This guide offers direction for new players who want guidance but prefer discovering many game systems themselves. You'll find general priorities rather than prescriptive "correct" choices, letting you experiment and learn what works for your playstyle. The guide deliberately skips some mechanics so you can encounter them naturally—check other resources once you reach tier 10-15 if you want deeper optimization.
Making suboptimal decisions early rarely causes permanent problems. As long as you sidestep the major pitfalls, you can undo most choices or they'll become irrelevant as you progress.
This guide takes an opinionated but hands-off approach: it steers you toward priorities without declaring what is definitively right or wrong. You're encouraged to try different approaches and form your own conclusions, except where actions create serious long-term obstacles. Certain game systems are intentionally not covered here—Perks, synchronizing Underworld and bots after toggling them, and specific upgrades that excel early but falter later are left for you to discover. Other guides document these topics thoroughly.
Beginner Objectives
Focus on these objectives in roughly this order of importance. **Rush Tiers**: Your highest tier unlocks better daily mission rewards. Regularly attempt to beat your personal best and reach wave 100 to advance to the next tier. Collect any milestones you earn, and look specifically for milestones above wave 100 that grant rewards beyond gems, stones, or coins.
**Complete Daily Missions**: Finish 35 missions weekly to claim all weekly reward boxes. Higher boxes contain better prizes.
**Collect Gems**: Gems spent on lab slots, cards, card slots, and modules are universally useful. During runs, gems orbit your tower and also appear every 10-15 minutes on your screen's left side.
**Farm Coins**: Use coins to upgrade your Workshop between runs and fund lab research. Workshop upgrades help you meet your goals—this guide won't specify which ones to prioritize. Keep coins in reserve so labs can begin their next research level immediately upon completion. Choose farming tiers based on your playstyle: tier 1 might suit overnight farming, while other tiers offer different reward distributions. Coins per hour matters, but consider all rewards. At tier 10-15, you can fully reset the Workshop for 150 gems (a respec), refunding all spent coins. Delay unlocking the wall until you've completed the Workshop Respec lab, have 150 spare gems, and have invested several levels into the three Workshop Discount labs. Then test the wall over dozens of runs before respecting if desired. Track your progress via lifetime coins and lifetime stones—listed as "Coins Earned" and "Stones Earned" in your stats menu (gear icon, main screen). These two currencies matter most.
**Research Lab Levels**: Activate all five labs and keep them researching. The clock icon on the left toggles auto-progression to the next level—leave it on unless you dislike seeing incomplete labs. Farm enough cells to maintain the 1.5x speed-up, eventually advancing to 2x. If you regret starting an expensive lab, coins refund when you begin something else. This guide avoids recommending specific labs due to some creating restrictions later, though the Range lab's slider now negates old warnings against it.
**Buy Cards**: Purchase cards until most are unlocked and leveled to your satisfaction. The final epic cards take time due to randomness; decide whether to chase them or spend gems elsewhere. Most cards can be swapped mid-run, but unlock additional card slots once swapping becomes tedious or you want to add a card without removing another. Final card levels offer real benefits but demand many gems.
**Equip Modules**: Modules grant a primary effect based on level plus rerollable substats. Spending upgrade shards on modules carries no penalty since they refund for free. Purchasing modules is costly, so prioritize five lab slots and useful card slots first.
**Participate in Events**: Complete event missions for medals. Medals carry over between events and purchase relics in the event store. Buy themes and songs once you have surplus medals—they grant coin bonuses without needing to be active. Avoid spending medals on gems, stones, or shards since bots need many medals to function well. Do purchase some stones with medals. Like Workshop coins, a bot respec refunds medals, so early purchases won't lock you in.
**Compete in Tournaments**: Tournaments offer bonus rewards on Tuesdays and Fridays. Save your first tournament ticket for a tourney mission or until the window closes.
**Join a Guild**: Guilds unlock weekly boxes through members' daily mission progress and operate their own store similar to events. Joining an active guild has no downside. Once guilds open, you may face acceptance delays—climbing the tournament ladder helps since guilds can see that metric.
Footguns
Most early choices in The Tower can be corrected with a bit of time. A footgun is different: it is a mistake so costly to recover from that avoiding it entirely is the only sensible option.
**Do not wreck your phone.** The Tower currently has no offline farming, so progress means leaving the game running for many hours a day, every day, and most phones simply are not built for that kind of sustained load on the screen and battery. There are workarounds. Android emulators let you play on a PC or Mac, and cloud saving moves your progress between devices smoothly. A spare old handset also handles the game surprisingly well — just watch the battery, because a swollen one is a genuine hazard.
**Do not buy an ultimate weapon outside Golden Tower, Black Hole, or Death Wave until you have a long-term UW plan.** New UWs are painfully expensive early on, so this guide gives firm direction: Golden Tower first, Black Hole second, Death Wave third. That ordering is widely followed, though not everyone agrees, and the remaining UWs involve more personal judgement — see the UW selection guide for those. Randomness matters here: with nine UWs in the pool, one of these three might not appear among your options until your seventh pick, which is the point where every leftover UW is guaranteed to show. If neither Golden Tower nor Black Hole is offered as your first UW, you have three routes: take Death Wave if it appears and hope the others come soon, consult a spoiler-heavy guide about future UW directions, or start over with the "New Account" button in Settings under Account. Be warned that restarting wipes your shop purchases, including the no-ads boost. Landing all three of GT, BH, and DW within your first five UWs still counts as a good outcome. Before buying anything outside those three, read an UW guide first — by the time you can afford the next one, upgrading what you already own is often the smarter move. You can safely preview your UW options without committing; the offers stay fixed until you actually pick one.
**Do not spend stones on UW cooldown.** There are exactly two exceptions: bringing Golden Tower and Death Wave down to 3m 20s so they line up with Black Hole's cooldown, and you may do this even before owning Black Hole. Golden Tower takes priority over Death Wave for this. Other UW upgrades are not footguns — Golden Tower bonus and duration, Black Hole size and duration, Death Wave damage and quantity, and any stat on UWs that have no cooldown are all fair game. Once both GT and DW are synced with BH, start building your own upgrade plan.
**Do not research bot cooldown in the lab.** This covers the four Event Shop bots: Golden Bot, Amplify Bot, Thunder Bot, and Flame Bot. Strong midgame strategies exist that use zero bot cooldown labs, and since these labs have no slider, you cannot throttle them once trained.
**Do not trade away current progress and fun for labs that take months or years to pay back.** Weigh the rising cost and shrinking returns of each extra level against what the early levels of a different lab would give you. A +0.1x gain, for instance, is a 10% improvement on a 1.0x multiplier but only 5% on 2.0x. Game Speed level 7 is not worth rushing — hold off until all five lab slots are unlocked and running at 1.5x with cells left over, because other labs will get you to that point faster. Labs Speed similarly stops being a good deal around level 25-30, with three exceptions: you have played for a month or two and know how far ahead you want to plan, you genuinely cannot tell which labs you need right now, or you want something cheap on coins because you will be away from the game for a while. This part is opinionated — pick the trade-offs that suit how you play.
**Do not overspend real money in the shop.** Buy nothing until your first UW is locked in and you are happy with it, since a bad pick may push you toward restarting. If you will play for more than a week or two, the Disable Ads boost earns its price for almost everyone. Beyond that, the Starter Pack and Epic Pack are the next best value thanks to their permanent coin bonuses, followed by Premium Passes. This guide takes no position on Event Boosts or Stone Packs — that call is entirely yours. Gem Packs sit at the bottom of the value list for most players, since the no-ads boost and other sources already supply gems.