For an idle game, Crush Them All has quite a bit of intricacy that you need to consider in order to advance through its many, many stages at a consistent pace. This game starts off pretty quick by simply presenting you with its main plot (protip: it’s not important), and letting you loose in the world. While there is no extensive tutorial, the little information you do get is more than enough to teach you the basics of the game. Alternatively, we have also prepared a beginner’s guide for newcomers, which you can read on our blog.

While the game is quite easy to play (it IS an idle game, after all), you will still need to optimize certain processes if you want to advance without getting stuck on the same level for too long. This is because stages ramp up in difficulty quite easily and you’ll be quickly overwhelmed if you don’t stay on top of upgrades and other features of the game.

In this article, you will find some of the best tips and tricks for starting and progressing through the levels in Crush Them All. And considering that the game has well over 10,000 stages at the time of writing this guide, you’ll definitely need all the help you can get!

1. Rush to Stage 130 to Unlock the Ascend Feature

While you can definitely take your time when progressing through this game—and you’ll inevitably have to later on since the staging process is quite slow—the one thing you should rush to unlock is the ascension feature, which is available when you finish level 130. Through ascending, you can unlock special missions and game modes that reward you with tons of prisms, through which you can bestow permanent boosts to your characters, in exchange for leveling down your characters back to level 1.

For every time you ascend, you will be able to further improve your characters with permanent boosts so that they respawn stronger than ever and can easily progress through the game without your supervision. It’ll probably take a while before you reach your first ascension since stages are a bit difficult initially. However, you should ascend as soon as you get the option to, mostly because of the passive buffs to the Village and Shops, which increases their gold revenue by 25% and their level bonus by 5 per ascension cycle, respectively.

In this sense, while your characters will be stronger than ever through ascending, both the Shop and the Village will also benefit from every time you do so.

2. Invest Initially on Luka

There are just under 100 heroes available for summoning in Crush Them All, though you only really need to level the starter hero, Luka, initially—at least until you reach stage 600. This is because, every 100 levels, you need to fight against a tough boss enemy which is only vulnerable to a specific element. We’ll get into elemental matchups in a bit but, what’s important now is that all bosses until stage 600 are vulnerable to water, which is Luka’s element.

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For this reason, you’re better off sinking all your resources into Luka early on and then only invest in other characters afterward. For future reference, the elemental vulnerabilities for the stage bosses after stage 600 change every 100 levels, and goes in the following order:

Water > Earth > Fire > Light > Dark > Water

We’ll talk about the best heroes for every element in another guide. For now, however, focus on training your Luka!

3. Master the Elemental Matchups

In the same vein as the boss elemental vulnerabilities, the standard monsters are also weak to certain elements, which can give you an edge when fighting through the various stages in Crush Them All. Luckily, the element matchups are quite easy to grasp as fire is strong against earth; earth is strong against water, and water is strong against fire. Meanwhile, light and dark are outside this triangle and instead are both strong and weak against each other.

4. Use Those Hero Skills!

The general idea of Crush Them All is that you set up your farming squad so that you can progress through the game automatically without having to click on anything. However, when you want to push through the tougher stages, and your auto-battle isn’t quite cutting it, you can use your ultimate skills to give you that extra push you need.

These skills usually consist of strong AoE abilities that deal tons of damage, and that can destroy lesser enemies in seconds. At the very least, some of them can knock the enemy down and give you a few free hits. While you won’t rely entirely on these skills to play the game, they are immensely useful when you’re manually pushing through stages, so don’t forget to click on them often!

5. Upgrade Your Village

Your Village is the single most important feature for farming money in Crush Them All, and it does so through the various shops that you can unlock by paying gold. In this sense, you need gold to make gold but, the higher the level of your shops, the more they will produce for every cycle.

Your shops in this game produce money automatically, and you’ll need to click on them in order to claim your earnings after every cycle. However, once you upgrade them to level 50, you will be able to activate auto-farming, which will significantly improve your production since you can simply go AFK and watch as your savings grow.

As a general rule of thumb, you want to level each store to 50. However, it’s also important to save enough money so you can purchase the next store, which will, at level 1, usually give more money than its predecessor at level 50. Nevertheless, you should always want to improve your stores to level 50 in order to automate their production. Also, every 50 levels, you will earn a permanent 200% revenue bonus from your stores, so it’s worth it to upgrade your stores far beyond level 50 if you want to maximize your gains.

Your Village is arguably the most important feature for progressing in Crush Them All, so try to keep it upgraded at all times. And remember that, for every ascension cycle that you complete, your Village receives a permanent production bonus in every subsequent cycle.

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