Farming premium currency in mobile games can sometimes be an artform, and for Merge Dragons this is no different. What’s more, considering that you’ll be needing as many Dragon Gems as possible once you reach the endgame, this is definitely one of those artforms that you’ll want to become very intimate with.

If you’ve ever wondered how to farm Dragon Gems in Merge Dragons, then this guide is for you. In the following paragraphs, we’ll be exploring how to obtain and farm Dragon Stars in order to tap them for gems, as well as how to optimize your usage of said stars in order to get the most out of them.

Farming Dragon Gems in Merge Dragons

Though you always have the shop available for perusing and purchasing gems directly, we’re assuming you’re reading this guide as someone who doesn’t want to spend money on Dragon Gems. Luckily, there is one main method of farming this currency, though it will take a bit of know-how, time, and patience. And while the latter two are completely up to you, this guide is here to teach you the former, so that you can start farming Dragon Gems in Merge Dragons.

In a nutshell, the best way to farm Dragon Gems in this game is by tapping Dragon Stars, special items that are quite hard to obtain, and that give you a number of gems every time you tap them. Additionally, the number of times you can tap each star is completely randomized, remaining within the range of 1-3 times. Moreover, just like with any other item in this game, these Dragon Stars can be merged into Magnificent Dragon Stars, which can be tapped 7-11 times, giving the most amount of Dragon Gems when used optimally.

Obtaining Dragon Stars

Of course, before we talk about actually farming gems, we need to discuss how to obtain Dragon Stars, the raw material for our entire farming operation. 

Sadly, there isn’t much to say here, except that they appear randomly in some levels. Whenever you find any of these stars during your regular gameplay, you can simply leave them on the ground, untouched, and they will automatically get delivered to your Camp when you finish the level, where they will remain in their bubbles until you manually release them.

There are many stages that are famous for being popular Dragon Star farming hotspots, especially due to how fast they are to complete, or because their completion rewards are a nice bonus on top of the Dragon Stars that you might get from playing them. Some of these stages include the following:

• Boneyard Isles
• Cliff Grove
• Craven Crypt 3
• Craven Crypt 10
• Drakeshire 9
• Dread Marsh 3
• Fear Isle 1
• Fear Isle 4
• Fjord 7
• Fjord 20

Remember that you can play Merge Dragons on PC with BlueStacks to create macros with which you can automate the completion of these levels, and effectively automate the entire grinding process, with the press of a button. Check out our PC setup guide for Merge Dragons to learn how to get started with downloading and installing this awesome merge game on your computer.

Optimizing Dragon Star Usage

Once you’ve gotten a few Dragon Stars, the trick to optimizing their usage is not simply by tapping them and receiving a few gems, but by actually merging them into Magnificent Dragon Stars, which have a much larger yield of gems. However, the true secret to get the most out of your stars is by doing a little bit of save-scumming, so that you can squeeze out a few extra gems by tapping them just enough times, as to avoid them turning back into yellow stars.

As we mentioned above, each Dragon Star can be tapped 1-3 times, with each tap yielding gems. The idea of optimizing your usage of these stars is to tap them just enough to get some gems, but not enough so that they turn into yellow stars. However, since the number of times a star can be tapped is randomized, we need to do a little bit of tampering with the game’s save system.

For the sake of convenience, we’ve broken down this process into a few easy steps:

1. Once you have at least 5 Dragon Stars in your Camp floating in their bubbles, go ahead and free them and place them near each other. Take care not to merge them yet!
2. Once your stars are all lined up, exit your Camp, and disable cloud saving via the game’s settings menu. 
3. With the cloud backup disabled, go back to your Camp and tap each Dragon Star, writing down the number of times it took each of these to get converted down to their yellow variants.
4. Once all stars are yellow, head back out to the settings menu, and re-enable cloud backups. Make sure you LOAD your cloud progress, and not overwrite your existing cloud save with the current game.
5. If done correctly, you should be back to the state before you tapped your Dragon Stars.
6. Go back to your Camp, and tap each Dragon Star exactly ONE tap less than what it took for them to turn yellow initially.
7. After all 5 stars are tapped, and still purple, merge them to create two Magnificent Dragon Stars.

Once you have your Magnificent Dragon Stars all ready, you can tap them up to 11 times each to get tons of gems. However, you can also repeat the steps above RIGHT BEFORE you’ve merged your 5 Dragon Stars. This will give you a cloud backup to go back to, in case the resulting Magnificent Dragon Star only yields 7 or 8 taps, instead of 10 or 11. 

Though it’s admittedly a bit of effort to do so, this is the best way to optimize your Dragon Star usage and farm Dragon Gems in Merge Dragons.