Version 4.7
Can somebody tell me please please the most recent guide to perk allocation? i’ve been playing this game almost a year only have 2M He but still can’t crack frugal despite pushing 43 power and 43 Toughness. What makes it worse is that after every portal it’s harder to attain my previous level ( currently 125) than the first time. I’m obviously doing something terribly wrong but all guides seem so outdated and don’t take into account the current game rewards.
I used to use zxv. That website is now gone.
Now I’ve converted to Perky at Perky. Paste your exported Save string into “Import Save” and pick a Preset.
Unfortunately, there’s no preset specifically for the Frugal challenge. Here’s the recommended strategy from Wikia:
Don’t worry too much about reaching 125 on your first run with optimized perks. Perky may set you up to earn a ton of Helium without reaching 125, which will get you to 125 real quick on subsequent runs.
Thanks! I’m on it!
Trimps keeps drawing me back in from only playing occasionally… my HZE is 316 and I was at about the point of thinking maybe I should try Spire II sometime when this hits. I just made it though.
I’m a manual player and have not been using perk calculators - you can do decently well at it if you keep some ratios in mind and go from there. Out of curiosity I plugged my current run’s set of perks into Perky and adjusted the weights a bit and reduced the helium to what I had at the start of the run, it seems my manual style maps pretty well to what perky would have given me if I had used a 40:6:4 weight scheme, with a few minor variations. I apparently value Resourceful and Overkill a bit more than Perky and undervalue Motivation. Oh, and Perky thinks extra levels of Trumps and Packrat are worthwhile for some unknown reason, though that expenditure is pretty minor.
I do think that site will be useful when doing Nerfed and other weird challenges…
I’ve come to the conclusion that Spire IV is impossible to beat in a human lifetime without hacking the game. Has anybody done it?
I’m not there yet. The first spire was tough without the new map options. I flew right through Spire II and Spire III as soon as I was able to reach zones 300 and 400. But I imagine Spire IV must be very difficult with no help from Nature. At least Fluffy will help with eliminating the special Corruption abilities.
I have beaten Spire IV, and without Fluffy the first time. You probably need to get stronger in general (I had about 1 Qi helium), but there is also a bit of a trick to it. If you do it wrong, you can certainly end up with timescales around a human lifetime.
I’ll put it in a spoiler box for any who enjoy figuring these things out (as I do):
No help from Nature? Nature helps those who help themselves. 
Do your prestige grinding in zone 495, when you still have poison, and it’ll take days instead of decades.
My quest to finish Spire continues on! I’ve recently realized something which, in retrospect, I should have figured out a year or so ago - that by setting my PC to not go into sleep mode and farming the highest-level map I can afford while I’m working/sleeping, I can get through the endgame grind a lot more efficiently.
I’m at about 300M helium overall and I’m pulling about 15-17M per run now running Corrupted. I can get from the start of a run to Spire in less than a day (really only 4-5 hours if I don’t have to sleep). Right now I’m just barely making it past zone 60 of Spire, though, and I feel like in a few more runs of pumping up Toughness II and Power II, plus some Motivation II to make the grinding go quicker, I’ll be able to unlock Carpentry II and get enough Coordinations to power through (right now I’ve still got 42 inaccessible coordinations when I reach Spire.) I’ve managed to beat the 215 Bionic Wonderland, and on my current run I’m pushing to beat 220 so I can get that next achievement bonus.
Anything else I should be doing at this stage? Some of the guides I’m reading say my block should be strong enough to absorb most of the damage I’m taking, but that just hasn’t happened for me. I can afford about 700 gyms by the time I reach Spire and the block I get out of that is less than a thousandth of the enemy damage. Should I be investing more in lumberjacks than the 70B I do right now?
As I recall, I was generally unable to keep block high in the area after the gymystics stopped coming (150, think). I’m pretty sure it’s completely impractical to get enough block to matter in the Spire.
The most important thing for eventually beating the Spire is getting equipment prestiges from higher leveled maps. I’m not sure if you have access to higher zones via map creation yet, or if you have to go straight to BW215.
Is it worthwhile buying Capable level 4? Cost is 100c Helium.
It gives access to Fluffy #4. Description: Corrupt and healthy enemies in active spires have a 50% chance to be missing their special abilities.
Seems a pretty high price for a fairly trivial advantage. At my current level I only do 2 spires per run. It will be quite a while before I reach Spire 3. And half the enemies will be easier to beat. Well, I can beat them already.
Is it as pointless as it appears? Or am I missing something?
The main thing is that Fluffy’s levels give damage bonuses in addition to the special abilities, and you can only gain experience towards a level if you have the corresponding level of Capable. Leveling Fluffy up is an important form of progression, so yeah, you want to be doing that. Whether you want to be doing it right now or hold off until you have more helium, I can’t say.
It’s been a few weeks, so I don’t know how relevant this will still be for you.
To beat the Spire, you’re going to need the prestiges from zones 201-205, and maybe even from zones 211-215. Used to be, the only way to get those was to beat the Bionic level 215 before beating the Spire. Now you’ve unlock Extra Zone maps at zone 210, which helps a lot.
You’re still going to need a LOT of Coordinated perk until you only have around 21 unused levels of Coordination. And ya, Carpentry II will help a lot with that.
I think you already have plenty of gyms. Build enough to survive Bionic 215 with no deaths, so that you can set your breed timer to a couple hours while grinding. But after that they’re not so useful in the Spire itself. As I recall, I was up to 660 gyms when I’d reach the Spire and up to 680 after grinding overnight for metal and prestiges. At this stage it’s far more important to have enough Attack and Health
In my latest run I managed to clear zone 80 and pick up Carpentry II. I’m at 41 unused coordinations as of that run - I haven’t been able to clear BW 215 from the Spire yet, but hopefully a few more coordinations will get me there.
More specifically, a level 4 evolution 0 fluffy gives +100% damage compared to +60%, stacking a net +25% overall damage. There’s going to be a tradeoff where you might not want to spend a huge percentage of your helium for +25% overall boost in damage, but it’s quite significant.
Just got my first ethereal heirloom! Woo!
So, post-Spire players; what’s your strategy for gigastations? What I’ve been doing is building as many warpstations and collectors as I can until I first start having unused coordinations before I use my first one, and then use another one as soon as I’ve built three warpstations more than I had when I used that one before I use the next one. Is there a more efficient way to boost my population?
What you’re doing is right on target. If you keep track, you’ll probably find that you’re first giga is being built at about the same time each run. Let’s say it’s after 30 warpstations. Increasing by 3 each time would be a 30/3 strategy. (If you were increasing by 2, it’d be a 30/2, etc.) It’s an easy way to keep track of your progress and strategy, and the last gigas are really the only ones that matter - so you’ll likely tweak it in the endgame of each run anyway to best suit your needs. You’ll also start tweaking the 30/3 as you experiment with it (“What if I started earlier, but made bigger steps, like a 20/5?”, “What if I waited longer, and made small steps, like a 50/1?”, etc.).
It’s actually been a while since I looked into optimizing mine. I’d like to hear what Sofis is running.
I stopped using Gigastations months ago. I can make it to the magma without slowing down using only unprestiged warpstations and collectors, so no point in the extra clicking. I was using a 50/5 strategy before that.
I finally beat the Spire tonight! I’d reached the point where I had all the level 41 upgrades unlocked and respecced to put as much helium into Coordinated as possible to bring my unused coordinations down to 21, and I steamrolled through Druopitee on my sixth group of Trimps.
Next destination - magma. Any tips for when I get there?
Congratulations! 
The magma changes quite a lot. The game up to the magma revolves a lot around using nursery-fueled geneticists to make up for the many coordination upgrades you can’t buy, and the various aspects of the magma seem designed to move the game away from that.
[ul]
[li] Nurseries decay with every zone, making the health from them only a temporary boost. For the time being, you’ll want to use all your nurseries for the spire, but later it will be a good idea to save some for the end of the run.[/li][li] Each zone applies a stack of overheating to your trimps, which removes one coordination’s worth of health and attack, so you’ll need to keep buying coordinations just to stay the same strength. You will find your early runs ending pretty quickly in the magma, as you lose strength while the enemies get stronger. Overheating does not affect block though, so keeping it higher than the enemies’ attack will become trivial after a while. This will affect which heirloom modifiers are valuable.[/li][li] You get a tremendous boost in power in the form of 100 coordinations… once you have the population to buy them.[/li][li] The potential to give you that population comes in the form of the Dimensional Generator. However, it will need some upgrades before it will be all that impressive. Also, it will require quite a lot of babysitting to begin with, but you will be able to buy upgrades that makes it capable of running mostly on its own. Carpentry and Coordinated perks remain as important, if not more so.[/li][/ul]
The good news include that you get a x5 helium gain multiplier from zones in the magma, so you’ll be raking it in. Also, you’ll get Nature powers, which are fun, but I have no idea what they’re like in the early magma (they were introduced well after I did that part of the game).