Ascension guide

*NOTE: This guide is outdated. Like, really, really horrifically outdated. For a more up-to-date guide, see the pins in the Synergism Discord Server.*

This is a guide for the ascension stage, starting from first completion of C10.

## C10 to C11

Welcome to the ascension era! You have ascended for the first time, and should have got around 2000 cubes.

Cubes are the main resource of ascension era, and can be spent on 2 things: cube blessings and upgrades. Both are equally important.

Here I'll list some of your first upgrades:

With these upgrades and enough cube tributes, you can finally complete C11, which gives anthill a huge speed boost, making ascensions a lot faster. For your first completion of C11, you will need:

* 125,000 total cube tributes
* All constant upgrades up to a cost of 1e9
* 15,000 levels of each blessing
* All first and second row cube upgrades except 1x10, 2x4, 2x5 and 2x6

## C11 to C12

Once you beat C11, you will be able to Ascend every 80 seconds for up to 45 cubes/second! The first thing you should now do is get a Three-Space (under Tesseract Buildings) if you haven't already done so. This will allow you to get a lot more Constant (e9 -> e13). In addition to weakening taxes even further, this will allow you to get the 9th Constant Upgrade, which will make runes a lot stronger near the end of an ascension. You should only buy this and the 10th upgrade once, as further levels don't do anything.

By now you probably got bored of repeating these ascensions over and over again. So you'll need these three upgrades:

* Cube 1x10: Automated ascensions. This is found under the Corruptions tab and should be set to 1 C10 completion for now (as grinding any more won't give you any meaningful cube boost)
* Cube 3x8: Automatic particle gain, allows you to turn off auto-reincarnations and massively speeds up ascensions
* Research 6x25: Automatically complete challenges. Set it to 4/1/1 (4 seconds for start, 1 second before exit, 1 seconds before enter) for now
* In addition, turn on automatic ant sacrifice and set it to 25 seconds real-time

At this point, you can let the game run for a while (but make sure to have it minimized as automation doesn't work if the game's not in focus). You should now save up for the following cube upgrades:

## C12 to C13

C12x1 causes ascension time to boost cube gain (including tesseract, hypercube, etc.); in addition to boosting cube gain by 50% and doubling tesseract gain, this is helpful for longer ascensions if you want to grind constant or offerings; it also lets you grind cubes and tesseracts offline.

You will be able to get a LOT of offerings after completing this challenge; you should be able to get all blessing levels up to 10,000,000 and 1 level of each spirit for now.

After doing that, you should get 100M cube tributes, then grind blessings up to 200,000,000 - 10 levels in each spirit would also help. Do C11x7 and increase corruptions to 0/0/1/2/0/13/2/2/1 before grinding any upgrades.

After that, the recommended upgrade order is:

 Do C11x8, C12x2, C12x3, C12x4, C12x5 and C12x6 for triple Cube Tributes!
Increase corruptions to 1/1/1/2/1/13/2/2/1 and grind 1B cube tributes
 [4x4] Chronos is stronger
 [4x7] +20 rune caps
 [3x6] Start ascensions with 3 levels of each rune
 [5x1] +7% cubes
 [4x6] Building power ^(1+level/20)
 C11x9, C11x10, C12x7, C12x8, C12x9, C12x10 and C13x1 through C13x6
Note: Challenges make tax faster in C13, so you should only do C6 (which slows down tax) and C10 (which is required for completion) in it

## C13 to C14

After doing C13x6, you should grind 4B cube tributes. You should then increase corruptions to 2/2/2/3/3/13/3/3/3, which will not only increase cube and tesseract gain by 80% but allow you to gain Hypercubes at a rate of 0.25/s, which seems small at first but becomes very powerful as more hours pass.

 [4x10] Athena is stronger
 [5x5] Hermes is stronger
 [5x8] Start with 1 worker ant
 10B cube tributes
C11x12 through C11x15, C12x12 through C12x16, C13x11, C13x12 and C14x1

## C14 onwards

Challenge 15, the FINAL challenge, is different from the other challenges in that you can't fully complete it, but gain rewards based on your best-ever coins. For this reason, you should enter it immediately; you should be able to get around e3300 coins in it. Exit C15 (as you need to exit it to get your rewards) and go to the Cubes tab; you will see two new subtabs.

One of them is the Platonic Statue tab; this is the 4th tier of cubes, and the boosts are different from Tesseracts and Hypercubes. There are 3 statues which boost the previous cube tiers, and you have a 33% chance of getting these on opening a Platonic. The 4th statue, the Platonic Remnant, boosts Platonic Cube gain, making it easier to get the other boost: this one has a 0.99% chance of being in a Platonic. The last four statues have a probability of 0.0025%, meaning you will have to open many cubes at once to get them, and boost Hypercube bonuses, reduce taxes, boost ascension score and boost the global speed, respectively. However, you need 1.337e12 ascension score to get Platonic Cubes, which is extremely difficult and unattainable at this point in the game.

The other new subtab is the Platonic Upgrade section, which holds your Challenge 15 boosts (You should have 3 unlocked so far and will get more as you progress further) and a new set of upgrades - these upgrades cost many different resources and have a variety of effects, from boosting cube gain to reducing the effects of corruptions to more general buffs to a "placeholder upgrade" with seemingly no effect. You cannot afford any of these upgrades yet.

You should now do a long run to get 2e12 blessing levels and 200,000 spirit levels.

Once you are done, you should get back to cube grinding. However, due to achievement 218 (C14x1), long runs are now more efficient for cube grinding, meaning you can fully idle now when grinding cubes - you should now turn off the ascension automator completely. You should also increase corruptions to 3/3/3/2/3/13/6/4/3. After setting up your ascension and completing as many transcension/reincarnation challenges as you can, leave the game for around 8 hours: when you come back, you will be able to gain around 40,000 Hypercubes, 1.6 million Tesseracts and 3.6 billion Cubes! Buy all remaining cube upgrades except [5x9] and [5x10] (2.1x talisman rune levels, double Offerings, triple Obtainium and an additional +82% uncorruptable obtainium), then pour the rest into Tributes. Buy all Tesseract buildings with a cost below 20,000 as well as a 2nd Hilbert Space, then pour the rest into Gifts, and there is only one thing you can do with Hypercubes so pour them all into Benedictions. All of these boosts put together will massively increase your stats, and you should now do C11x17, C12x17 and C14x2 through C14x11.

Now do a long run for research [8x5], which boosts export quarks even more. You should also get 2e13 blessing levels and 2e6 spirit levels. Once you are done, reenter C15 and do C1x2 and C2x1, the only challenges you can do for now. Due to Corruption 3, all resource gain is 1e50x slower, meaning almost everything is disabled. However, there are a number of ways you can exploit this: when you enter and exit a reincarnation challenge, you gain obtainium even if you don't have the required 1e300 mythos shards. You should turn off automated research and grind 500 Obtainium (Spamming 6 and e works well for this) to buy research [2x3], allowing you to gain 1e100x more coins. You should exit C15 with e4900 coins.

You should then grind 20B cube tributes and get cube upgrade [5x9]. This will allow you to get a lot more coins in C15! You should enter C15 and use the same strategies as usual, and exit with e17,500 coins, which will unlock 5 new boosts - a tax reduction, more offerings/obtainium and more multipliers/accelerators.

You should then do a long corrupted run - set up challenges and research as usual, then leave the game for a full 24 hours. When you come back, you will be able to get 144,000 hypercubes, 5.6 million tesseracts and 20 billion cubes! Pour everything into tributes/gifts/benedictions. You should then do C11x18 through C11x26, C12x18 through C12x28, C13x13, C13x14, C14x12 through C14x17, then re-enter C15 and exit with e20,600 coins. This will unlock a new boost, which will double Rune EXP. You should then do another long run for 1e15 blessings, 1e8 spirits and research [8x5], and another 24-hour run for cubes: this one should grant 50 B cubes, 7 M tesseracts and 175 K hypercubes. Spend all the Tesseracts on dots and pour the Cubes and Hypercubes into tributes/benedictions.

Once you get to this stage, go to Research guide - it's more advanced than this guide