Merge Dragons! seems incredibly simple to play, especially on BlueStacks. Up to a point, it actually is. There’s just something utterly relaxing in plopping flowers and dragons together to make prettier, more powerful things. If you’re serious about growing your base, though, things are about to get tougher.

Of course, you can use diamonds to speed pretty much everything up. However, as an F2P player, you have to carefully plan out your base and dragon operations to make the most of your resources and time. Whoever said you can’t do strategy with pretty flowers?

Manage Your Dragons Properly

The first time you pop a dragon from 3 or 5 eggs, it starts busying about the base gathering or harvesting resources. Pretty sweet. Soon enough, though, the dragon gets tired and needs to sleep, which is why it goes AFK for about 20 minutes, depending on your dragon home type.

Although base building seems pretty straightforward, there are actually a few things you can do to optimize your growth.

Dragon Power vs. Dragon Stamina

First, know your dragons. There are a few dozen breeds of dragons in the game and each can only be merged within the same breed. At the same time, each breed can be upgraded upwards of 10 times, which basically means you’ll need hundreds of puny level 1 whelps to get one maxed out dragon.

Not all breeds are made the same. Apart from the fact that they look different, their stats can also change. Stats? What? Dragons have stats? Yes, they do – two, to be precise. These are Dragon Power and Base Stamina. The first adds up to your total Dragon Power and allows you to unlock new regions inside your base, while the second lets you know how many actions a particular dragon will be able to perform before it goes back to sleep.

Dragon Power is important, but if you have to prioritize between dragons, we recommend higher Base Stamina. It’s far more useful than its counterpart stat.

Controlling Your Dragons Manually

When a dragon first hatches, it randomly chooses a task that it can perform in your base. The same goes for when it wakes up, provided that you are online. Note that dragons do not carry out tasks while you are not logged into the game. They just wake up, linger about, and scatter looking guiltily as soon as you decide to visit your base.

But letting dragons do what they want is not necessarily the best strategy. In fact, it really isn’t. Here’s an example. Say you have a Lvl. 8 life tree sprout and a Lvl. 3 blue life flower next to it. This will happen frequently as you try to create more high-level plants. Instead of looting the tree for a juicy life orb, the dumb little dumpling of a dragon might loot the flower for a life essence, instead.

These two actions will consume the same amount of stamina, but the resulting resource will be way worse in the second case scenario. To avoid this, manually place your dragons on top of the resources you want them to harvest or double-click the latter when the dragon is up and about. This brings us to the next point.

Waking Up and Timing Your Dragons

If you have a decent number of dragons, as soon as you log in and they all scatter around to make their poor resource harvesting choices, you might be slightly overwhelmed in the attempt to control them. This is more or less unavoidable for their first excursion, but when you have more time to spend in-game, it’s a good idea to make them go to sleep at different time intervals.

Play Merge Dragons! on BlueStacks

This way, they’ll only wake up 2 or 3 at a time and you’ll have a better grasp on how they use their stamina. As you’ve probably already noticed, space is a rare commodity in this game, so the more you can prioritize the resources you have lying around, the better.

Keep a Neat Base

The home base in Merge Dragons! might seem large to begin with, but this changes less than 1 minute and one wave of floating life flower seeds later. Of course, you need to catch these flying seeds to get life flowers, the base unit for your advanced plants.

However, just a few minutes in, there’s no room left for even one leaf. Literally. That’s why organizing is super important.

Turn Off Auto-Chains

One very annoying consequence of having to deal with a crowded base is that when you merge a resource together, say, a flower, the resulting plant can automatically re-merge with surrounding plants of the same level – but in threes. As you already know, you only want to merge in fives, so this can be highly detrimental.

To stop it from happening, go to the main screen and open the Settings menu. Scroll down until you find the “Allow Chain Reactions” option and turn it off – for good!

Let Things Grow on Their Own

Merge Dragons! might be a pretty game, but as my highest level in-game mushroom is my witness, it is not your friend. Every step of the way, it tries to trick you into making choices that are overall detrimental to your gameplay and the faster growth of your base.

Here’s one notable example. The game tells you to merge pretty much everything – from seeds to dragons, chests, flowers, and more. But in the case of some resources, it’s more profitable to let them grow on their own. This is the case, for example, with life flower seeds, fruit tree seeds, dragon tree seeds, seeds of the prism flower, well… you get the idea.

You can merge 5 of these seeds into 2 saplings or you can let them grow on their own into 5. The second option is obviously better, especially since the growth doesn’t take too long to happen. But guess what the game tutorial will incessantly tell you to do, instead?

Don’t Sell Everything that Looks Dead

You can sell things in your base for magical coins and, since you’re almost always pressed for space, you’ll be tempted to do this with dead things. That’s fine, to a certain extent.

For instance, when you discover old, hallow, or undead trees as you expand the base, your first instinct might be to sell them for room. Don’t, though. These trees can be harvested for wood and, as we show in our guide to resources in Merge Dragons!, this is the only way to get a mushroom production started.

Leave Room for Growth

Some plants, such as the shrubs or fruit trees, can randomly spawn resources in adjacent tiles. This is great and super useful, but unfortunately, it doesn’t happen if there are no free tiles nearby.

It can be slightly irritating, but especially when you’re waiting on a particular item – like a life flower, for example – you have to make sure the fruit tree has enough space to generate it. When possible, try to organize your trees in lanes with plenty of free space in between.

Didn’t think there was so much involved in growing your base in this game, did you? To be honest, neither did we, to begin with. Now, we’re hooked, as well as determined to prove that one can create a gorgeous garden without spending any real currency. Speaking of which, why not check out our guide to getting rich up next? It’s bound to come in-handy for both premium and F2P players.

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