This idle actually confuses me

[Paradoxical]

I like that there is a lot going on in this idle but I'm just completely unsure what to focus on. What is most important?

Increasing my number? Increasing my exp? Advancing in adventure?

I'm actually so confused I don't really know what I should be buying with my exp of which I have 300ish right now which is a ton for me...since I'm probably not using it properly. I don't know what's most effective. This also goes for AP shop(which I don't really have enough for anything anyway).

I guess I"m asking is this the kind of game I should be playing once a day, once a week or once a month?

If I just need to get my number up I can just shelf it for a month and that should make me alot stronger. If I need to gain more exp to get anywhere then I need to play it more often and rebirth when I'm stronger. I don't know what the point of adventure is actually, it honestly just feels like a side game but maybe you can get some strong bonuses from there that will make you stronger.

[Dimple]

You'll get a feel for it as you play but I'd recommend rebirths for number to climb bosses thus more XP, then spend XP primarily on Energy and magic. Try max speed for each (50), then work on cap and power as power determines how potent each point is when invested into something (bars are good but least priority as it's an idle game.. you don't need 3 trillion energy ready in 5 seconds)


If you're stuck adventure wise and feel like you've plateaued heavily, maybe throw a few XP into flat stats to progress.. could just be enough to get you over that hump.

You'll begin to learn that "Time since last rebirth" bonus really begins to taper off later into the game, so shelving it for months on end really isn't economically efficient and will get you no where anytime soon, so not recommend. I'd encourage being active for around 20-30 minutes just to get your performance to where you want it.

[Fel]

It becomes easier when you understand that the main focus of this game is advancing in adventure zones.
Bosses are a mean to unlock adventure zones (and to get exp early on), most features are unlocked by your progress in adventure mode and among the bonuses they five are adventure stats (power, toughness, drop chance...).

Of course there is more to it than that but it gives you enough direction.
(just don't get adventure stats with exp until much later, it is far from worth it until the end of normal difficulty and only becomes really needed about half-way into evil difficulty)

[muljostpho]

Number is temporary. You'll lose it when you start a challenge (in all of the challenges except one, anyway), meaning that you'll start over and have to climb up again. You do not magically jump back to the same number as before after completing a challenge either. You'll just be at whatever point you were able to reach while doing the challenge. However, various stats and bonuses that you'll collect throughout the game will make it possible to start fresh like that and climb back up much faster than before.

Challenges unlock after beating boss 58, by the way. In case you aren't up to that point yet.

Exp can be spent on things that are permanently kept through resets and challenges. Energy and magic stats are the fuel that keeps many of the game features running. The speed stat for either resource controls how quickly you generate that resource, up until it caps at speed 50 (which means that the bar fills 50 times per second). The bars stat for either resource controls how much of that stat is generated each time the bar completes. The power stat for either resource controls how effective the amount of it that you put to work in a feature will be. And the cap stat for either resource gives you more of it to work with. (Power and cap will be the main factors for most features. There's one feature, unlocked after the fourth titan, for which bars will be the more important stat.)

Don't worry about spending exp on adventure stats early on. Spending it on energy and magic stats will be more important most of the time. And once you get going in the adventure you may want to spend exp on some of the upgrades in the shop's "adventure special" page as well.

I didn't do this myself because I play pretty inefficiently, but the common advice very very early in the game (but after you've passed boss 58 and gotten reasonably powerful to start of course) is to speedrun boss kills for exp. That means rapid rebirths (I'm not sure how quick... something crazy like 15 minutes per run) where you blitz through as many bosses as you can as often as you can, preferably reaching a point of equilibrium where your number doesn't really rise or fall much with each run. This will be the "ideal" tactic for exp earnings before you start dealing with titans (which are special bosses that show up in between certain zones in the adventure).

What kind of progress you can make in the adventure mode will actually prove to be a primary measure of your overall progress in the game. The power and toughness on your gear has a side effect of providing a boost to your attack and defense for fighting the story bosses. Gear can also provide bonuses to energy/magic stats and bonuses that improve the performance of various game features. Also, there are a bunch of new features waiting to be unlocked throughout the game and unlocking those tends to be linked to defeating a titan and using a special item that it drops. Each new feature expands the scope of what you can do in the game, giving you new ways to get more powerful.

Gear is collected from adventure zones and duplicate copies can be merged into an item to level it up. Gear caps at level 100 and a lot of the sets of gear have extra bonuses that are unlocked when every item has reached max level. You can check which items are maxed in the "item list" accessed from the inventory screen. You'll also notice that gear tends to have stats: power, toughness, and various types of special bonuses. There are boost items that drop (different colored numbers) and these can be merged into an item to add points to those stats. A level 100 item can have stats up to twice as high as what the level 0 version of the item starts with.

When you can start dealing with titans the common advice for how to play the game allows for your runs to start getting a bit longer than the speedruns that were advised before. Because they take an hour after a run starts before they start spawning and the fastest they can respawn is once per hour.

The feature unlocked after the second titan, after you level up the things in it enough, will start to justify runs taking at least half a day at a time. After a certain completion of a certain challenge the limit on that feature is increased and it can become more of a once per day thing.

There's another feature later (unlocked after fourth titan) that will also justify day-long runs since the gains towards a permanent bonus are scaled to be most efficient at 24 hours.

There's also something you can eventually start collecting in the game, a special class of items that can level beyond 100 and that equip to their own separate menu accessed from the inventory instead of equipping with your normal gear, which I've heard actually get their most efficient gains towards their permanent bonuses if you do 30 minute runs. (I haven't tried to focus on runs that length for them myself. I tend to stick with the day-long runs most of the time.)

[Elenoe]

these two will give you the idea until you figure your own way

https://ngu-idle.fandom.com/wiki/New_Player_Guide_(Truth)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aaDJPQh7JiiRByCOqPvFxKg2234WPz9i6hHYl-iklOw/edit

[Paradoxical]

I didn't realize how important adventure was. I was largely ignoring it since you only seem to get drops when you are actively playing it. I'm focusing more on it now, making sure I don't let my inventory get clogged up and leveling items and powering them up.

That said, that makes it more of an idle you have to actually be actively playing then I thought this game was. Not sure how long I'll be able to maintain my interest since I was just messing around with it when I was watching youtube.

Thanks for the answers though, it does help.

[archmag]

Originally posted by Paradoxical:

I didn't realize how important adventure was. I was largely ignoring it since you only seem to get drops when you are actively playing it. I'm focusing more on it now, making sure I don't let my inventory get clogged up and leveling items and powering them up.

That said, that makes it more of an idle you have to actually be actively playing then I thought this game was. Not sure how long I'll be able to maintain my interest since I was just messing around with it when I was watching youtube.

There are some things later that let you automate adventure a lot. Most important ones are:
1. amount of slots so that you have to check the game less often before you reduce cooldowns on your auto-features (60 from exp shop, 24 from itopod perks, 166 from AP, 50 from no-equipment challenge),
2. basic (exp shop) and improved (AP shop) filters to reduce amount of loot that you get when you don't need it anymore,
3. automerge (it comes with 1 hour initial cooldown but which can be reduced later),
4. autoboost (need to complete a certain challenge to unlock it and it also comes with high initial cooldown),
5. filter boosts into infinity cube upgrade (AP shop),
6. inventory merge slots so that you don't have to have an item equipped to be able to auto-merge in it.

[Fel]

Even with all of that, it is definitely true that this is an idle game that is meant to stay open in the background during the day rather than one that you just open 2-3 times a day for a few minutes.

[bbfloyd]

One of the first instructions the game gives you (paraphrase, it has been a while) is if you are bored and just looking at numbers spin waiting for something to happen, its probably time to Rebirth.

Remember Dorie - Finding Nemo -> "Just keep swimming, just keep swimmimg..."
Just keep rebirthing. Just keep Rebirthing, rebirthing, rebirthing. ...

After that, just study it like any puzzle/exploration game, realizing the landscape is all numbers. All the WTF buttons actually have good explanations of what that section does and the basic math behind it.

The thing you are hoping to maximize is EXP earned per hour. EXP is hard to come by early, and you'll be reinvesting it primarily in rebirthing faster with more EXP earned per rebirth, by building your energy and magic power/caps/bars.

[Halfshell]

Originally posted by Duke of Limbs:

You'll begin to learn that "Time since last rebirth" bonus really begins to taper off later into the game, so shelving it for months on end really isn't economically efficient and will get you no where anytime soon, so not recommend. I'd encourage being active for around 20-30 minutes just to get your performance to where you want it.

This is true in the context of increasing NUMBER. But depending on goals, I've found delaying rebirth to be very useful. I stopped playing for a year but came back for Steam version and could suddenly auto kill tree. Made no real progress after playing active for a week. Left it off for a week (with decent number, energy allocated and in itopod) and now I can autokill Jake with my sweet 40k exp put into stats. Maybe certain goals require active play, like increasing number or challenges. But my week on, week off strat seems to be fairly good for the stage of the game I'm at.

[Fel]

Yes and no, you would most likely have advanced even faster by continuing to rebirth normally, growing fruits for seeds, using seeds to upgrade them, getting exp to spend on energy and magic to get more progress in NGU and other features, getting sets from various zones and their 1-time reward and so on.

At specific points you can definitely benefit from pushing your rebirth time a bit more in order to get more out of your temporary bonuses including advanced training but in the majority of cases you are better off continuing normally.

That being said, if you are satisfied with your current way of playing, go ahead with it, even if it is not optimal this is an idle game designed to be played for quite a few months, so even if you end up reaching the grind at the end game later than other players that started at the same time it isn't like there is a prize to win by rushing ahead.

[Halfshell]

I agree that some active play is required, but if I'm just waiting for exp or some other offline progress I may as well just let it run. Checking in every now and then seems like a good strat but then I would be too tempted to try to do challenges or other things that don't really give progress. I guess its a question of investing realtime (waiting) vs active time. At this point, I seem to mostly need to do adventure bosses to progress so I really just need exp and NUMBER. Anything else can be done more efficiently later once I need to do them anyway.

Edit: I mostly mean for new players to keep in mind that they can take breaks and still progress. Only 13% of players on Steam made it to where I am (known by achieves) so pacing yourself is more important than optimal play imho.

[Blood&Iron]

Being very active early on is more important to getting going, It's not till you get itopod open and auto kill at least the first two titans when you can make decent gains for early game and have it offline for extended periods. Getting the first gear sets maxed give some pretty good boosts for early game plus some ap. Probably want to grab the advanced item filter before your going to leave it open to farm sets, basic filter is ok but you wont have the inventory space to leave it running overnight without filling pretty fast.Just keep pushing your Adventure as much as you can, but don't neglect maxing items try to get those done as you go.May want to Get Yellow heart sometime before your ready to grind challenges if you do buy it stick it in daycare and leave it till it hits 100, at 100 you gain its bonuses without needed it equipped and its gives bonus to AP, challenges reward AP for each completion so you'll get the most out of there rewards with that ready to go , good luck

[1MantisPhoenix]

The game is a puzzle of prioritization, management, and accumulation for self-empowerment.

Keep your numbers Larger and larger. Boost initial energy pots, and energy POWER _ not speed. [It's both good, but power - will help the time machine + Magic power - in accordance with magic too. ]

eventually, after like a month, you get the ITPOD< - like Vegeta's Bulma Technology where he trained at a set gravity of his choice. You do the same, and start producing PP_ Points, to further background boost, attack & Defense, in adventure mode, stats in Magic power, regen and capacity.

It's Large, but you're in charge. When you leave the game, just make sure you've gone as far as you can go.

Even leave it a few days, you will only come back stronger and stronger.

Your first major goal is getting to 1 Million energy.