As the game is being frequently updated I'm adding this section here in order to record the latest major changes. This update was full of minor QoL changes, such as the ability to view Evolution levels and bugfixes, but a few significant features were added.

-13 Sep 2024: Huge update made massive changes. Won't have time to update the guide until perhaps the weekend, sorry. TLDR: There's a new game mode, some gameplay rebalances, Eternica got massively nerfed and Charity abuse with WuKong has been reined in to no longer break the game with cumulative cost increasing YaoLing.

Update notes are at.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2816950/view/4610085845253512381

-4 Aug 2024: Noticed that the Help section updates have clarified a lot of the mechanics, updated the guide with the exact details. Check out the new DEF vs Damage Reduction graph!
-3 Aug 2024: Breeding talent inheritance rules cleaned up. Some of it was incorrect.
-2 Aug 2024: Mini YaoLing Scroll added.

Important features added:

YaoLing may have up to 3 additional types, which may all co-exist.

• Elite YaoLings
  

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  These are easy to identify as they have a crown icon on their portrait in the inn. Elite YaoLing have a noticeably larger model. This does not appear to affect their Size, nor Strength, but it does seem to affect their hurtbox and collision.
  
  The game states they have better growth potentials than normal YaoLing, but this just means they have at least one stat which has 5-6 diamonds ♦♦♦♦♦♦ in growth potential. Elite YaoLings are hostile on the map regardless of level, and will always spawn in the same locations.
  
  Note that currently, the four story boss YaoLing do not appear to have Elite spawn locations, therefore, they cannot be caught in Elite form. However, there is a 1% chance that breeding may result in a YaoLing randomly becoming Elite.
  
  
• Rare Colour

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  These YaoLing have a different palette and are uncommon. Breeding YaoLing has a 1% chance of them becoming a Rare Colour. All Wild YaoLing which are Rare Coloured have at least 3 growth potentials in every stat.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Shiny YaoLing

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  Shiny YaoLing are the rarest of the three alternate types and can easily be identified from the unit list thanks to their rainbow-coloured border.
  
  Shiny YaoLing have a sparkling star effect around them, at least two stats which are maxed out in growth potential (♦♦♦♦♦♦) and come with one random SE Talent - a talent which is a direct upgrade of another in terms of power and has a rainbow border which shifts its colour over time.
  
  In general (as of now), SE Talents are not very good and are rather weak. However, the growth potential guarantee is significant.
  
  
  
  Here is a picture of how all the borders look.
  
  
  Attributes

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  There are six attributes in the game and they all have growth potentials, shown to the right of them. Mousing over each potential will let you see the numbers for how much they will grow with every level.
  
  Note that there appears to be rounding for some of these stats, especially ones with low growth rate.
  
  There is no need to go through each attribute, since the descriptions state exactly what they do and abilities usually tell you exactly how they scale. The current maximum level for YaoLing is 70, but the developers have announced their intent to increase this cap to 99 in the future.
  
  With this in mind, note that it's not always necessary to be obsessive and go for 6 stars in all stats.
  
  Generally, HP, ATK and MAG will always be good to maximise, but some YaoLing have such abysmal growth in a specific stat that there is no practical difference between 1 diamond or 6.
  
  Take note that DEF often has very poor growth. Many back-line YaoLing such as your starter healer, Lume, will find it difficult to get significant amounts of DEF, even at level 70.
  
  (DEF is not directly subtractive to ATK, it reduces non-fixed damage by a percentage, calculated by (1-1/(1+2%DEF)
  
  
  Additionally, WP is of limited use to units which are fragile because they will usually die before it makes any difference. 30 WP would mean the unit will gain 30 mana from taking damage as it goes from 100% to 0% HP. (The normal rate of mana gain is 10 mana per second)
  
  Finally, there is one hidden statistic, called LUCK. LUCK primarily affects the activation probability of abilities and talents. 50 Luck appears to correspond with a talent triggering approximately 50% more often.

There are nine different elements in YaoLing: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Wind, Poison, Darkness, Pierce, Concussion and Slash.

Whenever a YaoLing does non-true damage with an attack or ability, they will inflict colour-coded damage of that type and cause a small amount of elemental buildup on the target. This bar is not entirely accurate in real time, but when it fills up, an elemental debuff will be inflicted on the target.

Buildup seems to naturally decay in real time and can be prevented entirely by Talents such as Consecrated. Unlike Monster Hunter, the cap does not seem to increase each time a debuff is inflicted.


This is the list of the various damage types and the ailments directly related to them:

Ailment List

This is mostly relevant to some specific talents.

12/9/2024 Updated effects of Ailments (translated directly from the Chinese notes):

• Bleeding: Take extra Pierce damage equal to a percentage of lost HP (10% from Normal attacks and 25% from abilities) for 7 seconds. (Originally just 5% of lost HP)
  
• Burn: Every second, take 26 points of Defence-ignoring Fire damage. Scales by 4 damage per level (Originally 80-1580 damage, now 130-2130 damage)
  
• Frozen: ASPD -50%, MOV -70% (Originally ATK/MOV -50%)
  
• Poisoned: ATK/MAG - 30% for 8s (Originally -20% for 10s)
  
• Paralysis: Chance to become paralysed every second, also receiving 2-12% of current HP in Lightning damage. Lasts 8s. (Originally: Chance to become paralysed when attacking, stopping actions, Duration: 12 seconds)

Every YaoLing does a specific damage type with their auto-attacks, which may not necessarily be the same as their ability. You can view this damage type in the Party List or the YaoLing Scroll as shown:

This is a small map showing roughly where to find the 3 starter YaoLing and the 4 current story boss starters.

A large portion of the endgame will focus around Breeding YaoLing. I shall walk you through how I do it.

Because of UI Limitations, it is very difficult to breed efficiently as it is difficult to see at a glance if a YaoLing is an Alternate Colour or not. Fortunately, there are many things you can do to mitigate this.

I recommend only breeding 1 to 2 YaoLing families at once. This streamlines things a lot and declutters your YaoLing inventory, which is very difficult to organise once it gets cluttered. Working on 2 at once gives you the advantage of being able to alternate between the two when gathering ingredients.

Refer to the previous map for the unique YaoLing Locations. Starter YaoLing have 3 spawns, one of which is guaranteed to have an Elite. Boss YaoLing have only 1 spawn and no Elites, as far as I know, it is not possible to get an Elite Boss YaoLing.

You will need the following. Feel free to omit as many steps as you wish, but my current project is focused on breeding an alternate-coloured-shiny YaoLing. There are valid reasons why you may not want your YaoLing to be any of these, however, so leaving steps out saves a lot of time and Spirit Gems.

1. 1 Shiny YaoLing
   
2. 1 Alternate Colour YaoLing
   
3. 1 Elite YaoLing (optional)
   
4. As many useful Legendary Traits as you want.

You can use certain food to increase the rate of Shiny and Alternate-Coloured YaoLing, but this is not efficient for the Rare YaoLing, because the best method for those is the Save and Load tactic and Food Buffs are removed when you Load a Game.

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Go to where a Rare YaoLing is and bring a large stack of Tier 1 damage charms and capture charms.

• Save the game.
  
• Now hit the YaoLing with a damage charm (RMB) to start a battle.

When battle starts, press TAB. This shows you a list of all enemy units in battle.Check if there are any YaoLing with good traits you wish to capture and you can left click on any single one to tag it.

If there are no YaoLing you want and they are all trash, hit the Escape key and Space to Escape from the battle. Note this only works if you surprise the enemy, so always try to ambush them.


When you find a YaoLing you want, capture it, then Save the game.

• Now load the game you just saved (Esc > Load Game > Highlight > F) and repeat from Step 2 until you have all the components you want.

On average, I estimate it takes around perhaps a hundred tries to get a Shiny. Fortunately, you only really need one per breeding type.

Lastly, one of the most reliable ways of getting non-Boss and Starter Shinies is just to breed lots of eggs and use the Heart Stone gacha. Every time you delete an egg, you get heart crystals, and any eggs you pull from the Jade Tree's blessing is guaranteed to be a Shiny one. This saves you a lot of time rather than fiddling around with food, although it does not address the Elite or Alternate Colour problem.

Username @Dylan pointed out that unlike breeding, talents for these gacha YaoLing seem to be randomly generated when clicking on the Hatch button - hence if you don't like what you get, it is possible to save-scum their talents. If you can't tell them apart from your breeding projects, note that they will be marked as "Source: Wild" under the egg description.

Before we start the next part, I need to go over the importance of Egg names and how to read them.

Every Egg has a name, which can be divided in to 3 different parts:

1. Size
   
2. Talents
   
3. Element

Element just indicates the element type of the YaoLing, as such, it is mostly irrelevant for breeding.

Size is a determination of how many potentials the YaoLing has. YaoLing may have anywhere from 6 to 36 potential points. I estimate they are as follows (not confirmed):


The cost of hatching an egg increases dramatically the more potential points the YaoLing has, capping out at about 2200 for a Colossal egg.

The second part of the egg name. This determines the types of talents the YaoLing has. Since only Legendary Traits cannot be bought in endgame, we can just break this down into "Number of Legendaries as follows".


Note:

• Shiny indicates the presence of a Shiny SE Trait and overrides ALL other desciptions.
  
• The cost to hatch the edge will also increase accordingly, but less so than egg size.
  
• There is probably a name for having 4 Legendary traits, but I am not crazy enough to find out what that is.

In this section, I'll walk you through a worked example of breeding. My goal is to make a Colourful Shiny Tifur with the legendary Traits: Perfection and Elite Heritage.

Wild Tifurs do not come in Elite forms, so this makes things significantly easier.

Potentials greatly determine how expensive an egg is to hatch. However, talents are the biggest single contributing factor to how long an egg takes to hatch (potentials contribute only 6 min per perfect stat). There is a tradeoff as even 1 Legendary talent will result in the egg taking 27 minutes longer to hatch (before Breeding Hut reductions). Generally, it can be faster to breed Potentials before you breed in Talents, but since the Shiny inheritance rate from 1 parent is only 10%, it is difficult to breed in Talents to a Shiny YaoLing later.

As of the latest patch, breeding has been improved. It is still a good idea to rename breeding units, but now it's better to focus on Legendary talents they have as the parent names will appear on eggs.

Names are NOT unique, so don't worry about renaming a whole batch of YaoLing the same thing.


Here is my personal naming scheme, you can create your own as it is just a guideline:

<Type Letters> - E for Elite, S for Shiny, and C for Alternate Colour. I will call these ESC for short. No longer necessary as the UI was fixed.
<Name of YaoLing> - Keep this short. For use on eggs.
<YaoLing Type/Sex> - I use M for Yang and F for Yin because this is easier to type.
<Legendary Talents> - Useful when you are storing different Legendary talents to try out.

So in the example picture above, I would name the unit "STifurM".
You can now also add marks to your YaoLing, so you can conveniently label all your current breeding pairs with an egg mark .

Your goal here is to combine the legendary talents you want. These rules govern talent inheritance:

1. When you breed two YaoLing, ONE talent and ONE of the highest stat potentials are chosen at random from each parent to be passed down to the offspring.
   
2. Rarer Talents are prioritised for inheritance. Legendary talents will ALWAYS be chosen over Elite, which will be chosen over Rare talents, for example.
   
3. Shiny Talents occupy a talent slot. Hence, the maximum Legendary talents on Shinies is 3 Legendaries (Dazzling).
   
4. Unlike other good Talents, Shiny Talents are randomised every time you breed YaoLing.
   
5. Once bred, Empty slots may be filled by random talents, including negative ones. Random talents may be Legendary, resulting in 3 Legendary talents. This creates a Dazzling egg.
   
6. This means Dazzling eggs are still incredibly rare and breeding one should not be counted on as the talent will be random. It is probably more sensible to use a precious Legendary Talent Jade if you need 3 or more Legendary Talents on a single unit.

We do Talent breeding first because Shiny overrides all other descriptors - there is no way to tell how many Legendary Talents we have once we start breeding Shinies. Doing this first lets us use Pristine/Dazzling to determine if an egg is worth hatching.

Colour does not have an effect on stat potentials for YaoLing breeding, so it is safe and a great idea to start mixing in Colour at this stage. My goal is to get a few CTifur(M/F) with both Legandaries. This shouldn't take that long.

For Elites and Rare Colours, there is a 50% chance of inheriting this from each parent, otherwise an egg will have a 1% chance to become Elite/Rare coloured.

For Shinies, the probability is 50% if both parents are Shiny. Otherwise, it is 10% if only one parent is Shiny. This means combining Elite/Colour and a non-EC-Shiny has a 1 in 20 chance.

• Until you combine Shiny/Colour/Elite, try to prioritise hatching the LOWEST Potential eggs as you can as this is faster as well as dramatically cheaper. Hatching Huge eggs is around half to 2/3 the cost of Giant eggs.
  
• If Soul Crystals are scarce, delete all non-Shiny eggs which are too expensive or only Perfect. Only hatch Pristine or Dazzling eggs as this indicates successful inheritance of Legendary traits.

Step 2: Breeding in Types

This is the time you start breeding in Shinies. Hopefully, you have a bunch of cheap Coloured 2-Trait Legendaries. Breed them with your Shinies and hatch the shiny eggs.

• Don't hatch every single egg, you'll just delete all your soul crystals. ONLY hatch Shiny eggs.
  
• Use the Inn to delete all unwanted units and sell all unwanted eggs. Only keep Shiny Coloured (SC) units.

At this point, I do not need to name every single unit as I only keep SC units - I am going to start the most expensive part, which is breeding in potentials.

Fortunately, a recent patch has made obtaining Colossal eggs a lot easier.

• Prioritise eggs with 6 stars in the potentials you want as 2 of the highest potentials are inherited, one from each parent.
  
• At this point, I just rename them Tifur<sex><number> now, e.g.: "TifurM33". Breeding higher potential units increases the probability of the offspring having higher potentials.

A perfect unit isn't actually necessary. You should isolate the useful stats.

Description

ATK is important on all units, even healers as it affects status buildup.

DEF can be dumped on units with low DEF growth and backliners. However, it is always good.

HP has one of the more observable variances, but at a level cap of 70, this only works out to around 140-ish HP for every diamond at the level cap.

WP is only really good for your frontline and has poor growth variance. It can be dumped.

MAG determines how your abilities scale, and is one of the most important stats.

Crit will usually make a small difference of about 3-4% at level 70, it's worth maxing because the difference in growth is usually between 0.2% to 0.4% per level.

More importantly, if you are breeding a Shiny, the Talent will randomise itself. Getting a good talent is completely RNG, so cross your fingers and pray.

I'll gradually switch up my production line until I have 3 sets of SC x SC breeding pairs and use the remaining 3 slots to start my next breeding project. My final production line will look like this:


At this point, I just follow the guidelines:

• Only Hatch Shiny and Dazzling Eggs and delete all else.
  
• Delete all eggs which take fewer than ~1600 Soul Crystals to hatch. These eggs won't have good potentials and aren't worth the time and crystals to hatch.

This is about the right time to start a new breeding project or level up some new units while farming Soul Crystals on a boss rush. Getting a good SC YaoLing is just a matter of time at this point. Temper your expectations.


At this point, I stop production and save 4-6 of my breeding pairs, deleting all the rest so that my YaoLing list stays organised. This is when it is a good idea to mark all your breeding pairs with an Egg mark so you can resume where you left off if you ever want to revisit the YaoLing again, for example if you want to breed in a new Legendary Talent.

YaoLing all have Craft skills, which may be viewed under their Crafting tab.


There is very large variance to these crafts. All these three Level 1 Bunbows have dramatically different Crafting skills, for example.

Each YaoLing species has a predisposition towards certain Crafts, which can be approximately measured by a rating of 1 to 10 on the YaoLing scroll.


I originally had a huge Excel Sheet with all of this information, but I realised it was kind of useless because most people would just be interested in the top YaoLing for each Craft.

Training has no 10/10 YaoLing, the best YaoLing for it is the Tifur family at 9/10, and it doesn't appear to be important since it's just experience, so I am leaving it out.

• Due to this variance, 9s may actually have higher values than 10s.
  
• Demons usually have much worse Crafting stats, so check first before you try the Demon form.

YaoLing may learn up to four talents, which is the main way you customise them.

Talents are divided into 5 rarities:

• Common - Trash talents, which are usually negative. Delete these with Amber Teardrops.
  
• Rare (R) - Blue Commonplace talents, can be bought at the Village Shop every game day for 150 Soul Crystals.
  
• Epic (E) - Purple talents, can be bought at the Village Shop every game day for 500 Soul Crystals.
  
• Legendary (L) - Yellow talents. Soul Jades can only be found in chests at the moment and are limited. Easily breedable, up to a soft limit of 2, after which it gets dramatically more difficult.
  
• Shiny (S) - Upgraded versions of other talents, generated randomly on Shiny YaoLing.

Some talents have some hidden restrictions to them:

• (Ranged) - only learnable by YaoLing with a Ranged default attack.
  
• (Melee) - only learnable by YaoLing with a Melee default attack.
  
• (Summon) - only learnable by YaoLing with an ability which summons units.

Since some talents do multiple things, some of them will re-appear over multiple categories for your convenience.

Some Game Mechanics notes:

• Reflect: Prevents a percentage of damage and returns it to attackers. A very strong defensive effect.
  
• Weight: Determines how severely a YaoLing is affected by physics, such as knock up and knockback.
  
• Strength: Each YaoLing has a Strength category, which is used in knockback calculations.
  
• Interrupt: Note that some abilities and status are capable of interrupting any action taken by enemies. The status Paralysis seems to inflict a certain rate of random interruption.
  
• Dispel: Only buffs marked with [Buff] in the Status Window appear to be dispellable. It's useful to keep a dispeller (ability or talent) around just for some very annoying enemies.

These are all negative talents and you want to delete them most of the time.

These are Legendary talents (Yellow). Legendary Skill Jades are limited in number right now, so you probably want to focus on these when breeding. They are often the strongest types of talents, stronger than the majority of Shiny talents.

Shiny Talents are upgraded versions of lower-level talents. Now I'll be candid with you - many of these are weak and not worth using. Overpower SE is downright suicidal, for example. Generally speaking, the usable ones are Investment SE for ability spammers, Mind over Matter SE, and Starfall SE. Grand Entrance SE is good for tanks/assassins. The rest are a bit situational, although Charity SE has one special mention for being crucial for a degenerate loadout (to be covered later).

Since you're a smart reader, you're probably wondering: If these skills are kind of mediocre, why breed shinies? Well, Shinies still have 2 guaranteed 6 potential stats, which helps increase the probability that your offspring will have great stats. Also, they are pretty.

This is an extra general questions section.

A: Commissions at the Tavern are currently the only real way of getting significant amounts of Soul Crystals. Hunting Demons in the meanwhile can provide you with a small amount and is a good way to level up units at the endgame when you unlock a certain boss rush area.

A: I'm compiling (very slowly) a YaoLing scroll which is only 56/297 units in. You shouldn't expect it any time soon. I can give general tips on YaoLing if needed, but I think one of the fun parts about this game is that almost every single YaoLing I've seen has a purpose and can be made to work. You should play around and find what works for you, because that is part of the fun of the game.

Just as an example, Bunbow, which is one of the first YaoLing you ever meet, can be potentially S-tier material with a little bit of breeding.

A: I'll share a degenerate strategy I use to farm all demons by using one of the most broken units in the game.


(Space for spoilers)









Behold the pinnacle of Mechanics abuse. Make two of these or back them up with a decent Wind debuffer and you'll never have to worry about Demons getting a skill off again because they simply won't have any mana.

Wu Kong is an absolutely degenerate unit to use because his summons sharing his Talents means that they also trigger "On Death" skills, meaning you can combine them with Charity to feed your entire team with % mana, letting you spam skills which shouldn't be spammable and have an increasing cumulative Mana cost to stop you from doing that normally. Charity also feeds himself with Mana, so you'll always have summons up.

Incidentally, his summons also trigger "At Battle Start" skills.

He generates an absurd amount of hits, so he is a great candidate for Irritation and Drain, while building a crazy amount of Stun on the boss. There's probably about a hundred different builds with Wu Kong alone.