You can find tips in this guide that will help you when you get stuck in the game and want to proceed smoothly.
Tips and Tricks
Early game there’s only semi-automation. You can’t fully idle at this stage.
Near endgame (10 – 20ish hours depending on your play style) you’ll unlock full automation tools.
When You Discovered Hell Gems
Mechanics elaboration
Hell gem spawns randomly in the cubes at certain depths. Cubes become a lot harder to mine when there’s a hell gem in it.
Hell gem injectors generates 32 hell gems while consuming 32 hell gems. The point here is that hell gem destabilizer boosts cube-mining by 625x but it requires a hell gem in it. So hell gem injectors are supposed to be paired with hell gem destabilizers to speed up mining process. They don’t actually consume hell gems though.
When You Discovered Chromalits
Mechanics elaboration
As you may have noticed, chromalits disappear themselves. However they don’t disappear for nothing but decay into lower tier resources. At the beginning of this stage you want to build some vessels to keep a small amount of chromalits for use, however later on chromalits decay becomes the main source of elmerine and qanetite.
After you built the research site, hollow stones start to spawn around it. The first hollow stone requires a LOT of clicks to collect. Afaik most people get stuck here without being told to keep clicking it.
The more hollow stones left on the ground, the more likely for time warp (you feel that the whole game is being slowed down) to happen.
How to progress at this stage?
Build vessels and accumulate more chromalits. Build research site on the strange rock when you unlock it. The strange rock locates at the north of your original position, from where long pressing W for ~10 secs will get you there.
Build irradiator whenever you unlock it. If you can’t afford it, feel safe to recycle some of your machines to get it. I’ll become your main source of chromalits for a long time.
Save your resources for the general decay reactor, which further boosts chromalits decay.
When You Discovered Celestial Foams
Mechanics elaboration
As you may have noticed, almost all your hell gems disappeared. Initially every 64 hell gems explode with a celestial foam (this is also called annihilation in the game) so you’re only able to afford anything below the cost of 64 hell gems.
How to progress at this stage?
Aim for the upgraded research site whenever unlocked. This makes every 512 instead of 64 hell gems explode at a time which basically increases your hell gem capacity to 512.
Keep collecting hollow stones until you can afford the annihilator. Then start collecting void from it.
Whenever you need more elmerine and qanetite, build more irradiators to benefit from chromalit decay. Converters won’t help much at this moment but consume a lot of charonite.
Build the void admiration chancel. Then build a waypoint and interact with it.
You will be teleported to a dark area. This area is a mimic of the previous area, where each machine you built is replaced by a symbol. Collect 1024 symbols to get back.
After that the void admiration chancel becomes the entry of the dark world.
End-game
How to progress at this stage?
Get the inverse chasm so you finally are able to fully automate your stuff. From now on long time of idling is expected. You’ll need to redesign your setup to make use of the conductors. Be careful that conductor’s cost scales really fast.
Get the gradient well. From here feel free to get rid of the channels if you’ve already got the 64k depth achievement, as you can get way more resources from gradient wells. Gradient wells can be placed with void resonators and industrial destabilizers. Note that hell gem destabilizers won’t work.
Keep collecting resources and building hell vaults and containment silos. Once you have 6 gradient wells, you’ll unlock the final machine, the pin hole. Pin hole requires 640k chromalits. Either building more (>= 15) containment silos or recycling some costly containment silos will get you to the ending very fast, but there’s an achievement for reaching the ending without doing so.
Achievements
I’ll mention some hard / confusing achievements. Rest is well self-explanatory.
Hellraiser
The 9th hell vault costs a LOT of hollow stones. You’re expected to idle for several hours.
Red-Blue Rock
This achievement requires you to reach the ending (build the pinhole that costs 640k chromalits) without recycling during the past 5 minutes and with no more than 14 containment silos.
You basically need to design a setup that fully makes use of preheaters to speed up irradiators. With higher chromalits generation speed you can hold more chromalits.
Each preheater boosts resource converters by up to 300%. Multiple preheaters around a single converter can stack.
Cookie clicker
Cookie locates at the west of your original position. However it’s ~10x farther than the strange rock. You’ll need to long press A for ~150 secs from your original position.
