Since I type this out several times a day in chat, I thought I'd just make a guide. **New note in HQt0** Yay! You just started The Perfect Tower (TPT)! If you like watching small numbers get bigger, then this game is for you! Some basic things to understand: 1) I am going to lay out the quickest and most efficient way to get through your first TT (Town Tier). If you want to do things different, cool! It's your game. Have fun! But don't argue with the people that tell you these things when you ask, because we have done the process many times over, and we really do know the quickest and most efficient way. 2) There are a TON of useless items in this game. You will ignore MOST things. If it isn't mentioned, you don't need it (Factory, anyone?). 3) SR (Special Resources) per second (or minute) [sr/sec] and Waves per minutes [wpm] are the name of the game. You find these under the Stats tab in your active round; bottom right corner, the one that looks like a hand-drawn chart. The goal is to optimize that. Anything that slows down this process is less efficient. That is why #1 and #2. 4) People generally talk about amounts of things needed in scientific (4.85e9, etc). I don't like using scientific in my game (i like engineering, it is prettier). but you will need to at least know how those translate across. People get annoyed if you talk about things in engineering. Just use the scientific notation in chat. 5) I'm not going to explain every single little detail, as far as navigation and such. If you can't find something I mention, then click around a little bit and find it. Don't be incompetent. 6) It took me several weeks to get from starting to my first Town Tier. These things don't happen immediately; they take time. It's an idle game. A very active idle game, sure, but still. You will spend LOTS of time just waiting on SR to build up. Get used to it. Okay, for some basic terminology: **SR** - special resources. The driver of the game **HQt(0-5)** - Headquarter tiers. The first part of the game **bpp** - blueprint points. What you turn SR into in the workshop, to buy blueprint upgrades **bpt** - blueprint tiers. The 2nd part of the game **tt** - town tiers. The 3rd part of the game. **tc** - town credits. What you get when you tt. bpt's convert to tc's. **WC** - Wave Compression. A major driver in the game. terminology is interesting here - WC IX in lab is WC 10 on the slider, so those are the terms. WC I = 2, WC II = 3, WC III = 4, etc. This is because WC IV (for instance) compresses 4 waves, but that means your waves skip up by 5, so the Slider will say 5. Don't overthink it, just know that the number is one higher than the roman numeral, when people talk about it. **NB** - New bounds. Major driver of the game. Opens up at HQt4 (but can get w a trick in hqt0 - see new note). What New Bounds does is slow down the rate at which the enemies get more difficult. Obviously quite helpful, and allows you to get to much higher waves. **Gems** - the regular BLUE ones. Used to buy first round of research, and then converted to rare gems in the temple. **Rare Gems** - The PURPLE ones (gems, not cubes). Acquired in the temple by converting Gems and Purple cubes. Used to buy +50% SR Drops and -20% conversion rate in temple. **Offense build**/GC (glass cannon) - basically all you will ever need. This is the main build for the game. It includes the first 13 items in offense tab, sr income/bonus and gem chances in utility tab, and Serious Missile and New Bounds in ultimate tab. **Insane build** - Insane is a little bit different. It uses Offense Build + 10% hp regen and hp (to slightly less than your attack) in defense tab. **BPT build** - For farming bpt's. Offense build, minus dmg, crit chance, crit factor, and impetus. **All of the working codes:** - I suggest using gitgud at HQt0 (as described below in 0.1). The others you can spread out in HQt1-2... but they aren't nearly as good. Here are all the codes: gitgud, lina, chatisawesome, perfecttower2, mytower42 and wave71. **Remember to save before using codes!** If you use a code, and it gets stuck in "retrieving code" for more than like 30 seconds, you can press "0" (zero) and it will bring up the menu to quit back to the town so you can try again. Generally, I save... reload... hop into a round and PAUSE... then do codes. This game tends to have a problem with lag, so something you may want to do is go through the settings and turn down the quality, etc. Also, once you get over the thrill of seeing the cubes flying around the screen, you can turn off the graphics by clicking the "GFX" button on the bottom right side of the screen when you're in a round. As you go along in the game, if you notice things lagging, go to the town screen then click "Back" and then click the cloud in the bottom left, and "Upload". This isn't enough, though! Sometimes the cloud fails. So also click "Import/Export" and Export a save file. Always good to have things manually backed up. Then refresh your game. I do this 3-4 times a day. If you refresh and find that your game has lost progress, then open the manual export file and copy/paste everything from that into the "Import" option on the main menu, and click "Apply". Everything else is generally self-explanatory in the game, so I'll not list everything out. **Headquarters Tiering:** This is the first part of the game. When you are in this part of the game, the goal is to get to HQt5 with 3 things, so keep these in mind as you move through your headquarter tiers: Wave Compression as high as possible Auto Restart Penalty at 0% New Bounds unlocked When you Tier Up in the headquarters, it resets your blueprint, and your bpp and sr turns into purple cubes to spend in the headquarters. I mention the best way to spend those at the start of each new Tier. **Headquarter Tier 0:** Yay! You just started. Ok, this first bit is a bit tedious. You need to get your blueprint to where it can run on it's own without you having to actively buy things during play with white cubes. The good news is there is a code that you can use and it will boost you tremendously here. More about that in a sec. So: 0.1) Save your game. This is done by going to the main menu ('back' from Town, or where it takes you when you 'end round') and clicking the Cloud, and "upload to cloud". You can also Export a save file to be safe. 0.1a] Start on easy. Pause the game, and click into the blue gem tab on the bottom right hand corner. Put in code 'gitgud'. If it sits on 'retrieving code' for more than like 30 seconds, it has glitched. reload your game, make sure you're up to date with your save, and try again. This will give you 10k of everything. Quite nice. 0.1b] A few things here for what to do with your gift of 10k of everything: research rapid fire, bouncing missiles, and multishot use 2.5k gems to research Wave Compression in lab. First you have to research Attack Modes to open WC put the rest of the gems into research speed (but save a few for the other lab items. like 10 maybe **note** lab takes gems to initially unlock a research item, and then green cubes after that) use your 10k blues to create an Offense Build (see list of terms above). The easy things to max are good to focus on first - multishot, rapid fire, bouncing missile (once you have those unlocked in lab). Of course you need to balance some dmg and attack speed with those, and be increasing your Special Resource Income. **a note on rapid fire - you only need to get it to about 20% and 2.5 seconds. From there, max your attack speed** 0.2) Keep going in Easy until you get to wave 500. Things will start to move quickly here. A few helpful tips: turn on "autoskip" and crank it up to 50. Switch to 4x if you haven't already. Uncheck 'knockback' and check 'compress' (once you've researched Wave Compression) By now you should be moving toward a solid Offense Build with everything maxed except dmg and crit factor. Special resource bonus is not as important until Normal difficulty. 0.3) At wave 500 Easy, switch to Normal. Max sr bonus. By now you should have a full Offense Build. All you need to do is pump sr -> bpp -> dmg/crit factor. At wave 500 normal, switch to hard. Keep this up until you reach the requirement to Tier Up in headquarters. It takes about 6e16 dmg (combined - check the sword at the bottom of your active screem) with WC 2 (first round of wave compression). For research requirements, the things to research are: The attack items I listed, Attack Mode, WC, then Gambling, Interest, and Gem Collection (this is purely for Gem Chances in utility tab). Then some Damage until it takes more than a few minutes, then Interest Limit (because it should go REALLY FAST with some gems into research speed. Makes it easy to hit the requirement). 0.4) Tier up! **New note** : I have discovered that you can import a blueprint with New Bounds at any time, and it will give you New Bounds! Even if you don't have New Bounds unlocked! Here is a full offense + 5% new bounds build to import: 1:180;4:50;2:99;5:10;6:100;7:200;8:100;9:90;10:50;11:9;12:36;107:500;46:100;47:100;52:100;53:50 This build takes 40.85k bpp, and has no dmg or crit factor. Once you import this, put whatever bpp you have left back into dmg and crit factor. You can also import this at any time, and manually change "107:500" to "107:X" to increase your new bounds (100 = 1%, max of 10000 = 100%). Major hax. If you don't have 40.85k bpp, then you can start with a decent build that has a little bit of New Bounds with the Challenge Mode build from below; it takes 15k bpp. **Headquarter Tier 1:** This one is more difficult since you dont get the boost from gitgud. You can use some of the other codes for a tiny boost, though. Remember to save first! When you first HQ tier, you'll get some purple cubes. Your priority should be getting Auto-Restart Penalty to 0% in the headquarters. You won't be able to yet, so give it a few clicks, and then put the rest of your purples into SR Factor. You'll need to turn off Compress and auto-restart if you have those on. 1.1) Back to the beginning, except this time it will go slower. You'll have to do quite a bit of active playing in Easy mode. Focus on upping your damage a bit, attack speed a bit, then maxing the easy things to max (listed above in 0.1b). Balance this with SR income. A note here - There is no real set way to start out. No matter how you do it, it is slow and tedious. If I find out a true 'best' way, I'll add it in here. Some people like to boost things with a few gems to start (you can switch the currency to gems in active play, along the bottom where it has the multiples options). Some people like to get their white block income up a little bit in workshop (First 2 in utility tab; resources/wave & Resource Bonus), as that can speed up your ability to get further in active play. If you do this, then once you're rolling in the higher waves (or when you switch to normal) you can just reset your blueprint and go for pure offense build as described in this guide. I don't like active play very much, so what I do is just focus on boosting SR income in workshop, and then do a loop of Starting a wave, maxing SR income, and then turning on Compress and skipping (pressing 'S' will skip forward) as far forward as possible. Then turn compress off when I die, restart, max SR income, turn compress back on and skip forward, etc. I do this a few times, and then put the SR back into SR income... A few more times, SR into dmg... A few more times, SR into Attack speed, etc. until I've built a blueprint that can go on it's own to wave 50 or so. Then turn Auto-skip and compress back on and go back to step 0.2 from above. 1.2) Roll through easy, normal, hard, same as in HQt0. In Lab, you'll want to continue researching Wave Compression as much as possible. Between researching Wave Compression, you can pump some research into Damage and HP since those are slightly useful. Also, more Interest limit if you need to for the research requirement. Wave 1000 hard takes about 8e48 dmg with WC 3. 1.3) Tier up! **a note:** Remember those 10k of everything you got? you can change them all to purples in the headquarters now, but you'll want to save ~600 black cubes. From Town, click into the billboard; 'Statistics and Information'. In here, you can put black cubes into your Achievements for an SR boost. You do this by clicking the gray boxes. Check back in and max out your achievements every little bit. **Headquarter Tier 2:** Same exact thing as HQt1, until: 2.1) Insane requirement. Insane adds a new element - you WILL get hit because there are cubes that are invisible, shoot you from a distance, etc. So what you need to do is farm in hard until you have a decent Offense Build (wave 5000 hard or so should do). Gather up some SR with your full offense build. Then In defence tab in workshop, get hp regen to 10%, and then build up hp to equal with your dmg. This is all you should need to do. If you dont hit requirement, farm hard a bit more and up your dmg and hp evenly until you can get the requirement. 2.2) This is where some people use aura build. Aura build uses less bpp to hit the insane requirement, so if things are going a bit slow for you, check it out. Details in a comment below. I don't suggest doing this; I suggest to just continue to build up your hp/dmg until you hit it. **Headquarter tier 3:** HQt3 is same as HQt2 except you get CHALLENGE MODE. Things go faster here thanks to this. Also, try to get your Auto-restart penalty to 0%. So what you do is: 3.1) This is same as 1.1, except once you build up maybe 5k bpp or so and have a basic glass cannon offense built, you can switch to Challenge Mode! From the workshop, it's on the left side. Click "Challenge Mode", and do easy. You won't gain SR during the run, and you can't improve your tower during active play, but you will get an amount of SR at the end of the run based on how far you got. It is much more than you would get doing regular mode at this point. Start on easy and build up to 15k bpp. At 15k bpp, you can take full advantage of Challenge Mode. You can't put more than 15k bpp into your blueprint though or you can't do Challenge Mode any more. That's okay - it is better than regular mode well beyond 15k bpp. Once you have 15k bpp, then use this build (thanks nyagore!): **12:36;11:9;10:50;8:75;6:100;7:175;5:10;4:50;1:180;0:175;2:99;3:100;107:93** How this works is, in your workshop in the top right, click "reset" then "import" , and post that build in. **note** this challenge mode build includes New Bounds, which you don't have unlocked yet. Thankfully, it will give you the new bounds anyway! If you don't want to use a pre-designed blueprint for challenge, then just make your own balanced glass cannon build that uses 15k bpp. **Disclaimer for people that like to moralize about idle games** This blueprint for challenge mode includes New Bounds, which is not actually unlockable at hqt3, so it is a bug. To avoid using the bugged blueprint, set 107 to 0 (107:0) and then redistribute the bpp to dmg or whatever the eff else you want. 3.2) Now that you have 15k bpp and a nice build, go to Challenge mode from Workshop (left side), and click into Hard. Do Hard challenge mode until you have 2M bpp (just collect them up, don't buy anything - just keep doing challenge mode with the 15k blueprint until you have 2M Bpp saved). You can also do each mode (easy, normal, hard, insane) to get the Statistics and Information achievements unlocked. Nice little SR boost. With Insane, it takes a bit of luck to hit the top achievement (wave 50) so you might have to do it a few times to get there. The blueprint above will work for all 4 modes. 3.3) At 2M bpp, go regular Offense Build and farm Hard until you can meet Insane requirement, just like in HQt2. 3.4) Final note here - if you are close to the next Wave Compression, consider farming up and getting that before you Tier up. Remember, you want to be as close to IX as possible by the time you get to HQt5. 3.5) Tier up! **a note on Wave Compression** : Since you're probably approaching Wave Compression IV (5) I think this is a good time to mention that you need to be increasing the # on your slider in settings as you research each level. Also, WC IV (5) is faster than WC V (6) and possibly WC VI (7). That is because every 10 waves is a boss, so going by 5's you hit a ton of boss waves, which goes faster than hitting mostly/all regular waves. To be honest, I fly through this part of the game quick enough that I just increase my slider each time anyway, but if you want the very best and quickest, stay on Slider 5 (WC IV) until you get WC VII (8) researched, and then skip to that. **TL;DR** - You have to manually increase the slider for Wave Compression, AND Wave Compression effectiveness goes 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> **5** -> 8 -> 9 -> **10** . 5 is better than 6 and 7, so you can stay on 5 until you unlock 8. **Headquarter Tier 4:** The easiest one. When you Tier up from 3, buy New Bounds in the headquarters. Otherwise, exactly the same as HQt3, except: 4.1) When you do challenge mode, go to 3M bpp instead of 2M. 4.2) Put 1M into New Bounds, and 2M into a regular Offense Build. Once you're farming in Hard, build up your New Bounds some more. This will propel you forward massive amounts, and make it very easy to hit the insane requirement. Usually after challenge mode, I only have to do 2 rounds to finish out HQt4. **Headquarter Tier 5:** This is where things change a bit. Here, your main goal is to get to WC IX. It is exactly the same as HQt4, except you aren't trying to tier - you're just trying to wrack up as much SR as possible. Grind through to Hard, and then add hp+regen, and farm Insane. This will go very quickly. pretty soon you'll have dmg, crit factor, and hp maxed. Just keep grinding and researching Wave Compression. Some other helpful things to do here: Check Achievements in S&I and re-max everything. You can also take a minute to go through Easy, normal, and Hard and get the max waves (20k for easy, 12k for normal, 6k for hard or something) Put some purples into SR factor in Headquarters. Generally advised to get it to about 15 at this point. Unlock Serious Missile. It is a little bit of a wpm boost, and pretty easy to max. By now you should have some decent Gem income. You'll want to go to the Temple and use Gems and Purples to buy Rare Gems so you can get Instant Research tokens, since Wave Compression takes AGES to research at the higher levels. If you have a few dollars to spare, I suggest spending $5 to get rare gems, because you can buy all the research tokens you need, plus Exchange Rate. You get your rare gems each TT, so it's a nice boost. If you plan on spending some weeks+ in this game, $5 is a cheap spend for QOL. 5.1) Try and get WC VIII (9) by the time you are able to bpt. You might not make it, and that's ok bc farming is nice once you bpt... but try anyway. 5.2) Save up 4.85e9 bpp to bpt. And then save up a little bit more, since you'll want to be able to purchase upgrades when you bpt. Once you're at this point, they are coming in pretty quick tho so it shouldn't be a big deal. 5.3) BPT TIME! In your workshop, you'll have a new option at the top. Check the "try upgrade" box, and then click "try maximize". If it doesn't do anything, just click the "+" button next to "Blueprint-Tier 0" **Blueprint Tier 1:** Now that you've bpt'd, you have no more need of damage items. Things below your bpt can no longer harm you. Switch to the BPT build listed in the terms above. 6.1) Main goal is to get WC IX (10). A tier lasts 57k waves at 100% New Bounds. Max your bpt build, including New Bounds, and then farm insane. Once you hit wave 57k you'll die instantly and restart. Make sure auto-restart penalty is 0% (if it isn't already, you did something wrong before here, but that's okay). Start a new round at wave 52k, and farm the top 5k waves of insane over and over until you can get WC IX. Another good thing to do is get your SR factor up to 20 here. 6.2) Once you get WC IX, you're just farming for BPT's! There are a couple of ways to do this: Just stay at bpt 1, and farm wave 52k-57k over and over... Or, every little bit spend your SR on as many bpt's as you can get, and then let it run on Insane until you find your new top wave, and then farm the top 5k waves of your new max tier. SR income increases the higher bpt you are. 6.3) Final thing before you can town tier is Killing Cubos 5 times. There is no rush on this, and the higher bpt you are, the easier it is. For that reason, I suggest waiting until about bpt 250 and then just killing him all 5 times. 6.4) To kill cubos: wrack up a bunch of SR, then buy cubes of all different colors. Go to Temple, and click "Fight Cubos". once you start, open up the left side menu and put some clicks into Mega Damage, get Attack Speed to ~2, Super missile reflect to about 30%, and special power to 2 or 3x. Then on the right side, get Darkness to about 10%. Then click on darkness and let it charge to 100% and release. When you release, make sure Cubos is not Purple. Then unclick Darkness and let the battle go for a few seconds, and then charge darkness again. At bpt 250 it should be very easy to defeat him all 5 times. 6.5) I wrote another guide, "TT and Beyond", that goes into details for when you might want to TT, and for what purposes. In this guide, I'll keep it real simple: I suggest Town Tiering at just over 500 bpt. This will allow you to do 2 important things with your first TT: Put 2 clicks into Additional Utilities. Yay, Auto-NB! See the forum post on that Right before you TT again, use your leftover TC for bpt conversion rate TT and Do it all again! Yay! Suggested Clarifications and typo catches are welcome. Hopefully this is a helpful guide. Thanks all! Some credits: towernoob - for helping me when I first got started, and making me want to stick around by wasting as much time in the chat as I do. Also for helping me feel superior because he's been around forever, and is still a noob. nyagore - a lot of details about how things work, and just a nice person that is always very helpful kcdfl, and probably a number of other people I'm forgetting - answering my random questions when I was the noob! The original guide in the forums - very difficult to read and use, but hey, it is what I learned with

I'm not including instructions for Aura Build in this, since I've found it simply isn't necessary or all that helpful. If you want to try it out, ask in chat.

For those that prefer it, or those that simply want to try it out. Here is the aura build, which is highly useful when wanting to hit the insane requirements for hq Tier 2-4. First off you are going to need to research a few things in the laboratory: electricity to max, universal tech to max, and aura radius to x. Once that is done, reset your blueprint and max out electric aura and universal aura in the defensive tab, then get your regeneration to 10%. From there it is a simple matter of dumping the rest of your sr into health. As well as: sr income, sr bonus, and the gem chances in the utility tab, and newbounds in the ultimate tab (once you unlock the moment you hit hqt4).

Bumping this so it stays at the top for noobs to find. ADDED: New Bounds trick in HQt0. See "New Note". Additionally, it's been confirmed a few times over... Aura build is not that great. It uses slightly less bpp to hit insane requirements for hq tiering, but at the cost of taking time to research the necessary items, which takes up time researching cheaper/faster things to hit the research requirement. It is just as effective to go offense build + hp + 10% regen, then continue to pump bpp into dmg and hp. Finally, it was posited that aura build may be faster in bpt'ing, because it requires less calculations. This is demonstrably false. I hope this guide is getting put to good use! Feel free to post questions or clarifications.

Betting to town tier at 1068 bpt. Get ultimate chance, but wait to spend the rest of the town credit for bpt conversion until you are ready to town tier again. Those town credits will help a little at getting more SR then usual, helping you get up to bpt 1,000 faster then the first time. town tier too fast, you will continue to be slow trying to get back to the same bpt as before.

Agreed - but I think 1068 is pretty high. At 500, you can get ult chance and save some for bpt conversion. It depends on how patient you can be before your first one. I'm a less patient person, so 500 works for me.

Anything changed in recent years? I played this game for more than a month and now just at BPT 171, gaining BPT at 4-5/day. Quite slow I supposed.

It seems nothing has changed since Dec 31, 2018. I wrote this guide in December of 2019. This guide is fully up to date. That is quite slow. Ask in chat and we can discuss what might be slowing you down :)

Should bpt and bpp be BPt and BPp respectively? Just a suggestion. :)

Seems like an arbitrary thing that doesn't change the content at all. Not gonna worry about it :) Thanks, though!

I think you are undervaluing a lot of the other upgrades, for example darkness is literally the most powerful upgrade in the game (and is rather cheap). It allows you to kill enemies with far, far more health than would normaly be possible with just your dps (I have e85 damage and I am easily killing enemies of e220 health). In fact just about every attack upgrade is worth it's cost (for at least a couple hundred levels).

> *Originally posted by **[nukestar](/forums/32139/topics/1879912?page=1#13355119)**:* > I think you are undervaluing a lot of the other upgrades, for example darkness is literally the most powerful upgrade in the game (and is rather cheap). It allows you to kill enemies with far, far more health than would normaly be possible with just your dps (I have e85 damage and I am easily killing enemies of e220 health). In fact just about every attack upgrade is worth it's cost (for at least a couple hundred levels). MTSean knows what he's talking about and every veteran player agrees with the general advise given in this guide, hence why it is linked in chat every few hours. People like Nyagore (who is credited in the guide) have reached HeadQuarter-tier 5 in less than 1.5 hours from the start of thegame. The way to progress fast in this game is by optimizing sr-income, not by spending hours with a 'full-elements' build trying to get a high wave. This guide is written to help people progress fast and get further in the game, not to help people waste their time on a stalled run. Please don't spread misinformation.

Just replying to bring it back on top for people to see, also it was very helpful for me back when I used it.

For the first 2 headquarters tier, try to focus a little in active play to upgrade the sr income/5th wave, to get more blueprints, and upgrade the sr income, so you will be getting more, and faster Also using factory, can be useful to get more blueprints and other resources at the start of the hqt1 Pd: Well, you could wait until having a nice build, one that can allow you to get a little further, at least, to wave 20, so you will get even more sr

This build is actually better for farming hard challenge, I was able to get to wave 280 in hard twice in a row Default Blueprint;12:36;11:9;10:50;8:75;6:100;7:175;5:10;4:50;1:180;0:150;2:99;3:75;107:143 it's just the nyagore challenge build, but with lower damage and critical factor, but invest more in NewBounds