Research and Soul Dust

The Research Hall is where you can research bonuses that get applied to your beasts, buildings, and towers. While most are incremental improvements, there are a few key ones that take priority and you should aim to get first.

In order to do research you need to spend Soul Dust. That is obtained whenever you attempt to forge a beast and get a soulstone for a beast you already have. After the first few chapter you will only be forging during the Forge Fiesta event, and will get a lot of soul dust.  In early chapters you will be limited by how much soul dust you have, and your Research Hall will be idle some of the time. You may want to delay spending until after the event and you know how much you have. In later chapters the research times are much longer so your Research Hall will always be busy. Never spend Speed Ups on research.

In the tables below, see if you can make one of the key items, or a good headway towards it.  You can spend leftover to pick up cheap stuff or alternate branches.

Note that Tier 2 Research requires Research Hall 2, available at City Level 40, while Tier 3 requires Research Hall 3, available at City Level 70.

## Specialization

There are three research trees, and you can specialize in one of them in order to unlock additional benefits.  Specialization allows you to get additional inspiration research bonuses that are specific to certain research items. If you specialize in Beast then all the beast inspiration bonus are enabled and inspiration in the other trees are disabled. You can change specialization at any time for a minor gem cost, so there is no downside.

For example look at Deeper Cut I.  There is one main benefit, 10% Leech Tower Damage.  If you specialize in the Defense tree then you can choose one of two additional benefits, -5% Aligning time or -5% Base Structure Upgrade Time. That second specialization is quite nice. But later when you Lighter Materials I you can change to specialize in the Management tree in order to get 4% bonus XP. Most people find those two inspiration bonuses to be most important, and will switch between the two every time they start an upgrade (note: you only need the inspiration when you start the upgrade, after that you can switch).

During the Building Boom event (and any other time you start an upgrade to a city building) you should switch to Defense to get the lower build times.

## Contracts

While you play you get Contracts, which will always give you a reward of Soul Shards. Within the Contracts page you can upgrade your Tier of contracts. Each upgrade will give you a 10% bonus to the number of Soul Shards that you earn of earn. Since Soul Shards are one of the most valuable commodities in the game it is a real benefit to upgrade the tier as soon as you can. There is no research time, it happens immediately. There is no change to the difficulty of the contracts.

## Research Trees

Here are the research trees with the known Cost and Time. If you know some of the missing values, please contact Mostly Harmless in game or Discord.

Items in red are key research items, the most important to get.

    Thank you to Megs for copying the data from the game and making nice looking tables.

## Priority order

Here is the order of how you should spend Soul Dust.