Loop Hero is a grindy game. It felt like the start was ridiculously slow.

If you don't know (say this is your first hour).... what you want to unlock is Necro, forest and river.
Why? The Necro is very simple to play once you get attack speed. Forests give attack speed and river double that effect. You can also double the doubling if you have river/thicket/river (note thicket gives 2% speed and forest gives 1% speed).

This guide assumes you have these basics unlocked and generally understand how the city building aspect works. If you are new to the game just keep chipping away until have some basic things unlocked. Use the treasury tile to get random resources; eventually you will unlock some better materials and you can unlock all the "cool stuff".

Long story short upgrade what you can when you can - if there's not something better to get close by. For me my goal was to rush necro/river/forests but you might have something else in mind and that will probably also work if you just keep grinding. Just keep making progress with your unlocks and eventually you will get some progress.

The good news is that you never backslide so that any progress is always in the forward direction. If you are not sure - run away from the boss. Failures hurt tremendously early on but are not as big a deal later.

I never bothered playing the rogue by the way until I had rivers unlocked. I focused on getting the crypt because it seems to make for easier runs *for me* even when playing warrior. On that note - you will play warrior for a long time to unlock anything. It felt like maybe 10+ hours and was kind of boring.

I prefer the crypt over the arsenal (but choose the latter if you want to grind with rogue) for both Warrior and Necromancer. For one you get a free resurrect and it lets you scale health to an insane degree if you fight enemies with a soul. This is not to be confused with "living"; spiders are living but do not have a soul (this was nerfed I believe in the first patch).


Some very basic tips:

Farms give food and you'll need a whole bunch to get your town maxed out.

Stone Huts give you more storage. Each level of bulding gives you more storage (supply tab)

Level one huts give you supply for +1 food/furniture/total supply slots.
Level two huts give you +2 furniture/ +1 tool/ + 1 food/ +1 total supply
Level 3 huts give you +2 furniture/ +1 tool/ +2 food/ +2 total supply
Level 4 huts give you +3 furniture/ +1 tool/ +3 food/ +1 Jewelry +3 total supply

Be aware dwellings are more valuable later when you have more supply to use. Early on you're likely to get random stuff that won't be very helpful. But save this for later. Early on you need just the base hut for +1 supply slot.

Before you get confused on storage let me clarify that +1 tool means you can have one more possible tool slot. Total supply means you can bring +1 more item. So getting +1 tool without having an empty slot means you have an available slot for another tool but you are already at your max supply limit. Having available supply but no more tool slots means you can't bring a tool but you could bring something else like food.

After you've been playing for about 10-20 hours you might get 5 count chairs and 5 alchemist tables (gives you +1% vampirism if you already have it / +1 potion slot). So obviously they are something to focus on *later*.

As soon as you can make watchtowers. They summon archers to help with everything not the boss around the campfire. They start at range one and become range 2 form tower level 2-3. *Be aware that watch towers can hinder the necromancer with 5-8 minions*. Instead of getting your scaling minions you will get fixed damage crossbowmen within range of your watchtowers. If primarily necro grinding you might want to keep them at range 1-2 for a while.

Note that tower level 3 gives you +1 tool/ total supply points. By tower level 6 you get an extra +2 tools, +1 more supply slot (2 total), and +1 food slot. But of course you can't upgrade them quickly because it uses some expensive resources (like 32-44 food for tier 3-4 upgrades). And of course that doesn't cover the orbs either. The level 6 tower has a range of 4 tiles and the level 4 tower has a range of 3 tiles. You only get 4 of these and they are *another* thing you need to work in.



When killing bosses be very picky about which power you unlock. Some of them are very good and some of them are complete garbage. This is where RNG has a chance to shine because if you get some of the better ones early on it can make the game much easier.

Basic notes

• Use the treasury to get resources you can't get early on in chapter I-II.
  
• Get free resource grinding in your town with lumberjacks/farms. Make efficient rings
  
• Unlock the necro/river/forest for easy grinding/gameplay
  
• Mud huts are the best building to fill your town with (*IF* you have good supply not being used)
  
• Be careful which boss powers you unlock as they will "clog up" choices for better powers. You can opt to just take resources instead. In the coming patches this will be less of an issue as they have said we will be able to turn on/off unlocked boss powers as part of deck design.
  
• When planning a rogue run go for high quantity of kills not quality.
  
• Try to give yourself as many fights as early as you can handle. More fights means more early xp and more tiles to place : which leads to more of both.
  
• It's better to run away and be safe compared to risking resources you desperately need to make town upgrades early on.
  
• There is a section on how to cheat at the end of this guide if that is what you desire.

Advanced notes

• Always play with the rare book if you have it. You only ever need one.
  
• Check your supply effects before assuming; you can use an infinite number of mining picks for more pebbles but the hatchet effect only applies once (same with rare book). If the information is cut off remove a few items and double check.
  
• You can use villages to block blood golems/living armor spawns from their respective tiles : but think about why those cards are in your deck if you don't want to fight them.
  
• With access to rivers the necromancer will be your best resource grinder in chapter IV until you get lots of very specific storage.
  
• Do not try to reach insane levels of attack speed with the necromancer. Last night I achieved 548% attack speed and my character summoned his minions instantly - then proceeded to attack the enemy and ran out of stamina. This caused -75% minion summoning rate which was not useful.
  
• Without any way to verify this information- I've been told that defense is 1% damage reduction per point up to 50 where it has diminishing returns.
  
• Different monsters drop different quality of loot; worms from ruins and golems have much higher drop rates and drop better items. Their item quality is drastically increased via count land quests. You can check this for yourself if you look at monster entries in the game files.
  
• Until it gets fixed : either do not upgrade your towers completely with Necro or fill those spaces in range of towers with count lands. Every second village will spawn bandits - the best option here is to have the only place where bandits can spawn filled. That way you don't have to use an oblivion later. Place villages on an "L" on odd placements (1,3,5, etc). The last thing you want to do is spawn bandits that destroy gear which took you 20+ runs to find.
  
• Use and abuse tile interactions. Villages/count lands block the summoning of goblins/blood golems/living armor/ghosts (and many more).
  
• Living armors get shredded by arrows from watchtowers. Spamming a few smithys before the boss can help when your supply is bad.
  
• Rogue can get items from quests in addition to the drops per round. But when your body count gets really high the quest loot that is normally superior is often inferior.
  
• For early chapter farming addition effects like mountains/burnt forest are fine. Multiplicative effects are better. Also be aware debuffing the enemy is mathematically superior than buffing yourself with tiles as your run should always try to have 5 enemies per tile. Remember to delete your storm temples once the rows they affect are finished. Tiles do not revert. Replace the temple with a thicket for more attack speed.
  
• The bookery has a cross pattern for card cycling but the Abandoned bookery functions like a Vampire Mansion for adding an enemy to tiles. If the tile is in range of a Vampire Mansion+ Abandoned Bookery you can get a vampire wizard who turns into a book and summons vampires. This can add an extra enemy to many tiles per loop for a rogue run.
  
• if you are farming to achieve 30-50 loops you will likely want to select different gear as you progress. With Necro rings I eventually try to convert to evasion, +1 skeleton, +skeleton quality. With rogue gear eventually I reach max evasion (75). And with warrior gear I try to put on some evasion items because the damage scaling gets really rough.
  
• Deserts are fantastic to reduce enemy health scaling. If you are using the crypt I think somewhere around 75% is plenty of health reduction. Lowering their attack speed is also incredibly useful.
  
• If you are fighting on a swamp and have an abandoned bookery with a living golem the mosquitoes will explode and kill the vampire; this will spawn the book that will give the golem a huge magic shield (that will take one damage per hit).
  
• Increasing your base health can quickly break the game. If your supply includes 44 kitchen knives and 64 food items then you can start at over 9000 health on the first loop.
  
• The attack speed reduction for enemies applies to your pets as a necromancer (so you likely want to just stick with rivers/suburbs)

You start with the warrior and he does a decent job. If you have unlocked tons and tons of supply you can make him insanely overpowered with +50 vampirism from stacking the count's chair - but almost nobody has that obviously. So how do you make him work?



My favorite build for the warrior without considering tile use is to get about 30% vampirism and 30% counter. This assumes you have leveled up to get some of the perks that make counter more effective (like the one that restores health when you counter). If not then you can focus just on vampirism/regeneration with what you have.

Warrior gear selection
Without considering tiles or level up abilities I tend to focus on getting a balance of 30% counterattack and 30% vampirism with a little bit of regeneration. If you do not have the perk for healing with counterattack you might want to focus on vamp/regen. Be aware that if you don't have attack speed from tiles it is very helpful when combined with high vampirism levels.

You can use either the crypt or arsenal ( I got the arsenal much later). Using the arsenal with the nerco reduced gear quality bonuses from .27 to .17 and I find that kind of gross. The crypt gives you a free resurrect so if you mess up you can get right back up and very likely quit safely on the next loop. The crypt also gives you lots and lots of HP if you fight enemies with a soul (not scarecrows, spiders, suits of armor, etc). On the other hand the arsenal gives you a helmet slot which adds retaliation damage (but enemy damage scaling makes this stat garbage as loop # increases) as well as regeneration, counter and vampirism. The helmet can have other modifiers but I would never take anything besdies vamp/counter/regen.

You can build for attack speed with rivers+ storm temple+ forests but that's three cards (and is + scaling instead of % scaling so limited value for infinite farming). I find you can do a lot with just mountains+ suburbs (the latter give a stacking xp boost if you don't have it yet- in the picture on the right you can see that I have +84 xp per kill).

The screenshot on the right has some of the better warrior level up options. Obviously some are better/worse depending on what you are trying to do (farm/kill boss).

Thanks to a bit of luck this run ended up being a "Tyler Durden : hit me as hard as you can run". I placed mountains on about 2/3 of the map and that gave me about 4,000 hp at the end. Note that this was a combined effect from the crypt. Once I got strong aftertaste, the perk that gives you + damage for drinking a potion, I tried to take more damage. And then I got bottomless bottle, the perk that gives you a 40% chance to not spend a potion. These two perks together helped scale my damage tremendously.

As you can see I focused on vampirism/counter (with a touch of regen and alternatively attack speed). I find evasion to be lacking because it drains your stamina but if I get some - whatever. Unless a weapon has an insane % of vampirism I go with highest possible damage. Sometimes I make an exception if I am trying to stack counter. Be aware that one of the hero perks can heal you as a multiplier of loops completed every time you counter attack.

After 12 loops I got 8 level ups. The power not shown was the ability to reflect projectiles at enemies 60% of the time. Had I gotten that sooner this run would have been massively easier.

The build strategy here was to have a few counts+vampires and a few groves+blood groves near ruins. Both of these make good synergy with lots of high level fights that give you lots of xp and good chances at high level items.

I do not have exact knowledge of what defense does but I *know* it helps to mitigate damage (see what happens when you fight worms in chapter IV). I have noticed that if I ignore it I often get sent home prematurely.

I likely could have kept this run going for 4-5 more loops but I got a little over zealous and made a few vampire golems. If you get a quest from the cleansed vampire town to kill a golem ( which gives it 200% health) you can find yourself losing thousands of health in that fight. Things can get really bad if you have worms standing on the next tile over shooting at you while you kill a golem that has more health than the boss you killed several loops ago.

-Be aware that the tiles you want to use with warrior change as your supply changes. I can start with nearly 3000 health so I don't bother with mountains anymore. If you still need to use them because you need the health boost or that is all you have then by all means use them. Mountains+Obliterate are the best way to farm Metamorphosis Orbs.

I find the rogue to be an interesting paradox because you want to give him lots of enemies to fight so that you get lots of high quality gear; but in so doing he never has a chance to rest and his health is constantly being chipped away.


The rogue has synergy with the outpost. You can use two to help you with the boss fight but sometimes they get targeted instantly and don't do much. The rogue gets loot at the end of a loop based purely on number of kills. So you should be fighting 4+ enemies as often as possible. I am a big fan of using the watcher tower as that gives you +1 enemy over a very large radius (doesn't work with vampires - not that you probably want to use vampires with rogue).

Mountains can work on rogue as they give extra enemies. Treasures can do this too and are likely a better bet but long term you would likely use something else. Once you build your mountain you can cycle the rock/mountain tiles to place more important things using the bookery if you have it unlocked..

Be careful about using Watchers with the rogue as they lower evasion.

Avoid using the treasure hunter trait with rogue - it creates a chest that gives neither loot nor a trophy. I would avoid using battlefields with the rogue because ghosts can be a real problem.

Be aware that spiders start as an easy enemy but their poison has lasting effects that quickly add up to a lot of damage in later acts.



Perk Selection

Old scars is absolutely amazing. For each trophy you get +1 health. Throw in some mountains early on and you've got an amazingly tanky rogue. I tend to spiral out of control once I get this perk and always aim for +100 trophies per loop.

Master of fencing is an excellent perk as you have a 10% chance to double hit.

Lightning fast is another good choice. You strike three times for 50% damage with each hit. Combined with Master of fencing and you will be a storm of blades tearing through the enemy.

Gear Selection

Personally I prefer counter to evasion; but sometimes you get boots with like 30% evade. Evasion does lower your stamina so if you are stacking attack speed it can make you need to rest faster.

Attack speed on gear is great - unless you are placing lots of forests then you can ignore it. Attacking faster matters more when you use two weapons and can critical hit.

Critical chance is better than critical damage until you have lots of both (there is some very complicated math behind this but if you played Diablo III you likely used a program to help decide which gear to use/keep because the math was very complicated).

You need as high damage weapons as possible but losing 3-5 points of damage for 10% counter isn't a big deal.

-when trying to make runs past loop 40 in act IV - I make it a priority to try and have counter+ critical chance (preference) or critical damage.


Tile Selection

I suspect the most optimal choice for Infinite farming will be Oasis+Rivers. Initially spam rivers and forests aiming for 70~100 attack speed for the second boss. The end goal will likely be something close to a 50-75% increase to allow for plenty of counter/evasion.



This was an attempt at an infinity farm but honestly I think it had a few flaws (see left picture for cards). I prefer the crypt to arsenal - this is why I had 12k hp even with a -45% health penalty.



The perk selection was nearly perfect. I got old scars first for that extra bit of max hp and got master of fencing and lightning fast. With the amount of health I have : nothing is sacred is a waste but the other options were even worse.



I ended the run here and you can see where I was trying a few things to optimize. Lessons learned:

The optimal build seems to be river/oasis/river. For simplicity I will likely use the C shape on the left side of the map (you can compare to the original image when I started remodeling.

In the future I will likely use : cemetery (instead of grove) and change chrono crystal (for spider web). This way you get souls form everything and the crystals make you have full skeleton spawns.

For optimal enemy count : have a Vampire Mansion+ Abandoned bookery. Together this gives you a vampire mage who will summon bats and will turn into a book upon her death. Two extra kills over 20+ tiles really adds up. I was averaging 200+ trophies per lap.

I got frustrated because I had lowered my attack speed to 40 something and then the game was only giving me attack speed gear which completely defeats the point of the experiment.

I've finished runs with over 400% attack speed. I can summon skeletons so quickly that this can become dangerous when you fight enemies with thorns. The necro is good against almost every enemy type assuming you've got about 5 skeletons.

How do we optimize him? On gear you want to look for these stats:

• Max Skeletons
  
• Skeleton level
  
• Skeleton quality

What do they do? Max skeletons gives you more available summons. After you summon 4 melee skeletons you can summon ranged units (who cannot be attacked).

Skeleton level makes your minions tougher to destroy and deal more damage. This only increases their stats every time you increase to a new whole number. In other words 5.99 is the same as 5.1 in terms of skeleton level.

Skeleton quality gives you the chance (0-100) to summon either a tank or rogue pet. The rogue pet has evasion and the tank pet has "first target" which means the enemies will attack him first. Skeleton archers become mages with +magic dmg. Ranged skeletons cannot be killed once summoned.


What to prioritize? You might have a necro book with +2.45 skeleton level and +1 skeletons but get a new book that has 4.65 +1.35 skeleton level. You very likely want that stronger book as long as your skeleton count is at least 4 or higher.

I prefer having 4-5 skeletons (more is better) , a level on par or close to the loop level and then aim for 75% quality (more is better). Why? If you have ~250% attack speed or better you about 99% immortal as you can just keep summoning tank skeletons. They get summoned and often die instantly - but you didn't get hit. Then you summon 2 more skeletons and the tank dies again. This repeats until the enemies are all dead and you rarely ever lose any HP once you get the stats you need.



Above you can see some of the gear you should be looking for. That "perfect" ring took many many loops to find (sometimes you can get it twice). Most of the time you will likely settle for +1 skeleton with +skeleton level on your rings for quite some time. There is also only really one good choice for amulets; you usualy have to settle for +skeleton level and skeleton quality. I always focus + skeletons over other stats early on except maybe on my book.


Note that without rivers and lots of + minions the Necro is complete garbage. I had one run where I had only 3 skeletons after 8 loops (and I was fighting almost 4+ enemies on every tile).

Pay attention to how I looped the river around the map to get lots and lots of attack speed! Once you have the bookery unlocked you can use it to cycle out forests and instead place only thickets.

What kind of build should you use?



This is what I started with. Villages+vampires give you lots of really difficult fights that you can often win with zero gear. That helps you get lots of cards early (this is a key point as killing the boss early is usually easier).


You can place a blood grove next to a forest. This prevents monsters nearby from running away. This makes it relatively safe to spam lots of ruins for good loot and experience. Be careful about placing vampires in range of what will spawn from a blood grove (vampire blood golems can be really nasty). But never put a ruin or cemetery "behind" the campfire as they will assist the boss. *You could potentially ignore that if you are 30+ hours into the game with infinite supply or have the *reflect* power unlocked from one of the bosses and have chosen it during level up.

With a little luck you can get your vampires+ villages placed early. About 4 loops later they will no longer spawn enemies. Then it becomes a nice place to put ruins nearby. If possible put a battleground on the village. Every round it will spawn a vampire with a chest; before the village is cleared you can have chest+vampire+4 ghouls for a ton of chances at loot.

Be very careful about vampire goblins. Goblins in general can be really nasty or just block placement. Feel free to use oblivion on them. After chapter 1 never place a village without placing a vampire area first (the bandits that spawn can steal your gear and inventory). Be aware that every 2 villages a bandit camp will spawn. You might need to oblivion that if you get unlucky in the placement. Note that bandits that move into a ransacked village become ghouls.



This is the build I used to beat the game for the first time. Note that I did something really risky and used the Arsenal not the crypt. This changes 27 quality on rings to +17 but allows you to "maybe" get a shield that adds +17 quality +1 skeleton (and if you are beyond lucky + skeleton level too). It will also add some pitiful level of defense that we will completely ignore. I forgot to use suburbs but I got insanely lucky and got all the perks I needed.

On that note : The Necromancer relies very heavily on level up perks. Some of the best ones include:

• +1 skeleton
  
• every time you summon a skeleton you get +magic hp (current not max)
  
• + skeleton level for every loop (starting on the loop you unlock it)
  
• damage dealt to the hero is split between his minions (not the ranged units)
  
• 20% chance to summon +2 skeletons (meaning you might proc 2 mages with 4 max skeletons)
  
• 20% chance for skeletons to deal 3 attacks for 50% damage each. Note this is a boss unlock - meaning you can't get it without a bit of luck and having killed the bosses a few times.

There are some other decent options but they are definitely lower tier.
1. skeleton horde: start each loop with 3 powered up skeletons (great early on if you are getting terrible gear rolls). This would be infinitely better if it were a temporary +3 to max skeletons.

2. Counterattack - when you get hit there is a chance your skeletons will attack. This is pretty good considering lots of chances over multiple minions - but it's just not "top tier".

3. Summoning a skeleton gives you 3 HP (do not use with swamps). Why is this a lesser perk? Why are you getting hit!


*If using the crypt be mindful about using enemies without a soul*.




Necro can use Swamps+Vampire Mansions to create very easy to kill enemies but you have to make sure not use any regeneration or "healing per day" food/tiles




I left room for an arsenal in case a ghost dropped one.


I use the crypt over the Arsenal. You can get rings/amulets with +29 quality, +1 skeleton and +0.27 skeleton level. The Arsenal reduces these values.

But if you get top tier rings/amulet and later get an Arsenal you can add a shield with +1skeleton, +20 quality and *maybe* skeleton level too if you get lucky after about 20 loops.

What cards you pick for your deck will have a huge impact on the resources you take home after the mission as well as how difficult the enemies will be. Some of the cards make things quite difficult once they have multiple abilities (never use villages without vampires starting with chapter 2 and beyond). Another example of tile synergy is the combination of swamps+ vampire mansions. Instead of leeching life everything will kill itself by attacking.

Generally speaking more enemies means more chances at loot and better overall loot drops. In other words try to bring vampire mansions or temporal beacons to give yourself another enemy to fight. More enemies means more cards faster (which as a reminder means you can fight the boss sooner - which is a good thing).

Placing forests gives you wood and placing mountains gives you stone. Building all these houses and watch towers means I need to farm several hundred stone to be able to upgrade my storage. Not to mention I think I need like 500-1000 food!

Top tier cards

Aresenal/Crypt - Never leave home without one of these (unless you are trying to make the game hard). They are absolutely amazing! Pick whichever fits your tile build best.

Battle field - Spawns a chest every loop. If you can spawn these everywhere (with a little help from the bookery - see below). Note this can spawn mimics but it is still totally worth it. If the battle field is touching a river then it spawns a guaranteed non mimic chest and a siren. Stacking the area effects of battle fields on empty tiles will spawn Blood clots. By themselves these are not dangerous but be careful because if they are present with a siren she gets a huge evade buff. On higher tiers the blood clots will kill themselves.

Furthermore any enemy killed in range of a battle field can spawn a ghost with a 20% chance. That ghost has a 20% chance to spawn the ghost of a ghost. And finally you have a 20% chance to spawn a "prime matter" from the ghost of a ghost. This final enemy can give you 3 random card drops or if you are very lucky one of the "limited" gold cards such as a crypt or arsenal.

Oblivion - You start with this unlocked for a good reason. Bad things happen and you need this to delete them. You can also use these with a mountain to "move it" . This is a really easy way to farm orbs of metamorphosis.

Temporal Beacon - Affects a huge area and speeds up time by 50% which means you heal more often and get to fight enemies more often. If not in the radius of a vampire mansion this also adds the watcher enemy to a fight. When combined with a bookery it makes a watcher mage but both will give you time shards. Often two or three of these will cover 80% of the loop or more. Sometimes your loop is bad and has no room for them on the inside track (might want to restart).

Ruins- Spawns a scorch worm which is a ranged unit that can attack the tile before it. These mobs have the highest chance to drop loot (85%) compared to anything else I've seen; I believe the next closest was the golem with 80% chance. Unfortunately worms try to run away after a fight (40% chance). So make sure you place ruins in range of a blood grove - which means they now have a 0% chance to run away.

Blood Grove - These can only be placed next to a forest or a grove. They can spawn blood golems which are very dangerous but drop great loot. Blood Groves have the added effect of not letting Scorch worms run away.

This tile effect prevents the spawning of ghosts.


Vampire Mansion- Gives enemies in nearby battles 10% vampirism. This can be really dangerous with spiders/goblins/golems/sirens/etc. Combing with villages gives you a 5 enemy fight as early as the first loop. Large fights usually beget more cards which means you usually end up getting lots of cards faster which means you get more xp/loot faster.

Note: Vampire Mansions only prevent bandit spawns when directly touching a village. Every 2nd village placed spawns a bandit camp (so be careful how you place those).

Wheat fields- These are full of easy enemies (unless you are a necro on higher difficulties and they get an AoE attack). They can also scare away (read as remove) one enemy from battle. There is some synergy here with these as you can make goblins vanish from a fight. I am not sure if vanished enemies count as defeated for the purposes of getting loot but they do count for increased chest rewards.

You can "chain" wheat fields and villages to give yourself access to healing without using meadows.

River - This card makes everything better. Once you have the bridge unlocked you can place it next to the road (wasteland tiles) and it will spawn fishmen. If a battlefield is nearby it spawns a shipwreck and a siren. Try using rivers/swamp/vampire mansion/battle fields/bookery together. I've had this drop so many items that one or two items were immediately moved off the inventory list before being able to even mouse over them. And because everything is a vampire it will kill itself with the swamp mechanic. If things needed to be any easier you can stack Silver pendants for -4 damage from vampires (stacked 2-3 times this is very easy to quickly notice). And then you can make every enemy you fight a vampire.

Niche cards

-Bookery : A great option if you want to cycle cards (to replace forests with thickets). When placed on a double or triple corner you can cycle 4 or 6 cards respectively. This means you can get +1 monster as early as 6 loops into the mission and in the meantime get the cards you want more often. This has more value for "long runs" on chapters 3-4 when you know you will farm a while after you kill the boss. The resulting mob can help you get time shards.

Note: For card cycling purposes Bookeries function in a "cross" pattern so that you can make them hit two or three tiles.

-Abandoned Bookery: This tile is created after a Bookery has cycled 20 cards (each pass through an active face of the tile will cycle 3 cards if you have them in inventory). Once the tile transforms the tile will create the Magic vampire and add it to battles in a 1 tile radius (same as vampire mansions).

In other words: you can place lots of bookeries early on to quickly cycle cards.

-Smith's forge : Removes useless items and gives you a damage shield; after enough items have been deleted it makes a "living armor". This creature has "Defender" so it will get killed first. It only has 12 hp but it only takes 1 damage per attack. This can be difficult into any build besides for a necro - where you likely don't need the damage shield because you have undead minions taking all the hits.

-Outpost : This is basically a "rogue only" card. He takes your loot as warrior and actively attacks the necro. Otherwise it helps you fight on the tile at no cost if you are playing as a rogue.

-Storm temple: Combine with a forest to make burnt forests for +0.5 damage. There is some natural synergy here in that you can use both forests and thickets to add +magic damage (or more optimally you can thickets for double attack speed and forests for magic damage without the need to card cycle).

-Zero milestone : I wouldn't use this card if you have it unlocked.

-Cemetery : This spawns "easy" enemies but it gives you only knowledge. Lame. They also hit really hard as the loop counter increases.

-Desert : Lower enemy health and your own at the same time. This is generally a bad idea. You can combine it with a river to make an oasis (which lowers your attack speed and the enemy's attack speed). Good to reduce high loop health scaling.


Late game enemies to avoid

Gargoyles - Gains defender.
Scarecrow (necro)- Has 30% chance for AoE attack the battlefield. Has 30% chance to counter attack. It also removes one enemy.
Prime Matter - enemy's 6th strike will kill the hero.
Goblin leader - The rage gets really nasty if this guy is killed last.
Rat wolf - Can only lose 30% of its health per swing.

Beware there are spoilers ahead. If you have plenty of supply space you might consider using the Old paintings as each one increases your damage to the boss by 4%. Maybe I got lucky or they are common but I very quickly got 5 and I have never taken them off. The extra 20% damage gives me the security to fight the boss even with half health (if I have any kind of resurrect remaining).

Litch

The boss can be tricky because he summons tiles that make him more powerful. Each tile called "litch's palace" that he places increases his damage tremendously. To counter this boss just overload the tiles around the campfire. On chapter 1 you can make him usually get 0% bonus damage. In chapter 4 you can pretty easily drop him down to 10% if you try hard enough.

Priestess

This boss is super easy if you are playing necromancer or any class with lots of stacked attack speed. The boss repeatedly summons mirrors that deflect your attack onto the mirror. Unlike summong skeletons as a necro the boss seems to be able to summon them very very quickly. Once the mirrors are broken the boss still has a very high evade chance (if I recall while looking in the game files it was 30%).

Hunter

This boss has two hounds to help him in battle who will repeatedly phase in and out. While phased out you can't hit them. Meanwhile the boss has an ability that forces you to attack a different target. So you can get stuck hitting everything down to low health instead of killing any one target quickly. High damage or attack speed are your friends here but it's not as critical as the second boss.

The best advice I can give you is to have good gear when you fight him but try to fight him as early as possible.

Omega

The final boss is likely the most annoying as he can temporarily delete your items and one of your stats. Make sure then to have some useless stats if possible like 5% evasion or 0.6 regeneration so those get targeted instead of +hp, + max skeletons, + attack speed, etc. The warrior has an advantage here because you can lose retaliation damage (necro too if you got an arsenal and had nails equipped). Also in case you didn't know you have to fight all the bosses over again from the previous chapters. Be aware you can skip a boss if you place enough tiles. This can be very useful if you are not building for attack speed with the second boss. Overall I found this boss to be pretty easy assuming you don't get tremendously bad RNG.

You need to unlock every building because it gives a unique ability or more storage (or both).

The order you unlock things is up to you and there are no build either building A or Building B but you can never have both options.

"What is the most effective upgrade?" : Mud huts. Assuming you have useful supply items you can just keep spamming these to be able to bring more items along.

Long term I would suggest making 1-3 lumberjacks and a ring of farms because you will need lots of wood and even more food.

If you could wave a magic wand you would fill every tile in your city with level 4 mud huts (houses) and all of the other "limited" buildings. Why? Because it offers more total supply options. It's really that simple.



I have 3 lumberjacks in my upper right corner making wood. I had plenty of orbs so why not? I am trying to produce lots of food with farms but it is incredibly slow! I am not very worried about making the farms super efficient because eventually we will only have houses.



This is what my supply looks like before I start a run with the warrior/rogue.


The beginning of the "end game" is when you finally unlock alchemy. This is where you can turn trash resources into something you need right now. But of course you'll "waste" resources in the long run. In order to create an item you have to first destroy it once. But you can destroy a "partial" resource instead of a whole unit to unlock the ability to synthesize the orbs.

Eventually with the crypt you can unlock the ability to pay 3 boss orbs to keep your loot on death. If you like to be risky you can go for that early. Make sure if nothing else you unlock the ability to get the free resurrect. It will stack with the crypt card to give you 2 resurrects but until it is upgraded the resurrect from the town building is very weak. But it might be enough to let you survive the fight and run away with a reduced resource penalty. Dying and resurrecting three times during a run will get you an achievement.


If you get somewhat lucky with good supply items you might throw down 5-8 mud huts for extra item use. Otherwise you are likely better off early on working on the buildings that lead to more upgrades.

As far as upgrading your mud huts goes you want to spam level 1 huts first. The level 2 upgrade is likely to be the least efficient as it does not offer another increase to total storage.

*Note*: You might not want to upgrade your watchtowers past 2 squares if you plan to do much farming with the necromancer for Act IV. Maybe have one tower that has range 4 but leave the rest unupgraded. Why? If you have 4 crossbowmen then you can't summon any skeletons in the 5-8 summons slots (I hope this will get fixed soon).

This game is not entirely obvious about what everything does. For example I discovered"shoe nails" do nothing for the necromancer unless you place an arsenal. You can use them if you have no other good supply but be aware that the damage gets reduced based on monster defense. I've had a warrior helmet that had ~45 retaliation and the enemies were only taking a few points of damage per hit. In other words... they are not worth using unless you have nothing else. But you might put one in your supply just in case (see chapter 4 boss notes).

So what else is good besides the obvious?

Furniture

Count's Chair/Sturdy stool : just grab about 25 of each of these right? No problem.

The alchemist's shelf is fantastic once you have potions unlocked. Always use these as the combination of strong aftertaste + bottomless bottle is incredible.

The antique shelf is great if you are "forever farming" in chapter IV. You still likely can't keep up with enemy attack/defense values but this can help you get to loops 30-40 if you stack it.



Tools

The Jeweler's lens adds 10% to your chance to get rare items. I've been having a lot of success using about 5-7 of these and I am finally able to test what happens when you have 10 of them.

The Blacksmith's hammer is very likely underrated because the game never defines defense. After some digging I discovered that defense means 1% damage reduction (believe 50% is the cap).

The Kitchen knife is great once you start stacking about 5 of them with at least 5 pieces of food. Scaling that up several times I can start a mission with over 700 health now that I am using lots of both. From what I can tell the game gives you +1% health for each supply food item (I assumed it would be each unique food item). Currently with 22 of them I can start wither over 2k health.

The skinner's knife is a fantastic early game item that massively drops in usefulness later. As you progress to later chapters enemies get more abilities; Ratwolves eventually get an ability that prevents you from doing more than 30% of their health total in a single hit. But if you are doing some chapter 1-III grinding I found 5-10 of them to be very handy if your deck includes groves.

The Farmer's scythe would be amazing if you could get about 10 of these; At that point the 3% damage to all would become 30% damage to all (but once again remember that "nimble" enemies (ratwolves/bandits) ignore damage to all in later chapters.

Food

The Cheese and Smoked Ham are the early winners from the food category. They give 1 hp per kill and 5 health per day respectively.

Later on you might want to try mixed nuts when you start the game with +40 defense. Each instance of "mixed nuts" gives you +2 hp for each point of defense. So if you have 40 defense then you will start with +100 hp for each item.

Garlic is an honorable mention if you are going to make every enemy on your map vampires.

When you first start the game the loaf of bread is not bad as you get +10 hp for one slot.

Jewelry

The rare book is a really nice item as you only ever need one (I tried stacking 5 of them and just like the brass candlestick it does not stack). Once you are finished placing tiles it will give you a very nice defense boost.

The next best bet is the Old painting. Keep stacking these to make the boss fight incredibly easy; this comes in handy later...

Once you "finish" the game there's still plenty of grinding left to do.

I try to find new builds so that I'm not always farming the same enemies with the same tiles.

A pretty safe infinite grind would be to cover the map in fake villages - but that would tale a very long time.

Stone/Food



For this run I loaded up on lots of garlic and damage reduction items from vampires (since 90% of the enemies were vampires). If I did this again I would put the battle fields on the count lands before villages (because after 4 loops the villages no longer produce enemies).

Bring a scythe if you have one to get that food just a little bit faster. Once you are "done" with your tile placement you can keep using Oblivion on the mountain to farm metamorphosis orbs. If you don't mind goblins early on you can leave them around for extra spawns around wheat fields. One problem with this build overall is that the bookeries take a long time to make a new enemy and when they finally spawn the wheat fields get rid of them. Another problem is that once the villages are all cleared then you have a ton less enemies to farm.

On the other hand this can be a very quick "explosion" setup if you get n early vampire mansion and a village. Then you can place 2 wheat fields and just keep spamming because you have suddenly have so many cards. Remember to consider if your next village will spawn a bandit camp or not; otherwise you might have to use an Oblivion to "fix" the problem of bandit spawns. Another problem with this build is that wheat fields spawn enemies every 4 days which is really slow. This means you always have two enemies to kill unless something else lands in that tile like a harpy or something.



Remember how I said the necromancer is overpowered? Well he is; but the Rogue and Warrior will eventually be better. That being said when you first start getting into the massive resource grind to complete your town you will likely want to do some "forever" farming where you do 30-40 loops in a chapter IV run. The easiest way to that is with a necromancer.

Using Vampire mansions and swamps you can spawn the frog king (fill every tile of the loop with swamp. Leave about 4-6 cities as desired/needed. You want to get 2 mosquitoes on every tile. Why? Well if not killed after 7 hits they explode dealing enough damage to kill every enemy remaining. Somewhere around ~30 this hits for 1000 damage and the monsters have less health than that. In other words unless you are fighting something that chain summons enemies (Sirens) the fight is over after the enemies attack 7 times. This makes for very fast/efficient resource grinding.

I initially designed this loop so that all those "outer" ring bookeries in the top right corner near my campfire spawned sirens. Somewhere around loop 30 I realized this was a terrible idea because your watch tower archers will replace skeletons summoned in the 5-8 slots. This is good initially because you start with 2 skeletons; but if you get to 7+ skeletons you are left with mediocre damage crossbowmen who deal ~43 damage instead of scaling damage. At loop 20 something my skeletons were doing about 150 damage if I recall.



This run I title: who you gonna call? Card list : Village+ Ruins + Battlefield+ Blood grove+ Bookery Forest +River + Crypt. Lately I've been having a problem dying to ghosts in late loops so I wanted to test a few things. I learned the following. If you want to run this I would suggest adding the Smithy card.

1. The reflect power is not working as intended. It does not reflect the defense debuff of the worm onto enemies on the current background. It does not reflect massive damage as 60% of their shots are reflected from myself and my pets.

2. Battlegrounds cannot spawn ghosts if the road tile in question is affected by a blood grove.

3. Until you can set a priority for the necromancer's pets place vampire mansions+villages within range of your camp watch towers. (You can spawn golems safely in those tiles before the village converts).



Eventually you will likely start messing with deserts and Oasis.

RIvers

Someone made a lovely tool for river optimization. The most optimal combinations were apparently found by claustrophobie on Reddit. Thank you sir!

Here are images of the most optimal river formations for attack speed.

river for 5 wide :


River for 4 wide:



River for 5 wide reversed


River for 4 wide reversed:




This is a link to the source if you want to mess with the optimization tool yourself :

https://loopherolayout.xyz/#


Oasis:



This is a new theoretical model for Oasis placement. Be aware that the first tile you place for river will not be turned into an Oasis.

*Yes I am aware one of the tiles in the Oasis setup should be purple*. It doesn't really change anything and you should be able to get the idea.

Broken Geography: Use rivers+ forests and place lots of battlefields that become shipwrecks.
Sirens constantly summon enemies and every time something dies you have a chance to summon a ghost. (best done with necro because ghosts will kill you if their 6th hit connects - but a tank skeletno can take this hit for you).

See the world and not die: Requires you to have all the buildings unlocked and place one of every tile type including Zero Milestone. I've gotten that tile many times but never bothered to place it realizing you need it for the achievement.

Crunchy company- You need a cemetery tile to trigger this achievement. Play necro and if you have enough allies/enemies so that there are 10 skeletons this achievement will trigger.

If this sounds dirty and suspicious - you're right it is. But some people are built like Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory.

Before editing game files you should be aware that bad things can happen. Back up your save and email it to yourself as a precaution. I will also mention that editing the files potentially will cause you to get everything you ever wanted much faster than anticipated. This could cause you to completely unlock everything and get less enjoyment out of actually playing the game. There ok you've been warned.

There are some nice guides on steam how to do most things for this game. Nobody has mentioned the obvious darker side. Say you wanted to get the achievement for killing the Litch on the first try. How? Open your steam directory and go to the Loop Hero folder. Find the "variables.ini" file and open with something like notepad +. If any of this sounds scary stop right now.

Honestly it's easy and can take you less than five minutes if you have ever made a mod for a game before. If you have zero experience with playing with files like this then I'll warn you again not to touch anything. If something goes bad just delete your edited copy of the file, turn off steam's autosave and import your save (then you can turn on steam's file saving sytem again).

What do we do to get "In time for Lunch" unlocked?

Edit the health of ever monster you plan on placing with tiles to have 1 health. The enemy files begin at line 202 at the time of this writing. This will reduce the scaling factor so that the monsters are an extreme cake walk. Still not easy enough?

You could go back up towards the top and decide that items need more base stats.

You could for example edit line 20 and decide that items should have 20% instead of 8% vampirism.

"Have I used modified files to make any part of this guide?" The answer is no because I don't need to; however it was useful to look into the files to see which enemies had better/worse treasure and things of that sort.

Why is this a part of my guide? Because I feel that you the consumer deserve to have the knowledge if you specifically request it. Use it if you wish - or don't. It's not my decision but yours alone as you paid for the game.

I have also grown very tired of playing games made by companies (paradox, CA, etc.) who desired to change the game so you would buy more DLC rather than the company focusing on actually using their resources to make the game better.

It's probably no secret that I have put quite some time into playing Loop Hero. This is how I started today's run - but note I added fields in there last minute. Why not?



At long last I managed to get 50 count chairs. The tile layout looked something like this :



I discovered unfortunately that the Oasis tile has a maximum of -50% speed effect on enemies.



So all the effort I used to make that cute little river town was for nothing (I didn't get a screnshot for this but II used the river+town+oasis tiles to create a river/oasis alternating pattern). I don't think it would have been possible for me to die; My life never dipped more than 500 points before loop 43. And even leaving it afk for about 5 rounds only caused me to lose about 3 potions (not upgrading items can hurt a lot).. In the end I had 76 desert tiles with 50 oasis tiles.

Skeletons as an enemy type were very comfortable to farm wth rogue. Bear in mind too that skeletons have a chance to become a lesser cracked version - and that new mob gives you a token as well as gives you experience.

I noticed somewhere between loops 35-45 that skeletons started getting insane levels of defense. Maybe it was a little earlier but eventually the 20 scythes started having almost no effect. It was a regular event for multiple skeletons to get crit for 2-15 damage by the end. However early on the scythes were completely ridiculous as I was able to clear the entire field with one to two hits.

Unfortunately the Oasis tile is somewhat "busted". You can only have 50 of them before they have no effect and they are not doubled by rivers. Is it good? Absolutely - there is only one of you and many enemies so making them and yourself slower is great. Is this a bug? Is this intentional? Either way it was a disappointment.



This is where I ended the run. Unfortunately this might be the end of the game for me until we get new content.

Take note of my health which has been reduced by 76% but is still 42,517! Does this put to rest any doubts that the arsenal is better than the crypt?

I really wish we had the option to pick better stats on gear. Many of my weapon choices were ruined by the fact that they had 40-60% or more attack speed. What's the problem with attack speed? It makes you hurry up and wait with -75% attack speed. If you just have the attack speed from your initial left side you will have no problems until the skeletons get insane defense.

As a point of reference before I went afk at run 42 for a while - almost every fight ended with me killing all but one enemy before running out of stamina. And then I attacked him first before it got to attack.

I should make a note that you do not need the supply I have to make this work. But it certainly will help. That being said I think once you get used to intelligently placing your tiles it is likely best to reset the game once you get to high tier loops. If you are brave you can increase the desert rating of your terrain (note that this loop had a lot of wasted space so that was not an option).

I don't really see a point in doing much farming after 45 loops. The scaling gets really bad and you take more time to get the resources. If you like even numbers 40 might be a good cutoff point to achieve.

Thank you for reading about my loop hero journey. I wish you the best of drops and luck!