Farming guide

## Max Stage Farming

Farming is a part of the game that we spend most of our time on, and it is good to understand what we need to do to maximize the benefits we get for the time we spend. Farming is the act of prestiging, typically below your max stage, to gain relics, and help level up your artifacts to become stronger. Meanwhile, pushing is when you exceed your max stage and try to increase it as much as possible.

The basic premise of farming is simple. You prestige, play until you slow down and cannot easily progress, then prestige and do it again. Typically this slow down point is around when you cannot kill the bosses in a single hit anymore or cannot splash anymore. However, this exact point will be different for each player and each build. This is when the metric for determining your most optimal prestige stage comes into play: Relics per Minute. Simply put, you can use the prestige screen to compare the number of relics you get from a prestige and the amount of time it took to get there. The point where you are getting the largest number when you divide you number of relics by your minutes to reach that point is your optimal prestige point. You may find that pushing even when things are slow can actually increase your relics per minute due to the relic gains you get from increasing your max stage. You will need to do this to find out for yourself.

When talking about farming, speed is typically one of the biggest concerns. You want to be able to do your farming runs quickly to maximize your relic gains, but you also want to make sure that you do not lose too much power when doing this. Having fast farming prestiges is important, but it is also important to maintain higher relics per minute. We can break down ways to improve our speed into some distinct categories:

**Prestige relics**. Books of Shadows is known as the most powerful artifact for a reason, and it’s simply because it allows you to gain many times more relics each prestige than you would normally. More relics = more artifact levels = more power = more progression = more relics. It’s a lovely circle of life.

**Splashing and skipping boosts**. These help you go faster by increasing your splash count, splash skip, multi-spawns, and Portar/Snap spawn chance. These are typically the boosts that people will refer to as “farming boosts”; simply because they don’t give any damage or gold boosts by themselves, but increase the speed you can farm.

**Cool down reduction and duration increases**. These help you reduce the amount of times you need to interact with the game in order to prestige, or reduce the time waiting for an event to happen.

**Mana capacity, mana regeneration, and mana cost reductions**. These allow you to not wait around for mana, and thus allow you to progress without interruption. These are similar to the cooldown reductions mentioned in the last bullet point, but some builds like Heavenly Strike have such high mana requirements that these deserve their own category.

**Faster sources of gold or damage**. For gold, getting boosts that help Boss or Chesterson gold can be better than boosts that help Fairy or pHoM gold, simply because these gold sources will pay out your gold faster. Similarly, a damage multiplier that doesn’t require a delay is faster than something like the boost from Anchoring Shot, Lightning Strike, or Doom, and thus are excellent for farming. While a damage skill that requires delay can be powerful, this delay can also reduce your relics per minute even if you do end up progressing further in a prestige.

**Silent March**. Boosts that allow you to progress offline faster and more smoothly allow you to pay less attention to the game and get greater rewards. This includes boosts to inactive damage, multi-spawns, and inactive advancement speed.

When looking at how you evaluate a build in terms of farming, you will want to consider these above points. You care about how much your build will splash, how many hits it will take to defeat a single stage, and how long you will need to wait to defeat a titan. These can typically be seen at a glance by checking the splash skip, splash count, and cooldowns of your build, but the true test will always be to simply try it out for yourself and find out your relics per minute.

## Tournament Farming

Outside of standard farming, there is a specialized farming method designed to give you the best possible odds in a tournament. In short, you must do as many prestiges as you can both inside and outside of tournaments. Outside of a tournament, you will pour all of your farmed relics into your Book of Shadows. This increases the benefits of farming, but does not increase your pushing power at all. By keeping your potential max stage low, you will be able to join a tournament with players who have the same power as you. However, you will also have a very high Book of Shadows compared to those players, and all the farming you will do during the tournament will be amplified due to this. In the tournament, all of your farmed relics will go into damage and gold artifacts, trying to push as far as possible as fast as possible. You will continue to farm and progress for as much as possible, until eventually, you do one final big pushing prestige to place highly in the tournament. Placing highly in the tournaments will give you more resources, and those will help you progress faster in the game.
To note, you should still push every tournament, regardless of whether you use this strategy or not. Otherwise, you are simply losing progression for no reason.

## Equipment Farming

No matter how dedicated you are, you want to try and do four prestiges in a single day. This is due to equipment farming. Equipment farming is a way where we can gather up to a maximum of twenty equipment per day by progressing through stages we have already beaten. More specifically, up to five equipment (low max stage players will get three or four) will be randomly distributed among bosses between 80% and 99% of your max stage when you prestige. When you defeat those bosses, you will get an equipment drop. This is a great source of free diamonds and additional chances at equipment to complete your equipment sets or improve your current equipment.

As a special consideration, you should make sure that you pick up your farmed equipment off the ground before your daily shop reset happens at midnight. Your daily farmed equipment count will reset at midnight, but any farmed equipment you have on the ground will count against your farmed equipment count for the next day. This means that if you keep all 20 equipment on the ground, you will not get any new farmed equipment until you pick them up and then wait until the next daily shop reset.