This game is about bouncing balls. You bounce balls by clicking the screen. As balls bounce, they generate energy. You can then spend that accumulated energy to level up the ball to make it generate more energy, and also to unlock more balls.

Throughout this guide, I'll use Scientific Notation for energy. Whenever I use logarithm, assume it's log base 10. Some basics before we continue.

• Level: Besides increasing energy gain in the usual way, there is a multiplier every 10 levels. x2 typically, but also x5 at level 50s, x20 at level 100s, and much bigger boosts every 500 levels.
  
• Bounce: How long your balls can keep bouncing. Increase this to make your life easier.
  
• Ball size: As the game explains, energy gain scales at cubic power of ball size (x2 size => x8 energy)
  
• Tube height: Higher tubes allow balls to generate more energy

This is the max energy you can have at once. You can use energy to extend Capacity. Later on, a Meta Energy upgrade can automatically extend capacity to some extent.

As you generate more energy, you can unlock the Ball #2. There are 6 in total.

After you have unlocked all 6 balls, you will be able to Improve Ball #1 to make it 1^2, where it goes back to level 1 but starts at a much higher base energy. After you improve all 6 balls to second power, you can start improving them to third power, and so on and so forth.

In the same way you can improve a ball, you can also regress the ball to a previous ^power. Ignore this mechanic for now.

Activating Meta Energy is the prestige/ascension mechanism in the game. The formula for this is

After activating meta energy, you may use these to buy upgrades for faster progression. Note that unspent meta energy also increases energy gained. So don't spend all of it!

There are 3 achievements in the tab: Super bouncer, Energy storage, and Bubble buster. Each new achievement gives 1 red gem.

Gems are obtained two ways if you play for free:

• Achievements
  
• Daily Rewards: If you log in 7 days in a row, you get gems as reward. You get 5 gems on the 7th day, 6 gems on the 14th day, 7 gems on the 21st day, up to 10 gems on 42nd day and every 7 days after that.

The gem shop has free Ability Point and Meta Energy refunds.

You gain 1 free Meta Energy refund every time you activate meta energy (and not using the meta-energy converter). You gain 1 free Ability Point with each cycle of amplifier improvements (from n power on all amplifiers to (n+1) power on all amplifiers).

Thus, free refunds are abundant in this game. Don't be afraid to experiment.

As you just start out, you are actively bouncing the balls from their max heights, upgrading balls, and extending the energy capacity when needed. Activate Meta Energy when you've accumulated 15-20, as the game suggests.

• Density - most important upgrade in the early game. Because each unspent Meta Energy also increases energy gain by 20%, you should generally only buy Density upgrade if it costs less than half of your current unspent Meta Energy.
  
• Bounce - these greatly improve quality of life.
  
• Auto-capacity extender - another QoL improvement. Put some spare Meta Energy into this.
  
• Gravity - pretty expensive for this stage. Put points into it if it's cheap relative to Density.

Keep up your Density upgrades, and keep all your ball level / size / tube height topped off. Activate Meta Energy whenever you can afford a couple more Density upgrades.

Improving Balls give them Ability Points. Put only 1 point into Powerful bounce for now and save up those APs.

As you start accumulating more Meta Energy, this next phase of progression will focus on Bubbles. Improving your bubbles can greatly increase the energy gain of active play.

• Bubble probability - Increase this gradually, as it's expensive. 5-6% is a good place to be.
  
• Bubble initial capacity - This effectively is just another Density upgrade. Treat it as such, and level it appropriately using the "half meta energy" rule. You should maintain Density and Bubble initial capacity at roughly the same cost - i.e. do not over-level one vs the other.
  
• Remove spikes - Buy this at some point

Keep doing the Density upgrades, and level Bounce / Auto-capacity extender as appropriate.

You also want to begin accumulating some Idle multiplier / growth time, to help you get over some rough patches.

The play style is similar to early game, except now you get all your energy from big fat bubbles. Usually, there is 1 ball that is generating 99.9% of your energy. If a bubble spawns from this ball, and you click it right before it reaches the top, it will propel your energy forward several orders of magnitude.

You want to be actively clicking bubbles, also to raise the Bubble buster achievement level, so your bubbles grow faster.

I was able to use the Bubble strategy to go all the way to around e8000 energy, which took me less than 3 weeks of real-life time. Because Density and Bubble initial capacity is only x2 per level, and their costs grow exponentially, these eventually fall off in effectiveness.

While active bubble-popping play can take you very far, it cannot do so indefinitely. In the end, as many seasoned players in the community commented, Idle play is the only way.

I took many inspirations from the community, in particular n00bdragon's comments in his screenshot: https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1679618180

This is fairly straightforward. When Idle, your energy gain is multiplied by the bonus multiplier every hour, until the growth time runs out. So you want to raise the Multiplier to accumulate Idle earnings faster, and raise Idle Time enough to cover your offline / AFK periods.

As members of the community have pointed out, if you pop a bubble to end Idle, the idle bonus is applied to the bubble. So you should always end your Idle time by popping a big bubble.

The other big piece of the Idle play style is to have maxed (level 10) Free amplifier auto upgrade on every ball. After some testing, I find that having just this skill at level 10, and no other skill in the queue, is the fastest way to accumulate free amplifier / ball levels.

So we want the Free amplifier auto upgrade to give us free levels. To make this work well, we need: 1) more tube height, because drop height accumulation speed is proportional to sqrt(tube height), and 2) longer bounce, to avoid balls bouncing lower as we idle for long periods.

This is where I found the key to idle success:

I, like many, was confused by this feature. Many in the community speculated about its best use. I think it is perfect for facilitating idle play.

By regressing balls just enough, we are able to achieve several things at once:

• Max tube height - extremely important for fast accumulation of free levels. If by regressing, you lose e5 energy gain on the ball, but speed up ability activation by 50%, you will make that lost energy back in just a few short hours.
  
• Much longer bounce
  
• No longer need to keep up the Improvements, which force you to break idle

If we are focusing less on Density and Bubble initial capacity, then what else to do besides Idle multiplier / time? The answer is Gravity.

The drop speed of balls scales according to sqrt(Gravity). By raising Gravity, we speed up the ability activation timer, which gives us more amplifier / ball levels. More importantly, this is a multiplicative effect on ball level, which means it is a multiplicative effect on log(energy). This is vastly superior to Density / Bubble capacity, whose effects are additive to log(energy).

Also, please heed n00bdragon's warning, and do not overspend on Energy Generator!

To summarize, here is what we want to do:

• Focus on Gravity / Idle multiplier Meta Energy upgrades
  
• Before beginning an idle session, regress all balls just enough so they achieve maximum tube height
  
• Drop the balls and watch those free levels rack up
  
• To end an idle session, pop a big bubble
  
• Since getting back to where you were after activating Meta Energy takes a long time now, you should use 10 Gems to convert Meta Energy. You get free gems by logging in for days in a row. So this is a sustainable method for F2P.

One last important tip: For some reason, I find that offline progress (closing the game) gives much lower rate of Ability activation, which really hurts my progress. So to be safe, have the game open while you idle (sucks I know). See below related question I posted in the Discussion forum.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/697610/discussions/0/3421060714391227797/

In the end game, we want to focus on Gravity and Idle Multiplier. How important are they relative to each other? Which one should you level more? In this section, I'll go over some detailed math to explain this tradeoff.

Before we begin, it's worth noting that the balls / amplifiers generate approximately 1e60 more energy every 1000 levels. A significant proportion of this come from the 1e6 bonus every 500 levels, and the 1e13 bonus every 1000 levels (occasionally can be 1e9 or 1e14). Therefore, on average, each 10 levels, or each Free amplifier auto upgrade ability activation, gives 10^0.6 energy multiplier.

I will use my own game at roughly e10000 energy as an example to explain this.


Some information on the upgrades and my stats:

• Gravity - each point is a 1.1x multiplier. I put 22 points, giving a total of 1.1^22 = 8.14 effect.
  
• Idle multiplier - each point is a 1.5x multiplier. I put 25 points, giving a total of 1.5^25 = 2.53e4 effect.
  
• My next gravity upgrade costs 960.84 Meta Energy. Next Idle multiplier cost is 125.34.
  
• (Not on the screen) My Free amplifier auto upgrade activates every 3.3 minutes.

"Marginal" means the incremental benefit/cost relative to my current state. The Marginal Cost is easy - 960.84 for Gravity and 125.34 for Idle multiplier. What about the Marginal Benefit?

Per hour, the marginal benefit of one more level of Idle Multiplier is 1.5x energy, or log(1.5) = 0.176 in log space.

Per hour, the marginal benefit of one more level of gravity is more complex. Currently, my abilities activate every 3.3 minutes, meaning that they activate 60 / 3.3 = 18.2 times per hour. With each ability activation giving 0.6 more energy in log space, this is 18.2 * 0.6 = 10.92 orders of magnitude per hour. Now, if we have one extra level of Gravity, gravity becomes 1.1x, giving sqrt(1.1) = 1.0488 multiplier on bounce speed. So, the abilities activate 4.88% faster. Hence, this extra level of Gravity equates to 10.92 * 4.88% = 0.533 more orders of magnitude of energy per hour.

Putting this all together, we see that the next level of Gravity gives 0.533 / 0.176 = 3.03x benefit compared to Idle multiplier, but costs 960.84 / 125.34 = 7.7x. So I should level Idle multiplier next.


As you can see, the math is somewhat involved, if you want to precisely measure this. An important takeaway from the calculation is that, while the benefit of Idle multiplier is constant log(1.5), the benefit of Gravity increases as you have more Gravity. So Gravity will take up an increasing proportion of your Meta Energy budget as you head deep into the end game.

Because in End Game, Gravity is so important, you should buy the +50% Gravity for 90 gems.