Your game will be saved on the servers. You cannot make a save file to keep on your local machine or your digital cloud. This makes sense, since part of that save file includes multiplayer info about guild ranks, your guild, timing on guild commissions and faction wars, and other things that will be changing in real time. The game will update your saved information automatically, for all practical purposes in real time.

CADRIA IS THE MAIN ONE, mostly intended for international players.
GREENPINE IS DESIGNED FOR MAINLAND CHINA but still works for international players, too.

Cadria seems to have a livelier player base, with more active guilds. If that's something you care about. Also, Greenpine is mostly Chinese players who speak - you guessed it - Chinese.

Just pick one. It has no effect on the basic gameplay. Make sure you remember which one so you sign in to the same server every time.

NOTICE: Apparently some people care about this. Some people who are not me. So I'll mention it briefly. Once you pick your shopkeeper's gender, YOU CANNOT CHANGE YOUR MIND LATER. There will be a few other outfits and portrait frames that you can unlock for use on the character status screen, but you cannot change from boy to girl or from girl to boy... once you pick your face you're stuck with it. There is no cosmetic surgery option here. Fear not, because the game plays exactly the same either way. The choice you make is purely cosmetic for your own personal taste.

Another thing to note at the very beginning of the game is that you CANNOT restart your shop once you have started the game. The only way to play a fresh game from scratch is to use the other server. So you get a maximum of two shops to play with (unless someday they add a third server).


If you just vanish from the game, you are still taking up your guild attendance spot but no longer contributing to the guild. This is a common thing on the Greenpine server; people hit max level and have built everything, so they just leave and their guild is left listed as "full attendance" even though only one or two people are still active in that guild. Most guilds are set to "auto recruit" so new players see "oh this guild has 19 people, they need one more to be full I'll join that one" and then discover they are the ONLY currently active player in that guild, everyone else has quit the game forever. That means less rewards from guild commissions, and much less chance of guild-mates helping with faction orders. Please, don't contribute to this problem!

Building Levels for Unlocking the Final Artisans:
Blacksmith 9
Workshop 10
Emerald Courtyard 11
Engineering School 11
Wizard Tower 13

Building Levels for Unlocking New Heroes:
1, 3, 7, 11, 16 (all hero buildings have the same upgrade pattern)

Other Important Town Levels:
Town Hall 2, 3, 6, 8 - unlock buildings to recruit new heroes
Town Hall 4 - upgrade resource collection capacity to 4 (for copper, wood, herb, fabric, and leather)
Town Hall 5 - unlock Business Street for sales frenzy and shop orders
Town Hall 7 - unlock Emerald Courtyard for new artisans
Town Hall 9 - unlock Faction order requests (remember to post a faction quest item to your guild for help)
Town Hall 10 - upgrade resource collection capacity to 6 (allows unlock of pinewood, iron, fur, flower, and cotton)
Town Hall 11 - unlock Engineering School for new artisans
Town Hall 12 - unlock Faction Wars side quests
Town Hall 13 - unlock Wizard Tower for new artisans
Town Hall 14 - upgrade resource collection capacity to 8 (allows unlock of gem and mana)
Town Hall 15 - upgrade resource collection capacity to 10
Business Street 1 - unlock shop order requests
Business Street 6 - unlock Banker (in tavern)
Business Street 13 - that 10% discount is worth LESS than you pay for a single upgrade point now.
Business Street 15? - unlock trading square? (Still confirming this)
Textile Field fabric 5 - unlock next material resource (cotton)
Sawmill wood 5 - unlock next material resource (pinewood)
Herb Garden herb 5 - unlock next material resource (flower)
Mine copper 5 - unlock next material resource (iron)
Hunting Ground leather 5 - unlock next material resource (fur)
Mine copper 7 / iron 5 - unlock next material resource (gem)
Herb Garden herb 7 / flower 5 - unlock next material resource (mana)

1. Unlock final hero equipment slots for Horcrux to send them into the Trials
2. Unlock advanced crafting slots (150 each)
3. Occasional upgrades to equipment when you craft them
4. Occasional buy materials or instant-complete for crafting if you are in a hurry to finish a requested order
5. Artisan Slots if your level is too low to get them for gold
6. Unlock advanced adventure slots so heroes start resting even if you don't click to complete the adventure right away.
7. Whatever else you feel is worth it

Most of your team in the early levels will require cloth armor or cloaks, shoes not boots, gloves not metal gauntlets, and hoods not helmets. For accessories you mostly want projectiles, potions, or musical instruments, at least until you can start crafting scrolls. You will also want some shields and a few rings. Only a few of the early heroes will use hard armor, metal boots, metal gauntlets, and helmets. Later you unlock a little more variety in terms of equipment. Also, try to keep your number of teams equal to twice the number of Adventure slots you have unlocked, plus one. In "early game" you should reach Suramar Armory as your fourth adventure type, and perhaps three adventure slots so you can run three adventures simultaneously. So have seven teams ready... six for rotating adventures, and one for town missions and guild commissions.

These items sell for decent amount (at least for early levels) with very little material cost (especially the harder to earn rare materials from Adventuring). Stock up on these, then activate your frenzy and sell like mad!
Wisdom Potion
Vanguard Shield (or Shield of Honor once Pinewood and Iron are unlocked as materials)
Blue Hood
Wizard Robe
Moonlight Ring
Lute (or War Horn once Iron is unlocked as a material)

Feed your heroes items to levelup the horcrux (that final equipment slot unlocked by diamonds once they reach a high enough level) to give them more HP in trial maps. For the early levels, the most efficient way is to feed Leather Hat to heroes who use soft armor, and feed Metal Handguards to heroes who use hard armor. Remember feeder items must be BLUE OR BETTER quality - grey or green is not good enough. So sell or equip your grey/green items, but consider feeding blue or purple to a horcrux if you want to have easier time in the trial maps.

Remember to check your business plan AND the event calendar every day.
Remember when you make new equipment you must MANUALLY equip it to your hero.
Remember to have lots of gold coins on hand when you collect adventure rewards, just in case some of your equipment breaks and needs repairs.
Remember to check the rewards tabs on the Factions and on the Guild menus.
Remember there are THREE types of shop space: floor/wall, decorations, and functional.
Remember functional furniture can be upgraded.
Remember to upgrade your artisan furniture, too.
Remember to setup your heroes in TEAMS, and change teams once in a while to make sure you have good combat points for adventuring and good health/food points for trials.
Remember equipping seven favorite (green break chance icon) items on a hero will give that hero an extra 25% combat points!!
Pay attention to your PRAISE. Fill this up before you start a Frenzy.
Put one point (not a whole level) into Business Street right before you start a Frenzy, then you get extra 10% base item price PLUS double the total from frenzy! This stops being worth the price fo that one point upgrade at business street level 13 though.

There is NO WRONG WAY to play, if you focus on selling with frenzy active to earn quick cash, or focus on updating your heroes' equipment for more effective adventuring, or focus on unlocking new buildings... it all has to get done eventually anyway. If you miss one of the events, yeah you miss some extra content but it won't hurt your game. If you miss an order request you lose a little reputation with that requester (which means they send fewer orders in the future) but it won't break your game. If you accidentally use the last of your Iron to craft the wrong weapon for a quest, wait half an hour and then collect more materials to craft the correct one. Play all day, or play for 30 minutes, play it your way. Just HAVE FUN!

Now that you are in a server, you will see the opening of the main story. Yeah, yeah, town is destroyed and your friend is turned into a cat. You have to manage the rebuilding of the town and turn her back to normal, by managing a weapon/armor shop. Hooray...

Here are some basic tips to get you started without too much time or gold coin wasted by trial and error.

• The game was originally made in Chinese. You will notice some things are still written in the original Chinese. The translation is incomplete, but nothing important will be in Chinese. All of the story, tutorial, menu, etc. are in English or else you can figure it out even without understanding Chinese. So when you see some Chinese writing, DON'T PANIC.
  
• Diamonds... you will often be asked to buy diamonds in a cash store pack. You really don't need to, it will just speed up your game a little bit if you do. In my opinion, not worth the money. You will also be asked to spend diamonds sometimes. They are most useful when you craft an item and it randomly gives you the option to upgrade it. You get the first upgrade (either green or blue) FREE, but you can spend some diamonds to upgrade it one more time (to blue or purple) which makes it a little more powerful, but also worth more money to sell or to repair. They can also be used to upgrade various things throughout the game but all of them except advanced crafting slots will eventually be available by spending gold coins instead - you just have to wait until you level up more. Also, when crafting an item you can use diamonds to speed it up to instant finish, or if you lack materials to start an item you can spend diamonds to get the item started anyway. You earn diamonds from certain side quests and by completing main quest tasks.
  
• Gold coins are the currency you earn by selling the items that you make in the shop. These are spent on buying upgrades for buildings in town, unlocking various things throughout the game, increasing the size of your shop, and basically everything else you might spend money on in this game. You get them as rewards for completing adventures and some side quests too.
  
• Shop Furniture - every day you should check the furniture Gatcha tab, you get a free spin. When you go on adventure you earn boss tokens for defeating zone bosses which you can spend on more gatcha spins to earn additional furniture. When you place furniture, pay attention to the size. You can put a certain number of DECORATIONS which increase chance to get upgraded items when you craft, and another certain number of FUNCTIONAL FURNITURE which increases your storage limit, collects materials, or increases your praise from customers. Wall and floor furniture effectively takes up "zero space" but once you use up all your walls and floor you can't keep stacking them on top of each other. Decorations don't get upgraded, but functional furniture can be upgraded. It costs gold coins and the upgrade tokens that look like hammers, earned from daily quests.
  
• Artisans - you hire artisans to manufacture everything you sell in the shop. The more they make, the more XP they earn and the more they level up so then can make even better items. You have to pay gold to unlock an artisan slot, then do events in town and upgrade their building enough to unlock the artisan, then hire them with gold coins to have them work for you. You can fire them to make room for the next one if you don't have enough coins to unlock another slot, but you can always hire them back later by paying their fee again. Artisans work with special furniture in their workshop which needs to be installed before use, then it can be upgraded (for gold coins and spending the upgrade tokens that look like gears which are earned from daily quests) to produce higher level items.
  
• Heroes - Heroes need your items, they buy them from you. But that just earns you money, it does nothing for their combat ability. You need to make EXTRA copy of the item and then manually equip it once you hire the hero. Then heroes go on adventures, or guild commissions, or town event battles. You will see/participate in none of those, the heroes simply become unavailable until the mission is complete and then they have a cooldown timer while they rest before going again. You cannot change equipment for a hero who is in an active mission. Unlock heroes and increase their level caps by investing in the hero buildings in town.
  
• Adventures - in the Tavern, talk to the giant chicken to unlock new adventures. You can also eventually unlock extra adventure slots so you can send more than one team at a time. You pick the adventure you want, then you can either pick heroes one by one OR setup hero teams and just click the team from the list. You unlock team slots as you levelup your shop. You unlock more hero slots on each team as you levelup your heroes. Adventures primarily are for finding rare materials to build higher level items, but they also give a small amount of gold and randomly they give you some equipment items like a free helmet or something. BE CAREFUL when you come to collect your rewards from adventures. Hero equipment has a chance to break after an adventure and you have JUST ONE CHANCE to pay gold to repair it. If you don't have enough gold, that item is thrown away and you will have to make them a new one and equip it again. Each adventure has a chance for 0, 1, or 2 hero items to break.
  
• Gallery will just show you all the items you've bought, created, or found. Nothing special here. There is another "gallery" in the Hero menu where you can view more detailed information about your heroes.
  
• Praise points are indicated by the thumbs up icon at the top of the screen. Recommending a different item, refusing to sell an item, or surcharging to get more money from a customer, will SPEND your praise, while giving the customer a discount or selling the item to them will EARN a little more praise. Upgrade your reception desk to increase your maximum praise. Use and upgrade item racks to increase the praise you get from simply selling that kind of item.
  
• Equipment - Customers will only automatically request items that are at their level, +/- 7 levels. (So if they are level 10, they might ask for something between level 3 - 17 depending what you have ready.) However, by spending a little praise you may suggest any item you have in stock and they will take that instead. They will NOT automatically equip whatever you sell them; apparently they are all hoarders and they just take it home and stuff it into the bottom of their closet. When you manually equip items on heroes, anything more than 4 levels above or below their level will incur a durability penalty (it is more likely for the item to break after an adventure). So if your hero is level 10, try to use items between level 6 - 14. However, yellow or red quality items NEVER BREAK regardless of level!
  
• Quests on the Quests menu, the daily quests reward you with hammers and gears to upgrade your shop furniture and your artisan tables. Notice each quest has a star rating on the left side that is basically the difficulty level. If all three quests have at least 6 stars, you get 3 gears for completing all three. Any less than six stars and you only get 2 gears for completing all three. By spending diamonds you can change one quest for another random one. First time each day is 5 diamonds, second swap each day is 10 diamonds, +5 each additional time. The diamond cost resets the next day. You will also find story quests (the one at the top of the list) to advance the main plot. And town development quests to sort of guide you in improving your town's buildings, down near the bottom of the list.

So you've seen the town intro, and you're thinking "Where should I start?" Here are some helpful tips.

• Town hall is required to be the highest level building in town. Get this upgraded more to unlock new buildings, guild membership, factions, faction wars, etc. If this is level 9, then level 9 is the maximum level for anything else in town.
  
• The right side is for heroes. You have several buildings that unlock and raise level cap for your heroes. These are on the right side of town, with blue roofs. I advise getting these to level 4 as quickly as you can, then focus on the other buildings for a while. After that, the important milestones here are levels 7, 11, and 16 you get new heroes unlocked.
  
• The left side is for artisans. On the left side of town, with green roofs, are several buildings that unlock and raise level cap for your artisans. Scrolls, tomes, and guns will be off limits until you get these leveled up in order to unlock the proper artisans. Level these when you have the money, but you want your resource facilities up before you get these past level 8. The final artisans available by this method are unlocked at Blacksmith 9, Workshop 10, and Emerald Courtyard 9. There are also an Engineering School and a Wizard Tower that fit in this category, but I have not unlocked that yet - my town hall is still only level 10.
  
• Mines and farms are at the bottom. Towards the bottom of the screen are your resource facilities. The mine, the lumber mill, etc. These produce materials which you use to build your items in your shop. Higher level = more materials, they regenerate faster. You also want these up to level 5 as fast as you can because at level 5 an event starts that will unlock the next material for that facility. (Copper mine also produces iron, etc.) If you open the building window you will see on the right window there are several tabs, one for each resource this building will produce. Each one has to be leveled up separately. Once you have the second material for each one at level 3, you can relax on these and focus on Artisans and Heroes for a little while.
  
• Business Street is in the center of town. The big bonus from this one (at least in the early levels) is that you will unlock the Banker. It also increases your sale prices and your "Frenzy" duration. But when the Banker is unlocked, go to your Tavern and the banker will take your investment of gold coins, wait a certain amount of time, then give it back WITH INTEREST. He has three levels of interest you can choose from. The "best" is 11% but it is also the longest time to wait for it. If you collect it before time is up, you get your money back but ZERO extra interest.
  
• Special Events happen in town seasonally, or related to holidays. You can play through these to gain unique blueprints, costumes, hero outfits, equipment items, and other such rewards. Just remember these are time sensitive and when the seasonal holiday thing is over, whichever event you are on will be the last one in that series that you will see.
  [\List]

The tavern is full of things to do.

• The banker will take your investment and return your interest here.
  
• Any shop orders you have will be submitted here (after you accept the request in your shop).
  
• Factions are accessed here from the bar keeper, for orders and faction status.
  
• Faction wars are accessed here from the army general guy.
  
• Adventures start here. Buy more adventures from the giant chicken by the bar.
  
• The Trials are accessed here, too. Send your heroes on Trials to earn pieces of puzzles which combine to make artwork based on your heroes and artisans, which adds some deco points to your shop.

• Using Frenzy - Try maximizing sales profit with low overhead costs, particularly try to avoid making extra items with more than 2 of the rare materials from adventuring as requirements if you're just selling them to get coins. At least until you can do adventures with five team members so you get EXTRA crafting materials from adventure rewards. Eventually you will the Shield of Honor that is worth around 3000 gold. And the Wisdom Potion has a decent price tag for not much material investment. So does the War Horn, and the Blue Hood. Almost all of your customers will want at least one of these, so feel free to spam craft them. Before hitting the frenzy, try to have your Praise points at maximum (upgrade your shop's desk to have 150 or 180 for best result), have at least 30 items crafted and ready to sell, and have three customers in the shop whose requested items you have in stock for those first three really fast sales. Once the frenzy starts, DO NOT craft anything because it takes too long. Just sell sell sell (and maybe buy if someone shows up selling to you - your purchase prices are halved!) and recommend another item if you don't have their first request ready in stock.
  
• Guilds - eventually the game will suggest that you join a guild. Guilds are nice. When you have a faction order request to fill, you can post an item from it for your guild friends to help you out by sending you some. (They don't always do it but you can ask.) You can also take commission missions from your guild. Earn enough credits for your guild and you can buy special item rewards including decorations for your shop, item blueprints, and other things. You can also participate in faction wars at a certain point. For these, you craft a bunch of items for a faction, then send heroes to aid them in defending against an invasion.
  
• Commissions - Your guild will tell you about a special mission you've been asked to complete. Escort a caravan, send supplies to the front lines, or something. Each one will ask for a particular type of hero (the client likes beards so use a hero with a beard, or the monster attacks women so only bring men, or the enemy has wings so bring an archer). You can send that type of hero to boost your combat rating and gain extra portion of rewards, but you can also send a different hero and still participate. The result is based on the hero party sent by your entire guild, each person can only send one hero. During the commission, your chosen hero is "busy" so you cannot equip items or use him in adventures.
  
• Factions - it takes a while to unlock the Faction option. But when you do, the barkeeper in the tavern will let you view your standing and any requests from the factions. Here you can accept, fill, or reject any faction requests as well as buy special item chests from factions if you have enough faction points and faction keys (earned from completing order requests and faction wars). If your level is high enough to get town hall to level 12, faction wars become available, too. You DO NOT have to choose just one faction, you can do all three simultaneously.
  
• Business Plan - On the right side of your screen is an icon that says "Bulletin" - click on that to open your business plan. Here, they try to sell you some paid content. Most of it is probably not worth it and definitely not necessary to play and win. But, if you click on the number in the circle on the top left you'll see your business level. On the right of that window you see your rewards for leveling up your business. There is a paid content you can buy that will give you extra rewards as you level these up. If you click on the little reward button you can see a list of tasks you can complete to earn business XP. Remember to click the icon on the rewards when you level up, it won't automatically collect them for you. There are two ways to levelup. A series of tasks that changes every week, similar to the daily quests in the shop, which you either complete or miss it - either way it will rotate out for a new one at the start of the next week. And a set of persistent tasks that never go away so you can't fail or miss them, but they do levelup each time you complete them. For instance if you complete one that says "Finish 40 adventures" then the next one after you collect that reward might say "Finish 60 adventures" or something like that... until you hit the maximum challenge for that category.
  
• Events happen from time to time (i.e. Valentine's Day, Spring Festival, Halloween, etc.) that will give you special side quests to collect special rewards. Plus they sometimes have special packages for sale from the cash store. Notice the EVENT icon on the right of your screen in the shop? That's where you find this stuff. Most events also come with a FREE gatcha spin daily. Check it out. These events do expire, so if you are saving event tokens for a big-price item in the event rewards shop, make sure to spend them all before the end or you will LOSE THEM ALL.
  
• Upgraded Crafting - If you click an EMPTY craft slot you can upgrade it so that if you are making an item that requires a prerequisite item as an ingredient, it will automatically make the prerequisite item first (just like if you crafted it manually) and then go right into making the final item. It uses ALL the resources for the entire process up front though, and the crafting time will be the combined total of the prerequisite and final item. You can select Advanced or Normal crafting (to make it while using a prerequisite that you have in stock already) when you click the item to craft it.
  
• Adventuring for Rare Materials - When you are sending heroes on adventures to get the rare materials from the tavern, equip them with lower-level and lower-quality gear as long as you still get that 95% chance of success. Higher level and higher quality (purple and up) equipment COSTS A TON MORE TO REPAIR when it breaks. Usually it costs more than the item you need those ingredients to create will sell for. The top two qualities never break (thank you, developers!) but blue and purple items will still break and they are very expensive to fix. If you have a team of THREE heroes on an adventure, your rewards DOUBLE! If you have a team of FIVE heroes on an adventures, your basic rewards will TRIPLE! Also, there is a maximum of TWO equipment items that can break during an adventure. So if you have five people on a team you will never have three, four, or five busted items to pay for. Just like crafting slots, you can upgrade your adventure slots. Upgraded slots will allow your adventure teams to immediately begin their recovery cooldown time as soon as the adventure ends, even if you don't go collect your result right away. With the basic slots you need to collect the result before the team starts their "resting" cooldown timer.
  
• Deco Points - You really won't have to worry much about deco points until you get your shop expanded enough to actually put decorations in it. Hero portraits, hero outfits, shop decorations, and a few other things can increase your deco points. All the deco points do is give you a higher chance that when you craft an item it will pop up to a higher level of quality (grey - green - blue - purple - yellow - red). You can check your deco points on the shopkeeper menu by clicking your shopkeeper portrait in the top left. As far as shop decorations go, you can either use what you think looks "pretty" or "cool", or you can follow a strategy of using only decorations that will give the highest amount of deco points per floor/wall space used. A big item that is 3x2 squares with 36 deco (6 points per floorspace) is actually worse than a 2x2 item with 32 deco (8 points per floorspace).

Crafting Robot is a tool that you purchase from an event in town, after which it will just sit in front of your shop. It requires 250,000 additional gold coins to repair once you unlock it. Then you can set a list of items for it to craft for you. It only does one item at a time but it will just go down its list until it runs out of instructions. One thing to take note of is that the robot is considerably slower than your regular crafting because it levels up differently than your normal artisans.

You can levelup its crafting ability the same way you do with your Artisans - by crafting items like crazy - but once it hits enough crafting XP for a levelup you have to MANUALLY CHOOSE how to spend your upgrade points. You get five points per levelup. Then you levelup each crafting skill individually and after the robot hits level 9 it gets VERY EXPENSIVE in terms of gold and crafting XP to level him up again. So it may be wise to focus just on a couple of types of items for this thing to craft. You can also pay A TON of diamonds to increase his number of instruction slots and/or give him advanced crafting like your regular shop. I recommend the advanced crafting actually, but you can do just fine with only three instruction slots. It starts with three instruction slots, one for active crafting and two that it will start automatically once the first one in line is done. If you change your mind you can cancel any orders on WAITING status and have the entire material cost returned to you.

Most people try to use the robot to manufacture low-level items that are prerequisite ingredients for some of the higher level equipment. That is one way to go. But really it takes several minutes for the robot to craft that low level item, while in your main crafting area it might only be 45 seconds or something like that, so the benefit of doing this is questionable at best.

What I found to be the most effective use of the robot is this: restoring your praise after a shop frenzy sale!! If you get two of the Glove Racks in your shop and level them up so you're getting a total of +8 (combined) praise from selling gloves and gauntlets, then all you need on the robot is advanced crafting (500 diamonds to unlock that) then get it a few levelups as follows:

• Tailor (scissors) 21
  
• Jeweler (ring) 19
  
• Blacksmith (anvil) 20
  
• Armorer (helm) 20

With that ready, now you can put one upgrade into Business Street for +10% to sale prices (this stops being economically beneficial once your Business Street hits level 13 because that 10% price increase gets you less extra money from frenzy sale than you spend on the one-tick business street upgrade), activate your frenzy sale, drain all of your praise to make more money by surcharging the prices. Then when your inventory is low again and you need to restore your praise, your robot can craft gloves and gauntlets for you while your main crafting tables focus on higher level items for the next frenzy, or else working on faction orders. :)

The quickest/easiest/cheapest thing I found for this is to make the robot craft two Rogue's Gloves (level 8) and one Spiked Handguard (level 6). These only cost a few praise when you suggest the item, followed by reduce price which gives you more praise than you spent on the suggestion, without costing you a ton of materials to build them. Plus with your glove display stands upgraded you get +9 just for selling gloves/gauntlets regardless of what you do to the price or equipment level. Then rinse and repeat. The ratio of hard-gauntlet users to soft-glove users in the shop is roughly 1 to 3, so you want to keep more gloves than gauntlets in stock while you do this. Follow this pattern for a few runs, and you'll be back to maximum praise in practically no time!

Now you have a choice... you can keep dumping levelup points into only those four skills to make crafting your gloves and gauntlets faster - but ignoring all other items; or you can diversify into some other skills if you don't really care about how fast your gloves get finished, but you want the ability to handle some other types of items. Whatever you feel like doing, go for it. If you feel like you messed up the skill levels on the robot, you can reset them for 50 diamonds by clicking the little button next to where it shows how many levelup points you have remaining to allocate.

At a fairly early level you will open the option to fill orders from some NPC shops. The profits from these can be increased by leveling up the Business Street in town. You unlock additional shops that request orders by learning blueprints for the types of equipment they deal with. In the Tavern, click on the bulletin board to see a list of all the shops and your status with them. Every so often an NPC shopkeeper will show up in your shop with a "!" over their head to indicate an order request. Click them to view the request. If you accept it, they will wait in the Tavern until time is up or until you fill the order. If you reject the request, they go home and wait until the cooldown cycle completes and then they will rejoin the order request cycle. By completing orders, your reputation with them goes up which means they will make requests more often, and for more complicated items with better rewards. If you reject it, or accept an order and then fail to complete it within the time limit, your reputation with them goes down. These orders are fun to do in the beginning, but the difficulty will spike around shop level 15 and after that with the long build times for the more complex items I question whether they are worth completing anymore.

Once unlocked (Town Hall level 12) you can do faction wars by visiting the general in the Tavern. There are two phases to each war. The first phase is a lot like a shop order. They will request two items from you, which you can submit in groups of FIVE each. You can submit AS MANY TIMES AS YOU WANT. The more you submit, the more points you gain to get additional rewards during this phase, plus it counts towards your status on the leaderboard for the current war. As you submit more items, you reduce the number of battles required to win the next phase of the war. The timer for the preparation phase is about a day. Then there is a brief wait period. Make sure you collect your rewards from the preparation phase by clicking on them before the end of the wait timer. This is a group effort, everyone who submits items contributes towards the total points. If you all submit enough to fully supply the faction army, everyone who earns enough points to make that first prize notch will also earn an extra reward shown in the middle of the left panel.

Then the battle phase starts. These are like adventures. Send a team of heroes to battle the monsters. When they win, you gain points towards rewards. Then send them again. Rinse and repeat until satisfied. The rewards are similar to those from the preparation phase, and again make sure you collect your rewards before the war timer runs out. This is like a "raid boss" event where everyone on the server contributes points towards the total, and once you all defeat enough enemies you win the war. An overall win will grant everyone who made enough points to claim that first reward notch with an additional reward shown at the top left panel.

Here is a table showing the hero level when eveyrone will unlock their Horcrux. Here, anything listed at 10 might actually be 11, I didn't write them down until I hit level 11 with the first 13 heroes. I will discuss Trials in more detail in the next section. Unlocking the horcruxes costs diamonds, at level 10 it will be 50 if I remember right, at level 12 it will be 75 if I remember right, at level 14 it will be 125.

There is a Trials menu in the Tavern, at the bottom left. Here you send your heroes on extra adventures for greater rewards. The main rewards here will be puzzle pieces. Collect pieces to make an artwork of a character. Each piece adds a few deco points to your shop, and a completed puzzle adds a lot of deco points to your shop. Remember that deco points increase your chance of randomly improving the quality of an item you craft in your shop. There is also a special shop here that sells items you can use in the trials, as well as puzzle pieces, for a certain cost in either diamonds or starweave crystals (the purple hexagon things). Starweave crystals can be earned from certain squares inside each trial, from the chests at the end of a trial (one contains an art piece, two contain starweave crystals, you pick one out of three and contents are random), or else sometimes you can buy them by redeeming event items - i.e. during Easter time you can spend some easter eggs to buy starweave crystals. You can also buy Horcrux items which attach to a hero's horcrux to give them an additional skill slot. These skills are only useful during trials, not for any other battles. It might increase CP during certain trial maps, or give extra HP, or something else along those lines. Most of the other items you can buy in the trial shop will be used during a trial. If you have ever played Mario Party games, it is like the items in that game... you will figure it out pretty easily once you play one or two trial maps.

Once you pick your team, you pay a startup cost in food in order to begin the trial. It's like a board game - advance one square for each step. For each turn you will consume some food to roll the dice, which will determine how many steps you will take on that turn. Each square has different results; some cost you extra food, some give you items, some offer a chance (usually by paying diamonds) to restore food or HP, and some lead to a battle. Battles will consume your HP, each battle has three possible results which drain different amounts of HP and give slightly different rewards. The amount of HP lost is based on the difference between your team's CP and the enemy team's CP. HP can be restored with medical kit items, food can be restored with food items, and there are a few other items that give various bonuses only during trials. Food will automatically restore each day if you wait, too. If you run out of HP, you lose the trial. You can then send another team (and pay another startup food cost) to start at the same square where you lost. Each trial only persists for a certain time, then it expires and vanishes, to be replaced by a new trial... so if you wait too long between runs you will have to start over from the beginning on a new trial. At the end of the map is the trial boss, who has a ton of CP. Beat him and you earn a chance to open one of three treasure chests. One contains an art piece, the other two have starweave crystals. If you open one and then decide you want to open another one, you can pay some diamonds to do that.

Only heroes who have unlocked the Horcrux (that final equipment slot on the Hero menu) can participate here. Horcruxes are unlocked by paying some diamonds once the hero levels up enough. Certain equipment (i.e. Tomes) can increase your HP (heart icon) instead of combat points (CP - sword icon). Your team's HP in a trial is the combined total HP of all heroes involved.
You can also increase HP by feeding BLUE OR BETTER items to the character's Horcrux to level it up. They must be items the character can equip though. Items the character dislikes (yellow or red equip icon) give less Horcrux XP than favorite (green equip icon) items. For instance, if you have a potion and a scroll at the same level and quality, but that character is green for potions and red for scrolls, then the potion might give 30 HXP but the scroll might only give 6 HXP. Higher level items give more HXP. Better quality items (blue < purple < yellow...) give more HXP.

For those early horcrux levels, you can get away with spam-crafting low level items with blue quality blueprints. I advise focusing on the armors for this, since there are only two types of armors really: soft and hard, while there are several types of weapons. So you can stockpile just two armor items and use them interchangeably on all your heroes instead of needing seven different items because they all use different weapons. My advice for starting out: use the Leather Hat for soft armor heroes and the Metal Handguard for hard armor heroes since after you build enough of them the blueprints automatically unlock blue quality so you get a level 5 blue item EVERY time you make one. The rest of your armor items with automatic blue quality are only level 3 or 4, worth fewer HXP. Remember: green and grey items are not good enough to feed to a horcrux. This works for a while, but with each horcrux levelup the next one will cost more HXP to reach... which means that eventually your little 20 HXP per item will just take too long to use those level 5 feeder items anymore. So eventually you will need to start saving purple items that you find or create randomly in order to feed to horcruxes instead of selling or equipping them. But the hat and handguard will suffice for the first six horcrux levels on each hero, give or take a few depending how patient you are willing to be for this.

Common question for this kind of game: is it worth it to spend real money on the bonus packs?
The answer here is - maybe. Depends how much you like the game really.
Business Plan
There is an upgrade to the business plan that is just a few dollars and in my opinion is worth it for EVERYONE who plays. It gives you extra rewards for each time you levelup your business plan. These rewards include bonus heroes, XP potions for faster levleup of heroes and artisans, artwork, and legendary equipment items. Plus some nifty blueprints, too. I am not sure about the other paid content, but this one will apply to BOTH servers if you are running a shop on each so you only need to buy it once.
Business Fund
There is also a Business Fund you can spend a few more dollars on that really only rewards you with diamonds each time you reach a certain levelup in your shop. Maybe not really worth it for that since you get diamonds for free as faction war rewards anyway.
Special Gacha
There is a "Special Gacha" series just marked as "Sale" in the store menu, too. This one has rewards of a bunch of diamonds plus various items (some of which are very nice to have) at each step. However, the trick here is you have to unlock each step buy purchasing the previous one. The first step is around $5, but each step is more expensive than the previous one. The final step costs around $50 or so by itself, plus you have to already purchase all previous steps to get there, so it gets expensive really fast. Luckily you can play through the whole game without this package... it just gives you some additional item storage space in your shop, new heroes, extra artisans, and diamonds. Note that the contents of this sale change every so often, keep an eye on the timer if you are planning to buy the series.
Resource Chest
They also offer for sale two chests full of materials to help you craft items and upgrade your shop's furniture. These are pretty cheap, but all the items they contain are available for free in the game if you just send heroes on adventures or complete daily quests. So basically you spend a few bucks to avoid waiting a couple of hours to finish some in-game tasks to get a few materials. Nothing special here, but at least it's really cheap.

Eventually (probably around shop level 16 or so) you will find all your artisans and most of your heroes have hit a level cap and can't levelup anymore. This is due to the steep increase in prices to upgrade buildings in town. Yeah, town will just eat up all your gold for basically two steps on the five-step upgrade of one building. Meanwhile, you can't advance the story plot because you need more crafting gears to upgrade your crafting tables in order to unlock some of the more advanced blueprints.

Honestly the hero level caps are NO PROBLEM right now since their main function is just running those adventures to collect materials. At level 13 you can send them out with no equipment and still win the first three adventures with a team of three adventurers. Sending them out naked will also avoid those unattractive repair costs since the cost to repair nothing is NOTHING. Or, if you don't like them going naked and you want that 25% CP boost, give them low-level equipment and just pay the tiny fine to repair it every time you do an adventure. Giving a level 13 hero all the level 4 or 5 equipment will incur a penalty to the chance of breaking because it is more than 4 levels different between the hero level and the item level. But low-level items only cost a few hundred gold to repair, while those level 12-15 items can cost 20,000 gold to repair.

If you are choosing to run adventures with no equipment or low-level equipment, good for you! But you should probably keep a full set of high-level gear in your inventory for when you want to send a hero (or a team of heroes) on a guild commission quest or on a faction war battle, or maybe do a run through a trial map. Those all require higher CP than the regular adventures. Some of the town events also require higher CP than a naked hero would be able to provide. So either keep a set of decent equipment around or be prepared to craft a set every once in a while when you need to send a hero on a tougher errand.

The artisan level caps are more of a problem because you need to keep leveling up their stats in order to unlock better blueprints and continue the main story. Plus the fact that you can only have 7 or 8 artisans on your team even at shop level 17... means you'll have to fire some of the early artisans to make room for the masters as you unlock them by upgrading buildings in town. Honestly, upgrading your artisans and their crafting tables is the biggest factor that slows down your progress in this game. This is the only reason that the Special Gacha Sale might be worth the money - the final tier of the sale is usually an ultra artisan. But man, it is expensive for that. For this reason, I advise you to put most of your town rebuilding efforts into boosting your artisan buildings once all your hero buildings are level 7 and you have unlocked all the mining/farming resources to level 5. Then just remember to keep upgrading the crafting tables, this will take time because you need the crafting gears which you only get 2 or 3 each day by doing quests. It costs around 15 gears (and a ton of gold) to upgrade from Skilled to Senior level for each table, so each one will take you almost a week just for that upgrade.

Also try not to neglect your shop furniture. You can upgrade your desk to get more Praise. You can upgrade item racks so that each time you sell one of that item type you earn extra praise. I like to keep either one armor rack, or else a boot rack and a glove rack upgraded to level 3, so I can build up praise faster before I activate a Frenzy sale. You can upgrade material boxes to store more crafting materials, which will make you able to craft more items sooner, which helps alleviate that slowdown I mentioned. Try to have at least two of each resource box, all at level 6 or 7. The main thing to remember though is you can upgrade your storage boxes so you can have more items in your inventory. This is important once you start finding the "event" items because you usually can unlock a hero outfit or a portrait if you find all the event items and equip a hero with a full set. If you only have 12 storage slots and you need seven for these event items, that doesn't leave much room to craft and store items to sell or to use in a faction war.

By the time your heroes are using level 14 equipment, one broken thing from an adventure will cost you between 8000 - 10000 gold to repair. That is a huge jump from the level 2 or 3 equipment that barely cost you 20 gold or something like that. And even if the stuff is equal to your hero's level AND their favorite (green durability icon) it will have 3% chance to break for EACH of your seven equipped items. Since each has a random roll to break independently of the others, until either one breaks or all seven are deemed okay, the total chance of something breaking is 3% * 7 = 21%. Then you have THREE to FIVE heroes on your team, each of whom will have yet another independent 21% chance for their stuff to break, and you can have up to 2 heroes with broken equipment. So in practice it will FEEL like you're finishing adventures with one or two broken equipment about half the time. This cost adds up FAST if you pay to repair your stuff. Of course the other option is to leave without repairing, in which case the item is discarded and you need to craft a new one for them. It seems silly to be paying 22,000 gold in repair costs just to pickup 6 of those green gem items and 300 gold reward though. You decide if it's worth it. I don't think so.

NOTE: Legendary and Mythic tier equipment NEVER BREAKS... but it is very rare to find or build it, it sells for a ton of money if you do get one, and it really is not practical to build a strategy around it this early in the game because your shop level is too low and you just won't find enough of it yet. If you really want to try, you can spend A BOATLOAD OF DIAMONDS to upgrade equipment that you make, sometimes it gives you the option to upgrade again if you pay more diamonds so if you upgrade from blue to purple to orange... (it's been a while I don't exactly remember the color scale??) you will have an unbreakable version of the item once you reach yellow or red quality. The down-side of this is that the purple and orange items are much more expensive to repair than the green and blue items, so until you get those yellow and red ones using your purples might occasionally slap you with a huge repair bill.

There is some good news though: the higher-level adventures pay a little more money in rewards, so if you have 21,000 in repair costs you might earn 2,200 from that adventure which reduces the cost a LITTLE TINY BIT. The bad news is those later adventures are also considerably harder, with a higher Combat Point requirement to hit that 95% success rating. So, there are some strategies to run adventures and collect materials while minimizing your repair costs.

1. Have two or three teams setup to run LOW-LEVEL adventures. If their level is high enough to run the adventure at 80% success without using ANY equipment, do that. If you can't quite crack that combat point requirement while naked, or if you are pretty close to the 95% success mark, then have them use LOW LEVEL (< level 8) equipment only. This way you're pretty much guaranteed that your stuff will break because it is well over 4 levels lower than your hero's level... but the repair cost is almost nothing. These teams will only run the adventures to get the green gem, white flower, red crystal, and (if you hit level 17) orange stone items. And sometimes town events if their CP is high enough.

2. Have another two teams setup to run mid-level adventures. These would be the orange stone, orange coin, purple stone, and purple sack item rewards. These heroes will likely need equipment somewhere between level 8 and 13 to be successful, which is still a little expensive to repair but better than the level 20+ equipment. This will also be your go-to team for the medium-difficulty Faction War battles.

3. The rest of your team slots should be fully equipped with the best equipment (and lowest chance to break) that you can craft that is within 4 levels of each hero's level. These will be your main attack force, taking on the higher level adventures, guild commissions, hard difficulty Faction War battles, and certain town battle events that require more CP than your lower teams have equipped.

4. If you care about keeping all your heroes at a nearly equal level, just rotate the equipment you use every now and then, shifting your step 1 team into step 2, shift that step 2 team to step 3, and shift the step 3 team to step 1.

5. Try to make up for the gold you lose by repairs by taking a break from adventuring every couple of days and focus on building high level gear to sell in a shop frenzy. Pro tip: pay for one investment step at Business Street right before you're ready to start the frenzy, to increase item price by 10% BEFORE the frenzy doubles it. :)

To make it easy for you to check your team's CP against the adventure's requirements, I have built this little table for you. Each time you defeat a "boss" in an adventure, the adventure goes up to the next rank. The highest rank possible is V, and each rank has higher CP requirements (and better rewards) than the previous ranks. I will update this list as I unlock the higher ranks of those later adventures. I am only including the info from the highest rank that I have unlocked, for simplicity. The reward shown is for a team of THREE heroes. With five, the amount will increase but you have to be a much higher level to be allowed to use a team of five.