Quick & Lucrative Grinding (Without Cheating)

Simple instructions for acquiring the best gear and the most gold & essence early on, as well as basic advice on getting through rough patches. This guide covers party selection, formation & loadout, where to find the gear you'll be using and which relics to focus your attention on for optimal growth rates. This guide assumes that you have some familiarity with the game already; it does not walk you through from the start of your very first run.

Getting Started

Hire the following:

• 2 Healers
  
• 3 Thieves

Arranged in that order, let them run on auto starting on level 200. When they're done, hopefully you'll have recovered at least one Vaan's Magnet. Continue running the same setup but make sure someone's holding the magnet/s. Do this a few times until you have six magnets.

Thieves give you an increased chance to find items and open all three chests after defeating a boss. Between these two effects, they're great for finding more and rarer equipment. Vaan's Magnet boosts item find chance AND gold income. So basically the thieves find you the magnet and other goodies, then the thieves use the magnet to find more magnets and even more & better goodies.

Essence Farming

This setup is good for more than just finding items, however. As promised, you'll quickly rake in the gold, too, which can be exchanged at the well for essence. You can bring in enough gold to purchase thousands of essence in just a few hours. Thousands of essence that, directed towards the HP and ATK relics, will make future runs longer and faster, boosting their income. I think you can see where this is going. In just two days time I was able to boost all of first selection of relics to level 50 (excepting the crit chance relic, which caps at 25). One of those relics increases gold income per party member. At level 50, that's a 250% bonus to gold income. And if you need (or just wish) to boost it even faster then you can exchange one or two magnets for essence tokens (found level 400-500) which boost your chance to find essence by 25% apiece. Paired with the gnome VIP upgrade, which you'll easily be able to max out with this method, you can bring in hundreds of essence directly per longer run in addition to millions of gold.

Optimal Party Loadout for the First 500 Levels

For optimal grinding, you eventually want to equip your party as follows:

• Healers - Midas Armor, Dragon Shield, Dhronen Sword, Anti-magic Bottle
  
• Thieves - Midas Armor, Gold Shield, Sacrosanct, Vaan's Magnet/Essence Token
  
• Pet - Jenny

Each item can be found starting at the following levels:

• Gold Shield - 71
  
• Anti-Magic Bottle - 91-100 (never seen it beyond here)
  
• Vaan's Magnet - 201
  
• Dhronen Sword - 301
  
• Midas Armor - 401
  
• Dragon Shield - 401
  
• Essence Token - 401
  
• Sacronsanct - 501

Most of these will be self-explanatory when you find them but the swords might raise questions. Simply put, it's perfect for debilitating the enemy and thereby keeping your party's strength up. Enemies that survive being hit are likely to be either set on fire (doing extra damage on their turn) or put to sleep (robbing them of their turn entirely). Furthermore, if you find yourself having to briefly take control to get the party's HP back up, you can use manually direct their attacks to prioritize simply putting enemies to sleep so that your healers can quickly get everyone back to full health. As it'll take a bit longer to find Sacrosancts, you'll initially want to go for 5 Dhronens. It'll make farming much easier in the short term and they'll be useful later on when you take on the level 700 boss (you're gonig to want that burn damage).

On an essence run from level 1 to level 600 I was able to bring in just over 12million gold and 1,000 essence with this setup (2 magnets, 4 tokens). Mind you that this was with higher level gold shields found in later levels of the dungeon and a level 50 Liquid Gold relic. Don't expect results quite on that level if you're going in with basic shields and few or no levels in Liquid Gold.

If, however, you find your party wiping out too quickly to make much of a profit then you can equip them with Skeletis armor instead. You'll lose a significant portion of the bonus to gold income but if you're wiping in only 20 or 30 levels then you're not making much anyway. Skeletis armor can be found between floors 201 and 300.

Optimal Party Loadout for Levels 500 to 1,000

• 1 Dark Mage
  
• 2 Healers
  
• 2 Thieves

The loadouts for the healers and thieves remain the same. The Dark Mage, however, is fairly different. The Dark Mage's purpose is to deal with the growing difficulty of enemy groups. She'll do high damage and potentially confuse or poison whole groups, greatly cutting down on the damage the party will sustain. Make sure she's first in the party line-up for full effect. You'll want to give her the weapon with the largest magic boosting effect (most likely a wand), a dragon shield, Mekh's Garb (again for the magic boosting effect), an anti-magic bottle & and a magic lamp.

• Mekh's Armor - 501-600
  
• Magic Lamp - Stolen from (and occasionally dropped by) genie mini-bosses.
  
• Pet - Dasha (for keeping your MP up in longer runs)

If you find yourself getting killed too fast, there's always the option of switching to Skeletis armor until you've beefed up the party's classes via relics. Alternatively, if you have the HP Regen relic and you've put at least 30 levels then you might try exchanging Skeletis armor for Power Suits (level 600-700). These lack the 25% damage reduction effect but come with a 30 HP regen effect (and a 10% magic boost).
Not enough to justify the exchange on its own but quite powerful when paired with the HP regen relic.

If you're getting hit hard by ambushes then you can swap out a thief for a knight to ensure that you always have the advantage. Be aware, however, that having a knight in the party also eliminates traps from branching paths and that the auto-battle system will always enter them as a result of this. Since the purpose of these setups is to grind enemies for drops, skipping six and seven levels at a time with warps is horribly counter-productive. If you're directly controlling the battles, however, then this obviously won't be a problem.

Optimal Party Loadout for Levels 1000-5000

This will be you new party:

• 2 Dark Mages
  
• 1 Knight
  
• 1 Healer
  
• 1 Thief

If you find your party wiping too quickly then exchange the healer for another Dark Mage (ahead of the Knight & Thief, obviously). The positioning of your knight is to allow him to cover for your Dark Mages in the event that there are any stragglers left after they've had their turns. He's not as powerful as they are but he's decent at it.

You're going to want to pump levels into the Magic Boosting relic and, to a lesser extent, the Dark Mage relic. You should aim for around level 300-400 in the magic-boosting relic. You generally want to put at least 50 levels into the class relics of any class you intend to use simply because you get a considerable boost for relatively little cost at this point, but it's especially important to buff your Dark Mages as they'll be carrying you until you unlock the final class. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the more important it becomes to avoid being hit entirely and Dark Mages (backed by a Knight) are the only reliable way to accomplish that.

Party equipment remains the same for now, but once you've got about 300 levels in the gold-boosting relic you'll want to stop using Midas plates and gold shields (assuming you still were) and start using the best Armor and Dragon Shields you can get. You'll be making enough gold that the decreased boost won't hurt too much, and paired with better survival rates you'll ultimately be breaking even at worst. Currently the best armor you'll have access to is Skeletis. Around level 1,100, however, with any luck you'll begin finding Dragon Armor, which is far superior.

Your goal at the moment is to level up your magic- and gold-boosting relics while grinding your way forward. More specifically, you're aming to reach level 4000. It's at this point that you begin regularly finding new (useful) equipment and start raking in massive amounts of gold.

You'll likely find yourself wiping around level 3500-4000. That's fine. Just keep starting new farming runs on level 2000 and, after each run, convert all your gold to essence, allocate it, sell your surplus items and repeat. After you've put enough essence into the magic-boosting relic, you'll find that your Dark Mages can breeze through even the largest enemy groups around that level with only one or two spells.

And yes--I said sell your surplus items after converting your gold to essence. Nothing's more annoying than realizing that you don't have enough gold left to warp back into the deeper dungeon (or even to rehire your party if you're really unlucky). This way you're sure to have plenty of gold left over.

Finally, near the end of this portion of your game you should save up your gold until you have enough to purchase the Magic Clock. Once you have it you'll never be able to understand how you ever lived without it.

Optimal Party Loadout for Beyond 5000

By now you should have a pretty firm grasp on how to grind and adapt. There's just one thing left, though, and it'll change yoru game pretty significantly.

Shifters.

You've probably wondered about that 5 Cap "Void Cola". It's associated class, the Shifter, is your new best-and-only friend. For a detailed run-down on how they work, see the section on Shifters further down. This section will assume that you've leveled all of their stones.

This is your party:

• 1 Shifter - Dark Mage/Healer
  
• 3 Shifters - Dark Mage/Thief
  
• 1 Shifter - Dark Mage/Knight

This is their desired loadout:

2 Rainbow Brand - Level 4000 (Lair of Despair)
3 Marvelous Claw - Level 800 (Lair of Despair)
Dragon Armor - Level 1100
Royal Shield - Level 700
2 Arcane Quartz - Level 20-100 (Lair of Despair)
3 Fuzzy Dice - Level 400-500 (Lair of Despair)

As you can see, you're going to want a bit of exceptionally rare equipment, and that means farming the Lair of Despair. For your first two Shifters, you want the equip the Rainbow Brands and Arcane Quartz. Both items give you magic crit chance and boosted magic crit damage, which you definitely want. The Marvelous Claws and Fuzzy Dice, meanwhile, boost gold and item find chance significantly. Dragon Armor provides the same 25% damage reduction that Skeletis did with the addition of a significant evasion chance boost (that varies with armor level, capping at 29%) and much more HP.

At this point, you'll also want to switch your pet back over to Jenny if you haven't already. The effects of pets grow largely insignificant as time passes. Jenny will at least provide you (at level 6) a 150% bonus to gold income. When you're working with a 1,500% bonus to magic damage, Dasha's effect would be completely wasted in most battles. Jenny will at least still boost your gold that little bit more.

Running this setup, you should have no trouble until at least level 8,000 so long as you've been pumping up your gold and magic damage relics. When you start to have trouble, switch one of your Claw/Dice shifters over a Brand/Quartz setup. That should easily carry you past 10,000.




Note that it's not strictly necessary to put the Healer stone shifter first if your other party members have protection from status effects. If they don't, however, then you're going to want the Shifter with the Healer Stone first in line to cure them of sleep or poison before their turn comes up. Even if the Shifter Healer doesn't have such protection, themself. They may get lucky & dodge an attack that disables the rest of the party.

The reason that the Knight stone shifter is in the fifth position is because they tend to use one of the Knight's two multi-target spells instead of the the Dark Mage's one multi-target spell. The Knight's multi-target spells are FAR weaker than the Dark Mage's. By placing the Knight stone shifter at the end, it's more likely that there will only be one enemy left on the occasion that they actually get a turn. Against a single target, they'll just default to using the Dark Mage's single-target attack.

Leveling your Relics

You might think that you'd want to pick & begin leveling the Liquid Gold relic as soon as possible. You'd be wrong. That relic is great once you've set yourself up properly but until then it's largely a waste (getting more gold per fight means little if you can't go more than a few fights at a time). No, first you'll want to level the expected two: HP and Attack. How you go about it is your choice but you'll want to get them both to at least level 25. Once you've done this, work on the crit chance relic. The more critical hits you're scoring, the fewer hit you're suffering.

Once you've achieved this, now you have some wiggle room. You can put some levels in Liquid Gold if you wish and it'll pay off. Alternatively, you could allocate your essence towards the MP relic. Not absolutely vital at the moment but it'll pay off later when you're running 500+ levels at a time. Or you could continue to build up HP and ATK. That's what I did.

----------

Eventually you'll have all of the initial selection and will have new relics offered to you. You'll want to choose Potable Potion, then Effervessence.

Potable Potion is a must-have regardless of intent as it boosts the party's magic power. With this first new relic you'll unlock the Healer's class relic and party-wide super heal (high HP restoration and debuff removal). Between that and the ability to quickly boost your Healers' stats, I don't think I need to explain to you why you want this as soon as you can get it.

Effervessence boosts your chance to find essence. It's not an extreme increase (1% per relic level) but it's still pretty good. Definitely helpful later on when you can put a lot of levels into it. Along with this relic, we get our second useful class relic: the Thief's. It gives them a 15% bonus to crit chance and damage. Given that thieves make up 3/5 of the party early on, improved crit chance & damage on top of the ability to beef up their stats is useful at any level.

On a final note, remember that it's much cheaper to boost a party's stats via a combination of the the primary and class relics.


And here we have a tip from another player.

Originally posted by Kittenboy12:

Since you have a whole section on leveling relics, you should probably have information on the Soda Stein here. If you put it in the hands of the first person to take their turn then it will have at least a 10% chance per dungeon level to increase a random relic's level, and when you set up a long lasting party then turn on auto combat you tend to get at least a few levels and in the long run it will make you a lot stronger overall, especially if you want all of your relics to be strong but prefer to focus on one or two with essence or tokens.

Unfortunately I never ran into this Soda Stein during the course of my time playing but you can probably find that information with a bit of googling.

About Merchants

Never waste your time and party slots on merchants. Their 20% bonus to gold is utterly useless as a single Vaan's magnet gives twice that, their stats are terrible and their abilities are only useful in very specific situations.

About Shifters

Now this is where it gets good, but only after you've put in a bit of work (well, a bit of time). Shifters, who show up once you've purchased Void Cola, have one item slot, no associated relic (that I've yet discovered)* and no inherent unique abilities. So what makes them so great? They can take on the abilities of two other classes. Simultaneoulsy.

You don't have this ability right off the bat, however, and that's where the time investment comes in. Shifters use special "stones" associated with the other classes that level up like pets do, with the additional requirement that a character of that class be present in the party (otherwise they don't gain experience). Fortunately you don't need to grind five examples of every stone in order to outfit a full party of Shifters. Fully level up one Knight stone, for instance, and every shifter in the party can take on all the abilities of a Knight.

Grinding Shifters isn't really difficult unless you make it so. Just put a shifter with that stone equipped into a party with the appropriate classes, go down to an earlier level of the dungeon (you can start all the way back at level 1 if you like) and let them go. Just remembe to put a Dark Mage or two at the head of the party and they'll burn through in no time. Shouldn't take more than a day or two for you to fully level every stone (depending on how long you leave the game running at a time). Note that having multiple Shifters with the same stone equipped will NOT cause the stone level any faster, however, so don't waste slots that way.



*Here we have a correction from a commenter:

Originally posted by Lisarnabbot:

so uh shifters have relics just gotta get further in the game and u know then the god guy tells u hey come in ma dimension and spend capps for relics and some buff for physical stuff

Holiday Items

The following is a list of useful holiday item. These items are only available at certain times of the year.

Christmas

Eggnog - level 100
+30% magic boost
+15% essence boost

Stocking - level 80
+20% item find chance

This Guide is Now Complete

In the event that I make further discoveries of significance, I will update it accordingly. For now, however, I believe that I've covered everything worth teaching beyond perhaps a few holiday items. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Contributor Tips

The following are tips given by other readers of this guide.

Originally posted by KingTiger99:

My liquid gold relic is lvl 50,000 at lvl 500K in LoD. Getting 1.5B gold per enemy... When you get them, use your caps to lvl up liquid gold relic. That is one of the best things you can do when you start earning caps.

Originally posted by Devarious {Ger}:

1. Could Charlie be a potent alternative to Dasha if I decide to give the Dark Mage 2 Magic damage Boosters instead of one and 1 Magic flask to another party member?
Worked for me, may work for others. Damage gets higher early on without costing much more than about one action every now and then

This can work early on. Eventually you'll want the additional casts provided by the anti-magic bottle as enemies get tougher and largely negate the pet's bonus but this can work for the first several hundred floors.

Originally posted by Kittenboy12:

Since you have a whole section on leveling relics, you should probably have information on the Soda Stein here. If you put it in the hands of the first person to take their turn then it will have at least a 10% chance per dungeon level to increase a random relic's level, and when you set up a long lasting party then turn on auto combat you tend to get at least a few levels and in the long run it will make you a lot stronger overall, especially if you want all of your relics to be strong but prefer to focus on one or two with essence or tokens.

[Psysop]

The problem with merchants is that their skills consume gold and they spam them, more than what their passive bonus can give in a run. So that is why they are useless in auto-mode runs for gold farming.

[Yogi]

I was surprised to find out the merchant plays no part in the meta game for gold acquisition. Perhaps if the developers had made his static gold-boosting skill a multiplier instead of a percentage increase, he'd be more relevant. I haven't played Soda Dungeon 2 yet, but maybe there's more balancing there.

[Stublybeaver]

Be aware that damage values can reset back to 0 if too high. I did this when running soda junkies up to floor 1 mill. Had to finish the run weaponless because that got me just low enough to hit again

[Psysop]

There is no paid DLC for this game. You just need to either pay a micro-transaction or pay with caps (in-game high level money) to unlock the bartender.

[Leeloo]

just wanted to point out the reason you never found the stein is because its a exclusive weapon that comes with the paid dlc of being able to hire the bartender, hiring him once adds the stein to your inventory

[Starweaver]

Just a side note on Vann's Magnet, there are tons of them dropping in the 800+ range. Just wish I could get the Anti-Magic item to drop. I only have one so far and since everyone will eventually be DM's, I'd like to get more. :D

[Stev]

Tip for anyone looking for "Vaan's Magnet". After HOURS of trying I was able to get TWO in the span of 10 mins by using the thief "Pilfer" ability on the round 270 + 280 boss. You don't get to make a much money, but if you're hunting for those items it's 100% the way to go.

[💖 Officer Hotpants 💖]

No idea, I'm afraid.

[Redeloper]

Does this game has any steam cards and does Steamy enable getting them or what? What is this entire random magic crit chance which I never trigger?

[Redeloper]

I just recently found out by experimentation that default essence drop chance is 10%, at least I think so. Level 90 essence increasing relic guarantees essence enemy spawns. It never failed me.