involve actually killing any monsters. For the Beacon-destroying ones, go to Field H1 – it has 10 beacons. No other level has more than 6. For the Demolition one, max your Demolition skill so you can blow up 13 structures instead of just 3.

Whatever you do, I recommend leaving enough mana for 3 grade 1 gems at the end, so you can blow up your orb yourself, rather than waiting for the monsters to kill you. Why? You get a free Battle Amulet every time for not letting any monsters reach your orb. No experience, of course, but every amulet counts towards your Ritual skill. Plus if you kill yourself, the battle counts as a win – which helps towards your 500 wins amulet if you don’t have it already. Also helps if you can find a level where you reliably get a grade 6 Wild Gem instead of a grade 5. This way you also get a second free amulet for creating a grade 6 gem.

(I wouldn’t normally do this, but some wanker decided to necro dozens of old threads and bumped everything recent off the front page, so I’m going to bump this just once.)

I will add that you can also get the “Win 500 Battles” one pretty easily just by repeatedly starting an Endurance battle and killing yourself with 3 gem bombs over and over.

Some more cheap tricks:

To get those “Kill X Monsters with <blank> shrines” ones, try starting a level which already contains shrines, and play in Swarm mode with Endurance set. Drop your Wild Gem into the shrine as soon as it’s charged, and boom. Repeat until you get 1000 for each shrine type. Good levels for this are H6 for Charged Bolt shrines (4 shrines plus a mana shard, so you can make multiple shrine attacks before you get killed) and B13 for Lightning shrines (the only one with two of them).

For those “Open X Tombs” ones, nobody said you had to survive opening the tombs. Try going to a level like L13 (again with Endurance mode), put your Wild Gem into a tower right between the two tombs set to Structures. Build some walls so the Tomb monsters have to go around the long way. You should be able to break open both tombs (and get some free Beacon kills) before you get killed. Boom, 2 free tombs to your credit.

This is fabulous. Thanks for the tips.

Originally posted by Lurlock:

This may be common knowledge, but I figured I’d share it anyhow. There’s a bunch of Journey Amulets that are just really tedious to get by normal means, but with Premium, you can get them super-cheap just by using Endurance mode. Just max out Wild Gem, Flexibility, along with any other relevant skills, and put the rest in Focus. Expand mana pool large enough not to waste any of the Wild Gem, sacrifice wild gem, and then do your thing (whatever amulet you’re working towards), and then kill yourself (or let the monsters do it for you). You’ll work up to those tedious amulets pretty quickly.

The ones I’m talking about are any of the “Build X <structures>” ones (though you’re likely to get some of those with just normal game play), “Destroy X <blank> with <blank>” ones, “Expand your Mana Pool”, etc. Pretty much anything that doesn’t involve actually killing any monsters. For the Beacon-destroying ones, go to Field H1 – it has 10 beacons. No other level has more than 6. For the Demolition one, max your Demolition skill so you can blow up 13 structures instead of just 3.

Whatever you do, I recommend leaving enough mana for 3 grade 1 gems at the end, so you can blow up your orb yourself, rather than waiting for the monsters to kill you. Why? You get a free Battle Amulet every time for not letting any monsters reach your orb. No experience, of course, but every amulet counts towards your Ritual skill. Plus if you kill yourself, the battle counts as a win – which helps towards your 500 wins amulet if you don’t have it already. Also helps if you can find a level where you reliably get a grade 6 Wild Gem instead of a grade 5. This way you also get a second free amulet for creating a grade 6 gem.

the battle amulet gives you xp at the very end

Not in Endurance it doesn’t. Endurance multiplies your XP earned based on how many waves you defeat. But if you do these tricks, you won’t survive any waves, so your Endurance multiplier will be 0, meaning you lose all XP for the level. Only exceptions are for Journey Amulets when you earn them, and if you open any tombs, you get a very small multiplier just for that. (Which probably means 0 experience anyhow, because just in order to beat the level the first time to unlock Endurance, you probably made at least the base XP for the level, and this will be far less, so you get nothing because it’s less than your previous run.)

Originally posted by calvindang:

the battle amulet gives you xp at the very end

Not if you suicide in Endurance. BaseXP*Settings*Amulets*Endure = 0 regardless of what multiplier you get for Battle Amulets if your Endurance multiplier is zero (beat no waves).

I think you meant “journey amulet”. (or whatever sub-type of amulet it is you’re referring to).
Kinda hard to say for sure, with the short comment+long quote in question…glares at the necromancer known as calvindang

Yes, of course the Journey Amulets still give you experience even with a 0 Endurance multiplier, because those aren’t affected by any of the multipliers. Of course you can only get each of them ONCE. Though as I said, those Battle Amulets you get when you suicide are not quite worthless, only mostly so. Sure you don’t get any experience for them, but they do still affect the Ritual skill, for what it’s worth.

Anyhow, after looking through them all, you can use these techniques to get almost every one of the Journey Amulets – the only exceptions are for beating the Epic Waves/Last Level (and thus the “Beat All Fields” one), the “Beat X Waves” ones, the “Spend 100000 on gems in one battle” one (probably), the “Spend 10000 on Banishment in one battle” one (pretty sure on this one), the ones about gem-kills (3000 on 1 gem, 700 each on 7 gems), the special kills (100000 HP monster, 40 armor swarm monster, 12 Apparitions, 24 Shadows), and the “1000 monsters in a row” (maybe on Swarm, but I doubt it).

I’m not sure on some of the other odd-ball ones, since I already got them legitimately before trying this. I’m talking about things like “Have 1 of each building at the end” or “Have no more than 2 gems at any time while spending 5000 on gems”, “Trap Kills Only”, “Gem Bomb Kills Only”, etc. I’ll have to try these on a new save to see if they can be done.

Just tried out, and yes you CAN get “Trap Kills Only” and “Gem Bomb Kills Only” this way. Start a level in Endurance, kill one monster in the specified manner, then kill yourself, and it actually works. This may be the cheapest of all of them. The others will require me to build up this new save quite a bit to have enough mana to do them at the beginning.

Yes on one of each building type too. Earliest level you’ll likely be able to do that on is C12, since it has 1 of each shrine already, so the expensive stuff is out of the way. (D11 has both types as well, but it looks like they’ve changed something, because I’m pretty sure it used to be possible to demolish shrines, but it isn’t now, and that one has 2 Charged Bolt shrines, so it wouldn’t work.)

I’ll report back on the rest of the odd ones as I get them – it’s actually kind of challenging playing again with a low-level character and no access to the good skills. I’d forgotten how expensive everything was because I’ve had Construction, Forge, and Flexibility maxed on my main save forever…

Originally posted by Lurlock:

(D11 has both types as well, but it looks like they’ve changed something, because I’m pretty sure it used to be possible to demolish shrines, but it isn’t now, and that one has 2 Charged Bolt shrines, so it wouldn’t work.)

It should be noted that buildings that you start out with also count. So, on the first level (ie G13) it doesn’t count if you demolish two of the towers and build one of everything else- It still thinks of the number of towers as three. I did it on K12 when I realised I didn’t have it, because I have enough starting mana to build one of everything and I know K12 doesn’t have anything on it.

The Trap and Bomb kills only Amulets being awarded after a suicide Endurance was supposedly fixed for 1.13…

I’m not totally sure, but I think thrown gem bombs may be counted as “on scene” even after the gem is supposedly blown up – my “Highest number of gems on scene at the same time” is 725 and I know I haven’t spammed towers/traps on any particular map. Might explain why it took several tries for me to get the “Have at most 2 gems at any time” Journey Amulet.

Weird. I dont think gem bombs count as “on scene”. But if they do it’s a bug.
But note that upgrading causes you to have 2 gems on board. So if you already have 2 gems and upgrade 1 u have 3 gems (even if it’s just for 0.0000001sec).

Okay, it doesn’t get any cheaper than this: “Win a battle on row 8 with no skill points used”. All you need to do is start an Endurance battle on any row 8 level with no skill points, and kill yourself right away without doing anything. Presumably the same holds for “Win a battle on column L with giant monsters only”. Hardest part of these is just getting to a valid level. You need to beat one Pylon level for row 8 and two for column L.

For the record, this also works for all the Novice Amulets, though if you need to do that, you should probably consider another game.

Oh, and I definitely got both Trap and Bomb kills Amulets after a suicide Endurance on 1.13 just yesterday, so it’s obviously not fixed.

As for gems on scene, each level is 20×17 squares, which is 340 total. Add the 36 you can store in your inventory at once, subtract one for your orb, and the theoretical maximum is 375 gems in play. (Which is impossible on most maps since there’s trees and such you can’t build on.*) So yeah, probably gem bombs – unless it adds up the grades of all gems in play or something.

*Levels where it is possible: D12, F9, J3, J6, J9, M6, M10

I didn’t try traps only on endurance (I just did some grade 3 or 4 L/Y traps on the first level and no monsters got far enough to actually get on my screen), but I did bombs and “one of each building” simultaneously, so they both definitely work as of 1.13.
I imagine that bombs count in your “on screen” gems.

There might be something to it. I’m having “highest amount of gems on scene at the same time” of 8403. Seems like a bug to me (that may also screw up the 2 gems achievement).

isn’t that “# of unique gems created”

(that bug is reported a while ago by me, I’m sure we’ll see fix in the next updates.
I think Peter has a priority in the reported bugs, and that is a lowest one… )

Yeah, if I were working on the game, that’d be pretty low on my debugging to-do list. I do wish this would show in the level stats or at the end of the level, rather than only in the overall stats.

For the two-gems one, I’d wager that you could start any level in Endurance with maxed Wild Gem, mana pool twice, sacrifice wild gem, and use resulting mana to create a grade 7 (lowest grade which is > 5000 mana), then kill yourself. Though if gem bombs count as people have theorized, this won’t work exactly – you’ll have to let the monsters kill you, but I think you can still get the amulet that way. My main save already has this amulet, and my new one isn’t high enough level to get Wild Gem yet, (let alone max it), so it’ll be a while before I can test this one.

If you are killed you won’t get the two-gems amulet AFAIK. You need to win (or forfeit endurance via self-bombing which doesn’t work in this particular case).

Alternatively, you could just finish endurance by letting the monsters drain the small amount of mana you’ll have left. That way you can get the two gems amulet because you “won”.

See, that’s kind of the common theme in this thread, though – I’m pretty sure that every Endurance battle is counted as a “win”, even if you never kill a single monster and die in the first wave. I’ll have to test this to be sure, but I know (for example) that I was able to get the “Raid X Tombs” amulets in battles where I didn’t kill myself, so I’m pretty sure that the two-gems one can be done as well. (I’ll have to build up this new save until I get high enough level to get a bunch of points in Wild Gem – if anyone else happens to have a save with a high level character that doesn’t already have this amulet, it would be interesting to see the results.)

Another interesting note: I just bombed a tomb to open it, but the last monster of the level was too close and I killed him- I got my +10% multiplier and never saw a single tomb enemy.