Rerolling:
It’s a goddamn trap. Currently, the game does not require you to have a crack team of superpowered characters (just having one with a bow or gun will get you through 100% of all content really). And rerolling is a long painful process, even if you macro it. But if you insist, I can offer these humble tips.
- Rolling a 5 star character isn’t the be all end all. Yomi for instance, is actually very very weak (weaker than some 3* units) when first summoned. To get the most out of her, you need to get a 2nd Yomi so you can unlock her 2nd Job. So keep in mind what jobs characters have initially.
- It is very unlikely you’ll get unlucky with a first summon. Even 3 star unit like Almira can be enough (with Dias and Logi) to do the story.
- When you you get a good unit or two, sit on them. Don’t try for “better”, rerolling is that painful here. Two good units could be Vanekiss and Lucian.
- The only time I suggest rerolling is on limit time collaboration banners, for the rare 5* units there (such as Noctis or Edward Elric (JP examples)). Otherwise, you’re just hurting yourself.
- From Lord Doubt:
“recommended reroll units: lofia, lucian, caris, zangetsu, yomi, vettel, rahu, magnus
consolation prizes: chihaya, lamia, almira, elisabeth, anastasia, raegan (only if x3)”
As is discussed many times, from the starting batch every character eventually becomes farmable by playing the game. That means powerhouses like Lofia, Lucian, Vettel and Caris are all within your reach ONE DAY. The F2P memo here is “one day”. There is no sharp spike like FFBE has, where one day your units were fine and the next they were trash. If you play diligently and just take your time, most good things will be yours eventually.
Pulling and You: 500 Gems goes a long way
So you’ve started AC and want to get some REAL UNITS, not LOGI and DIAS and the other basic ones you get for free. Well, it’s time to spend some GEMS on the featured banner. But which do you spend on? Worry not, for this is a simple flowchart.
See folks, a 4 year science degree let’s you make awesome flowcharts.
The 500 Gem pull (available once per banner) is a 10 unit summon. This does have some booby traps (like 4 star max units), but you can get some pretty good stuff, such as unit shards and new units. 500 gems might sound like a lot, but! Every day you can make 60 gems doing your dailies. Every banner is roughly 14 days apart. 14×60 = 840 gems! So you can easily make it by playing daily. (Not even including arena rewards).
But what do you do with the spare GEMS? Well, you can do a few things:
- Buy unit shards from the shops (bad investment).
- Buy items from the shops (bad investment).
- Save up to do a 2nd or 3rd step on the 3 step banner. (Actually a good investment).
- Save for future/Limited Time gacha’s. (Best investment).
- Do the 300 gem pulls on Weapon Gacha’s when they show up. (2nd best investment)
How do I acquire Gems?
Gems can be acquired from multiple sources. The main 3 free to play sources are:
- Daily Missions. (Such as do 5 Normal/Hard missions).
- Story Missions. (First time completing certain Normal Mode missions).
- Arena Rewards. (From your reward for your daily arena rank).
Now, from daily missions you can acquire 60 gems per day. Arena can add an extra 10-30 for a casual arena player. Story Missions come around every once in awhile and will add a variable amount to your total.
From here, you can resort to the dreaded cash money shop to buy gems. If you feel like being a whale, good luck have fun. It’ll cost you a few hundred USD to whale (9 step) every banner. For not-quite-free-to-play users, we have a few other options. One of these is the Alchemist Pact, which gives 100 gems+3 skip tickets/day for 30 days. Plus 300 initial gems. This is the preferable “minnow” tier of buying from Alchemist Code. But it is not required. As pointed out above, it is easy to earn enough gems in between banners to do the 500 gem unit pull and 300 gem armament pull each banner.
So When Do I Spend My Excess?
That is a good question, with no set in steel answer. In the future, there will be two more types of banners coming.
The first are Limited Time Collab banners (like Fate/Stay banner in JP) are banners where the units are only available to be summoned from those banners and the units cannot be summoned after they disappear.
The second are weapon banners. These let you pull rare weapons (armaments) that provide bonuses to your characters. Some of these gachas can also provide weapons for free limited time banner characters (such as Prinny or Prompto’s weapons). These weapons can be bought from shops for gems as well, but they are rather dear.
So, where does that leave us?
There are a few steps I think will help you spend your excess gems. Now do note, these steps assume that you always do a 300 gem Armament/Weapon gacha and a 500 gem Unit gacha pull on available banners. You are free to skip any step you wish as well;
1. Do a 1500/2500 gem pull for characters you like. Simply put, these games are most fun when you use characters you like. There is no point, in my opinion, in not pulling hard for the units you like. Even if your waifu is trash.
2. Do a 1500/2500 gem pull for Limited Time Collab units. While I do not suggest pulling for units you do not like (here’s look at you Brave Frontier Collab), Limited Time units are somewhat of a status symbol and are fun to parade in multiplayer. They also sometimes have interesting skill-sets or classes that will make future battles easier, so if you’re feeling on the fence about pulling it’s best to err on the side of pulling.
3. Do the 600/900 gem weapon pulls if you want to try for weapons for free limited time collab units. You could also spend gems in the shop to buy them, or go without. But if you want to use that character, I suggest pulling on the gacha first as you can get other rare items as well.
4. Save all other gems for future gacha’s. Do not refill energy/buy zeni if you are free to play (or even as a whale, really it is not a great investment).
Now, on top of this (especially as a F2P player), you should not be buying anything BUT limited time weapons from shops with gems. Do NOT be tempted to buy character shards or equipment with gems. It will always be a bad investment.
To summarize, Gems are the main currency in Alchemist Code. You can get them from multiple sources, such as daily quests, story quests, log in rewards and arena rewards. You can also buy them. As a F2P player these gems are best used for 500 gem gacha unit summons and 300 gem gacha armament/weapon summons. After that, gems are best saved for gachas with units you really like the look of, limited time collab gachas and future gachas. You should avoid using gems for buying items from the shops, minus weapons for limited time collab units such as Prinny’s swords.
Resources: A Guide To Juggling
In Alchemist Code, there are many resources. You have Energy, Rank Experience, Unit Experience, Gems, Zeni, Unit Shards, Coloured Shards, Rainbow Shards, Skill Points, Arena Coins, Multiplayer Coins, Alchemia Pots, Apples, Tickets (and a few more in the future). Daunting? Yes it is. But I will step you through every resource, it’s uses and the cost of using them. Do not worry, most of them are very simple in their usage.
Energy: The most basic of all resources, Energy is used to do missions. Every single player mission in Alchemist Code has an energy cost (from as low as 5 to as high as 40). Energy is pretty universal to gacha games. 1 Energy is restored every 5 minutes that you have less than full energy.
Your full energy is dictated by your rank, however you can go past that cap to a hard cap of 1000 energy. Energy can also be gained from Daily Missions, offsetting the costs of the doing the missions themselves. The energy gained in this manner is what allows you to go past your normal cap (so don’t worry about being full on energy, it happens).
Rank Experience: Rank Experience is experience you gain towards increasing your rank. Your rank decides how high your “max” energy is, as well as the maximum level your units can go to. You can farm small amounts of rank EXP from clearing normal/hard/event maps, however the greatest amount of rank EXP will come from daily missions and from story missions for the first clear.
Unit Experience: Unit Experience is the resource which units gain so they can improve levels, gaining more base stats such as Dex and Agi. Units can gain experience from being used in combat (including Arena). You can also feed your units apples to give them large amounts of experience at once.
Units cannot level past your unit (unless you fully upgrade a unit), meaning if you are rank 50 and you try to level your unit to level 51, the game won’t let you. The best source of unit experience is from “Apples”, a consumable you can farm from maps, from map missions and can buy with coins or zeni from shops.
Gems: Gems are the main currency of Alchemist Code, used to summon units via the rare summon gacha and armament gacha’s. Gems are covered in depth in another section.
Zeni: The in game currency, Zeni is farmed from missions, selling items and quest rewards. Zeni can also be farmed by farming Ingots, which have various levels and serve as a large source of Zeni. Zeni is used for multiple purposes, such as enhancing gear (along with alchemia pots or equipment), leveling abilities (along with skill points), buying items and the zeni gacha.
Ingots come primarily in Bronze/Silver/Gold varieties, each giving larger amounts of Zeni than the last.
Unit Shards: Unit Shards are the currency you use to “limit break” your units, raising their maximum level, combo stat and at certain points, allowing them to change jobs. Unit shards can be gained in multiple ways.
Free Gacha units (such as Yuan and Rin) can have their shards farmed from Hard Missions (not advisable) or drop from the Zeni Gacha. Rare Gacha units (such as Zahar and Almira), can have their shards drop from the Rare unit gacha pulls. They can also appear in the first Zeni Shop for Zeni (in minimal amounts) and from Soul Encounter ticket summons. In the future, rare gacha units will have shards added to hard mission rewards, allowing you to (slowly) farm them. Story characters (such as Dias and Logi), have character shards drop from hard missions or from story mission rewards. They will not drop from gachas.
Coloured Shards: Coloured Shards are a special type of unit shard, which can be used on any unit of the corresponding colour. For example, Lightning Shards can be used on Caris, Megitos and Vanekiss, but not on Logi or Dias. There are Coloured shards for each element, which can be gained (but not farmed) from Ex stages in the future.
Rainbow Shards: Gained primarily from the 9-step Gacha, Rainbow Shards can be used on any unit. These (along with Coloured Shards) are best used for maximizing limited time collab units.
Skill Points: Skill points are a resource used to level the various passive and active skills of characters. Skill points are used one at a time (along with increasing amounts of zeni) to level abilities one level at a time. You can hold a maximum of 20 skill points to be used at a time, and regenerate them slowly over time (like energy).
Arena Coins: Gained from daily Arena rank rewards, Arena coins can be used to purchase items from the Arena shop. A good use of these is buying Forbidden Apples for extra experience for your units.
Multiplayer Coins: Gained from clearing multiplayer missions, Multiplayer coins are used to purchase items from the Multiplayer Shop. You can buy unit evolution tokens, apples and items from this shop. Like with the Arena Shop, buying Apples is the better use of these coins at the start.
Alchemica Pots: Alchemica pots are a consumable with various levels that are used (along with Zeni) to upgrade equipment up to 5 stars. Alchemica Pots can be farmed from special Event/Multiplayer Maps, along with from some missions and Event maps. You can also use equipment in place of Alchemica pots for upgrading equipment, but Alchemica pots tend to give the most points when used for this. Alchemica Pots come in several levels (each giving more points than the last), primarily as Bronze/Silver/Gold pots.
Apples: Apples are another consumable with various levels that can be used to level your units. Apples come in different colours, each giving more experience than the previous. Forbidden Apples (the current farmable highest), give 7500 experience per apple currently. As mentioned above, Apples can be bought from various shops along with farmed from Missions for Normal/Hard maps and from their own special maps.
Tickets: Tickets are a resource that give you access to free summons of various kinds. Tickets can occasionally be farmed or bought, but most often come as present for logging in multiple days in a row, for clearing story/special event maps for the first time or from buying cash shop bundles. There are multiple types of tickets.
- Rare Summon Ticket: Gives you 1 free rare summon per ticket.
- 4* Rare Summon Ticket: Gives you 1 free rare summon that will give you a 4* unit/shards or higher per ticket.
- 10-Apple Ticket: Can be used to summon 10 Experience Apples of various rarities.
- 10-Equipment Ticket: Can be used to summon 10 equipment pieces. (Similar to the Zeni Gacha but without the soul shards.)
- 10-Rare Equipment Ticket: Summon 10 pieces of equipment (4-5* equipment, so no branches).
- Soul Encounter Ticket: Summon a small amount of Soul Shards for a Unit per ticket (usually 1-3 Soul Shards).
There are also Skip Tickets. What Skip Tickets let you do, is spend large amounts of energy to run a map multiple times at once, letting you skip the actual act of playing/auto’ing the map in return for a ticket. This lets you farm up equipment resources faster than normal. These can only be used on Normal/Hard story missions currently. Skip Tickets can also be bought with Zeni, earned from clearing Map missions for the first time, or from the Alchemist’s Pact bundle.
Investing Your Resources: Who/What/When/Where/Why?!?
So after learning about all those resources, now we to spend them. There are strategies to effectively spending all of them, but these are only ideas and are not hard and fast rules.
Unit Shards:
Spend them. The exception to this are the Zeni Gacha shards, which you can mostly sell immediately in order to make back some of the cost. Units such as Yuan and Rin are worth saving up and leveling (mostly Rin) because they have semi-useful jobs in the future, but there is no rush.
Coloured/Rainbow Shards:
Given the rarity and scarcity of these shards, I suggest saving them as much as possible. Basically, avoid ever using them on your 3 and 4 star units where you can. For instance, units such as Lofia, Zangetsu and Caris may be tantalizing now, but they can also be farmed from Hard Mode missions in the future meaning it’s a poor investment.
These shards are best used for very rare characters (such as limited collab 5 star units) or on characters you absolutely love (hey Setsuna). Spending them on the base set of characters or those released early on (who are not limited collab units) will be a short term gain, but you will be able to farm these shards later on in the games life.
Alchemica Pots:
Alchemica Pots are like apples, but for upgrading your gear. They give large amounts of “points” or “equipment exp” towards an equipped item gaining more stars (which gives it further stat bonuses). Alchemica Pots are best saved until you have “Job Mastered” a character and wish to use this class. An example of this would be not leveling up any of Logi “Soldier” classes equipment, because you will not use that class once you unlock Holy Knight.
Tickets:
Essentially, fire and forget. No real point in stockpiling summon tickets. The launch set of characters is a very strong one (especially the 4 star characters who can go to 5 star) and will remain strong long into the game’s current foreseeable lifetime. Skip Tickets are the exception, as they should be saved up for farming in the future.
Arena/Multiplayer Coins:
Personally, I am stockpiling both of these at the moment. However, they can be used for buying more Forbidden Apples. While I do not recommend spending your ARENA coins currently, Multiplayer coins are much easier to farm and if you feel the need to level more units quickly this is probably one of the better methods currently available to you.
Apples:
Now, this is gonna hurt but trust me on this one peeps.
DO NOT LEVEL EVERY UNIT!
Why? You do not have the resources. Your initial priority, is to level roughly 5 units to level 60 so you can do as much content as you can. This means: No leveling every unit the moment you pull them, no leveling several units of every element. No leveling units who are stuck at 3 or 4 stars max. At the start, you do not need this. The game gives you several decent characters who can go level 60 fairly easily (Dias and Logi) along with a lot of free summons early on to get you started. Now as you cap out units you can begin to spread out and start leveling other units. But your priority is getting that first team of 3 (Arena) then 4 (story) then 5 (events) to 60 so you can do all the content at the top level semi-competently.
This means for your apples, you’ll want to avoid overleveling units (so they lose total exp) as well as saving them from dailies and the like for when you can use them. The game gives you a lot at the start, don’t spurge them!
Zeni Gacha is the true end game:
Now, I know what you’re all thinking.
“The paid gacha is the best way to get ahead. Paying lots of my real life money to summon more units is how I get strong! Just like Brave Exvius, Mobius, Record Keeper, Fire Emblem Heroes, Fate/Grand Order”.
WRONG!
See in this game, the real pain is making Zeni to spend on the Zeni Gacha. You will need millions upon millions upon millions of Zeni to summon a single Sacred Lion Blade. What is a Sacred Lion Blade?
A Sacred Lion Blade is a rare item required by many jobs to gain job levels and is required in many high level item recipes. (Several classes require 2-3 Sacred Lion Blades per job level). You will need a lot of these.
These can be farmed (in pieces). You do require 60 pieces per blade, which can be bought from the 3rd shop for Zeni, farmed from some maps or….. rolled from the Zeni Gacha. See, along with this being the better cost/return ratio (as you can acquire other items such as Great Lion Shields, Great Lances and other rare items), it also is the least painful. Your energy is much better spent farming Zeni for the gacha (or tokens, or event maps etc) than it is farming for the actual pieces 1-2 at a time.
The problem here is, when starting out your zeni is much better spent buying the new player bundles/bundles of skip tickets and the like. And then on upgrading skills and units. And then on enhancing gear etc… So while the zeni gacha once daily for the quest is fine, don’t whale it too hard to start. This game is all about patience.
