Village - Wanders

This next stage of the game will continue to add gameplay elements that will expand and enrich Idle Slayer. You've been at this a while, but now things are starting to get a little interesting!

#### Village

The Village is a unique element in Idle Slayer and features an extended set of quests and a ton of lore and storytelling. It's exciting and fun. But, importantly, it includes incredible upgrades to soul gains. Getting it as early as possible and finishing the quests will help your pursuit of the Stone of Hope immensely. If you thought grinding out the materials for some of the more recent craftables was long, wait until you build some buildings!

To get to the Village, you’ll have needed to purchase the Village Key in the Ascension Tree, have your portal cooled down (it uses your portal), and craft the temporary craftable Village Key. Go meet some villagers, including the very friendly and welcoming mayor - Victor!

#### Armory - Swords and Armor

Later in this UA, you’ll unlock a new gameplay element that will come to dominate your approach over the remainder of the game: the Armory. The Armory allows you to collect and equip certain equipment - according to different criteria - that can produce major boosts. The first item you’ll be looking for is a sword (you’ll unlock other equipment as you play).

Check out the Armory page and guide for all the info you could ever need. But briefly…

After crafting the armory and the Ascendant Badge, you’ll have about a 12% chance for a sword at the end of each bonus stage. The sword can be various levels, one of three types, be excellent, and have any number of additional bonuses. There’s a lot of random factors!

After crafting Hammelia’s Hammer, you’ll also be able to upgrade your sword in the Village - for DP (and other materials later). Ultimately, you’re looking to upgrade an excellent Adranos sword for souls (and also, later, a Kishar to use for coins) - but use the best drop you have.

Soon, you’ll craft the Itinerary, which will unlock Weekly Quests. Completing these will ultimately allow you to craft Armor, your second type of Armory item. Armor is a weak Armory Item, and fairly expensive, as it costs three dragon eggs. Craft a few, but don’t chase perfect armor until much later in the game.

Use this calculator to help grade your weapons against each other. Consult the wiki page and the Discord community with questions.

#### Stone of Hope

The Stone of Hope is a very expensive, but very important addition. At 1.20e10 / 12 Billion SP, it is achievable after about 26 USP, but it’ll still be a long grind. Use the "If Chasing Astral Upgrades" ascension strategy below. One of the most common questions during a Stone of Hope grind is whether you should purchase the Ultra Ascension upgrades, Soul Surge I, Soul Surge II and Reincarnation. We recommend getting Soul Surge 1, but not Soul Surge 2 and Reincarnation. Soul Surge 1 is useful to have for getting all the Astrals cheaper than Stone of Hope (besides Magical Temporary Item and Flawless).

Once you do unlock the new stone, you can check the Stones of Time spreadsheet to see if you'll need to respec to put more USP into Stone of Hope. There are two options: first, you could simply Ultra Ascend and put any new USP towards Hope, according to the helpful distribution sheet.

Alternatively, if you notice that you'd be too far away from the optimal distribution, you can toggle the Dark Reset Dark Divinity and reset your divinities for 100 DP (while also resetting your Stones of Time). This will allow you to respec your USP into the Stone of Hope. Just remember that after respeccing, you don’t technically have any Stones of Time - so hurry to the Ascension Menu and reallocate your USP (and then the rest of your Divinities)!

#### Achievement Goals

Ultimately, the best way to track your progress through the endgame is through your total achievements collected. There are some massive Ascension Tree nodes and expensive Astral and Ultra nodes that you can chase, but the true mastery of the endgame grind is measured in achievements, mostly max item levels. Some will take a while, and others will simply take a lot of luck.