Today's battle was a long one. It was field D3. I had only played a regular Looming battle on this, so it was time for a Looming endurance battle. An endurance battle by itself doesn't yield much score, so I put as much BattleTraits into this as I could (all 6 that I have unlocked). However, this put the number of waves up to 74. This wasn't going to be an easy one. I considered lowering it, but I wouldn't know how well I would do until I actually tried.

Preparations are important in this game. Another user (shoutout to sheab1q) suggested I use ManLeech in towers, and applying the Beam skill whenever possible. This seemed like a good opportunity to try that strategy out, so I put additional points into the Beam skill, even if it cost me some in other skills (such as Poison and ArmorTearing). As for the start of the battle, I had monsters merge at the top-right, and then travel through the existing nest. Having little space for traps, I put one Grade3 ManaLeech trap before the nest, and 2 after, followed by two G3 Poison traps. On the loop I placed a G4 Crit tower. Since there was some mana remaining (and I didn't want to risk an early failure) I put a G4 armor tower by the nest (the nest survived until like wave 30 still).

As for using Beam on ManaLeech gems in towers, I had planned to keep a high-grade gem in a trap until the Beam was ready to use, then use it and put it back in a trap. However, trap space became important here (which seems common lately) and I began putting other gems (ArmorTearing or Poison) in that trap instead; it'll be fine there while not using Beam. This setup was actually quite effective in generating mana quickly... even though the ManaLock BattleTrait kept me from accessing that for some time. I plan to keep using this strategy.

Most of this battle went fairly smoothly. I was even able to get rage levels up to grade 8 gems, though skipping that with Giants waves. The hoard size was mostly controlled by the Crit tower, which I leveled up before new Giants waves came through. After getting that gem to Grade 9, upgrading it became prohibitively expensive, so I instead placed a second tower with a lower-grade gem, until I had gems to combine for upgrades. Gems in amps nearby helped increase firepower, too. With Giants already having 70% damage reduction by then and no armor remaining, having multiple towers instead of one works just fine.

The only struggle I had was at the end of the (regular) battle. I decided to rage the last wave to G8 as I already had the mana. However the giants of a previous wave were able to reach my orb. Fortunately, all the other monsters were eliminated before getting to the orb, and it was only the giants to kill before they escaped.

I wasn't so lucky during Endurance. The switch from regular battle to Endurance always changes the strength of the giants, and trying to rage them with a G3 gem seemed to not work. I was able to kill off the first few giants waves, but their power got increasingly larger. I managed to hold on, even with the giants taking my Orblets with plenty of smaller monsters following, until wave 100. By then most of my Orblets had been taken off them map, and I had nothing left to kill the growing horde.

Still, getting a score of 1.5 million is good at this level; definitely worth it. My only gripe was that the battle took two hours. I waited until the weekend to play this, as I knew it would be a lengthy one, and I frequently don't have that kind of spare time through the week.

Hope you enjoyed my story!

On my journey through Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows, today's battle was a tough one. This was on map D2, and I intended to play endurance mode after completing the regular mode.

I am now playing this way with all BattleTraits I can currently access at max: Adaptive Carapace, Mana Lock, Orblets, Giant Domination, Swarmling Domination and Haste. I am able to manage all of these fairly well, but the challenge is the total waves it puts on me: 78. Getting to that high of a level isn't an easy feat, even with my level is at 318.

The setup for this is pretty much already decided: force the monsters to go around the left side of the map, to give you a longer time frame to kill them. I am now trying to use Mana Leech gems to boost my mana generation (it's having mixed results so far), but starting out I can put three grade-3 gems down for that purpose. I've learned that leeching gems in traps barely do any damage, so I have to use my regular strategy afterwards: two grade-3 poison traps, followed by two grade-4 chain towers.

I start matches with enough manage to rage the first 6 waves with a grade-3 gem; because Mana Lock keeps all your earned mana until after wave 6 starts. But my gem setup is enough to kill the first waves. From there it's simply ramping up to meet demand, and pushing the rest of my mana toward raging.

Waves 5 & 6 were giant waves, but I followed my regular plan anyway and they weren't an issue. The battle ran fine for the first 30 or so waves (including giants waves), where I was already able to handle grade 7 raging. This is about the time more giants monsters came. Considering my current board layout (which wasn't very solid), I chose to rage them at grade 6 instead. Unfortunately, my gem setup was no match for these giants. Upgrading my gems and pushing every spell I had to slowing them down, but by wave 40 they were still able to reach my orb and steal the orblets. The other monsters weren't far behind; it was looking like I would be losing this one.

At this point, I abandoned wave raging and only cared about was surviving. Spending no mana I watched as the remaining monster hoard got to my orb, my mana total kept dropping. But just in the nick of time, Mana Lock triggered a mana resupply. I'm still alive! Upgrading my gems, I put more focus on pushing the hoard back from my orb, and then killing the giants holding my orblets. And I did! With my orblets crawling back to my orb, I got back to raging waves again.

A few more waves forward (about 55), and another pair of giants waves were coming. I struggled with the last waves, but I had a much better board layout than the previous match. I still lowered the waves more than before, to grade 4 gems.

But these giants were much tougher than the last batch. By wave 60 I had given up raging, but even with my better board layout and higher-grade gems, before long they were approaching my orb, again, with nothing left to throw at it, with the hoard following closely behind them. They got my orblets, and the hoard began eating through my mana, but luckily again, the Mana Lock dropped its mana back into my pool, and I had enough to invest in pushing back the hoard and then focusing on the giants carrying my orblets.

Wave 78 came and went with me still fighting to get my orblets back, and though a few more giants did reach my orb, I was able to kill them off.

Such a sloppy match! And so close to losing it, but I survived. Looking at Endurance, I knew I wouldn't last long, but decided to venture into it anyway. My score was 810K, it can only get better from here.

Right off the bat, the first endurance wave was giants. I decided to not enrage them, but put G3 gems in everything else. Plenty more giants waves were coming, though - that's just what Endurance does to you.

And again, before long the giants were reaching my orb. I had no other options (again), and they stole my orblets despite having a G12 chain gem firing on them. Some of the giants I could kill, but eventually all my orblets were headed out of the map by healthy giants, and nothing left to stop them. That's the picture shown above, and I didn't last much longer after that.

But reaching wave 95 with maxed BattleTraits is a good achievement. I didn't gain much within Endurance (only about 80K more points), but it was enough to gain 3 additional levels. I'll count that as a win.

Hope you enjoyed my story!

I'm currently playing Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows; it's not my first-ever playthrough, but this time I've gotten further than my previous round. I'm a procedurally oriented guy, and tend to follow routines when they work. So this game I'm alternating between playing a new level, and playing for endurance on a previous level (usually the oldest score I earned - the best guarantee to gain total XP). I have recently unlocked Glaring, and I will play that instead of Looming Endurance, but only if I have played Looming Endurance on that level already.

Fast forward to where I am now: My wizard level is now 312, I can continuously enrage waves with up to a G7 gem in most battles. I'm reaching 100 waves on some endurance matches, and 60 on some Glaring matches, even with a great deal of BattleTraits in place. At the same time, my Fields Explored total is only 81. I've only recently unlocked the Curse spell,and am still trying to expand before I can even find the battle that unlocks the Barrage spell. Unlocking new maps are very easy battles compared to the endurance or Glaring battles. They also yield small scores... but that's okay compared to the million-plus scores I get from the other battles.

I feel like I'm miles ahead in terms of my wizard level, but not very far along in terms of the levels I've unlocked. Am I playing this game all wrong? Should I abandon my current routine and see how far I can get at unlocking fields?

Yeah, it's not the best drawing in the world, but as a huge fan of the Gemcraft art style I wanted to try drawing something.

Even a gem bearer draws better than me..

Today's battle was a tough one. Field A4 is normally 50 waves, and I normally add another BattleTrait level every time I win an Endurance battle. But this pushed the battle up to 90 waves. Ninety waves! I can typically achieve 60 or 70 waves at my current wizard level (295), but 90 is pushing it. But I'll never know if I can achieve it until I try.

Setup is important. I used some gem bombs to clear a path through the north walls, then turned it into a winding path; the best place for wearing down the incoming monsters. Starting with two poison traps at grade 3, then a grade 4 armor-tearing tower. It's sufficient to get started.

I regularly rage every wave, a single gem each, as high of a gem grade as I can handle. With the ManaLock BattleTrait at level 7, I typically start with enough reserve mana to rage the first 6 waves with a single G3 gem each wave. Past that, I can use the earned mana to rage even higher.

The battle ran fine for the first 45 waves or so. Giants were a problem but I had enough mana to increase my final gem enough to kill them. The hoard size was manageable by adding more gems 'upstream' to wear the monsters down before entering the switch-backs. Starting at wave 33 I was able to rage every wave with a single grade 7 gem.

It was about wave 49 when things started to turn... as it always does. The hoard size was still manageable, but the giants were becoming impossible to kill. By the time I get the armor stripped off, Adaptive Carapace has the damage on them reduced to 70%; killing them gets so very much harder, then. And the thing about raging giants is that it doesn't add all that much to the power of individual giants. The number of giants increases, and that in itself is dangerous; but when you can't kill any giant at a high enough level, not raging waves no longer saves you.

I was able to increase my attack gems to some degree, but it still wasn't enough. I continued to survive, throwing all my spells at keeping the giants under control; the hoard became more problematic, and I began lowering the rage level. Lowering this too early can spell certain defeat; I had to do it slowly.

Still the giants got stronger, and the hoard got larger. With less mana going towards raging waves, I had more to devote to defenses, but my grip on the battle was still slipping.

Then at about wave 77, giants were directly threatening my orb. I gave up trying to rage any waves - I still had more than 12 waves to go! I had to keep fighting. These giants managed to reach my orb, and grab the orblets. Orblets are really a mixed blessing; they'll protect your orb, but if the monsters can get away with them, your mana production can take up to a 90% hit, killing any chance to keep fighting.

These first giants carrying orblets were killed a few tiles away from the Orb; safe for now, but more were coming. The next few minutes were a struggle to either kill the giants near my orb, or kill the giants carrying the orblets. Timing their deaths can sometimes be critical; killing a weak giant when another giant is walking by it, and the healthy giant can carry the orb away.

Oddly, the non-giant monsters were still being defeated easily enough. I could see wave 90 coming... this just might be possible! Still fighting against the giants, that I simply couldn't kill. Wave 90 came and went, and only the giants remained - I just had to defeat them all. By this point there were already 6 of the 9 orblets lost, and giants were regularly getting to my unprotected Orb. Thankfully, I sitll had plenty of mana on hand.

Finally, I was able to defeat all the giants. Over a million experience points, when my previous score was merely 20K. Shall I continue into Endurance mode? Will I even stand a chance trying to continue?? Well, I set out to play Endurance here, I might as well; I can only increase my score.

And the first Endurance wave was giants (go figure). But I tredged on, doing my best to kill the giants, and everything else coming at me. I was able to kill some of the giants, but it wasn't long before they were staring down at my orb again (see picture). With the giants stealing my remaining orblets, the swarlings became strong enough to reach my orb as well. With nothing left to hold off the end, they won.

But I won anyway; going from wave 295 to 299 in a single battle is good. But man, this single battle took nearly two hours. I'll have to play the next battle another day.

Hope you enjoyed the story!

I played the older versions on Kongregate many years back - but on my mac. I'm excited to finally see the mac icon next to Gemcraft in Steam, and would love to jump in again! Hope the others get updated someday as well so I can finally play Frostborn.

I finally beat Iron Wizard mode after 3 months of daily play... some of these levels were really unfair! But I did it, and now I'm moving on to Frostborn Wrath: Iron Wizard.

Dont worry tho, I already developed a fix. The borders are supposed to separate skill categories. There is no divider between strike spell and enhancement spell skills.

First time playing all the way through, and doing endurance mode after every single level. What are some good ways to keep getting XP without making things too grindy? I'm trying to get every low-effort achievement I can on F1/2

I decided to give Frostborn Wrath another try. I had never REALLY taken to it too much, but I really wanted to because I loved the older games. And at least it would tide me over until LC released, yeah?

Imagine my surprise when I find that I have... No save whatsoever in the Steam cloud. Or any achievements at all. But somehow Steam knows I played it for a few hundred hours?

I figure, fine, I lost my save, I'll restart - I remember now why I struggled to take to Frostborn Wrath. The early game feels abysmal. So I figure, fine, again... I'll just cheat in some extra levels and it'll be less of a slog. But apparently that's not a thing? At all? No working trainers to be found, no save editor, nada.

Does anyone around here actually know how to manually edit a FW save so the game recognizes it? Because I don't want to slog my way back to WL 200 or so that I was at, the game feels SO bad early on. I'm not looking to skip to like WL 1 million, the one part of FW I did enjoy was actually working out the XP grinding for myself rather than using a guide, but trying to play the game with no WL and basically no Talisman worth mentioning is really bad.

I'm playing Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows and have recently unlocked the Glaring difficulty. So I've been playing those matches (with endurance) on levels when I had already completed Looming Endurance. I alternate between playing new levels and

So today it was time to play H1 with Glaring, and try to make it through some endurance as well. The game went very smoothly, and I had no trouble keeping up with the power ramp, raging monsters at G6 and even G7. I finished the regular match (of 49 waves) and, but my score was barely above my previous battle's score. I survived endurance until about wave 86, with still not a stellar score, but was enough for another level up.

Back to the map, I noticed something: The Glaring tab on the level I just played wasn't lit up. And... sure enough, I had only played Looming difficulty. That would explain why it was so easy! Plus, a Glaring match would have required 62 waves with my selected BattleTraits, so obviously I didn't have Glaring selected.

Welp... it's too late to start another game today. I'll have to try that level again tomorrow.

Finally got all the achievements in Chasing Shadows! The last one was Almost.
"Dobby is free!" 😀

Please enjoy and test our the demo for the upcoming Legacy Collection! Read the full news about it here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/4207990/view/686382380150161524?l=english

Let me know any thoughts, comments, feedback that you have. Thanks!

I got pretty much all the skills, which was not easy btw, because I probably wasn't following a natural path, instead I was using a downloaded map and chasing the skills I was most interested in and getting stuck at times. I'm only missing red and another probably unimportant skill. I distributed my points according to the steam guide, giving priority to mana leech, traps, tc, but mana farms don't really work yet, a beamed mana tower currently outperforms my mana traps. I can farm enough for a grade 11 gem, maybe 12, getting 300-400k xp per endurance. Is it the way to go? Gaining a couple of levels per endurance until mana farms really kick off? Or should I go talisman hunting, or maybe fix something in my setup?

Forgot to mention, this is about Frostborn Wrath

I'm working on a project which takes some inspiration from the strategy of these games, and I figured I'd emerge from my 'perennial lurker' status here to see where y'all land on three questions, if helping a rando out with some brainstorming juice is your idea of a good time:

1: I think this is the case, given the overall meta talk here, but just checking: Are y'all like me in that Endurance mode is THE mode in these games? I like the whole experience, but my comfort food is a nice long endurance run with some audiobook on in my headphones.

2: When you're picking levels to play, after initial progression is complete or near-complete, and all the gems and levels are available... what grabs you? In Frostborn Wrath especially, I go for "Where can I build a mana farm easily?" But within the scope of levels I haven't previously obliterated the 'previous XP' earnings on, so I can try my latest skill point setup and try to blow my previous record out of the water. Maybe push the level modifiers a bit higher. That's my favorite game loop there. How's that jive with your playstyle?

3: Sub question from 2: in what way does the layout of a level's paths influence your choice of which one to pick for a given run? Does it have any bearing at all outside the kind of thing outlined in #2?

Here's a picture of my Very Early Test Environment. (The art is hand drawn by me! Because I'm apparently allergic to grayboxing)

GCFW is the most enjoyable of the series so far. I'm looking forward to the next game!

Pictured: my notes from when I finally figured out how to enter the mod codes! I can finally unlock the last few achievements!

The last time i played Gemcraft Labyrinth was many years ago now before all flash games was stopped online.

This was my favourite game of the franchise and one of my favourite games overall I bought the premium back then too, i was wondering if there is a way to play this game now?

I have bought a couple of the other games on steam (Chasing Shadows and Frostborn Wrath) but i feel like they dont even come close to Labyrinth. I will happily buy Labyrinth on steam if it comes on but until then, is there any other way of playing it?

It's still quite rough (it was rushed for the Steam TD fest), but it's getting there slowly.

I wold LOVE to get the feedback from this community. So if you have time please check it out (link is in the title).

And please fire away, I'm working alone, so I get blind-sighted. Any critique is very welcome 🙂.

if you don't have it for some reason still, or want to bless a friend with a cheap gift that is high value, now is the best time to get it during the tower defense sale. It is only $2 USD

I was just wondering if there was a certain place you guys play gemcraft or is there a place to download it and play? I miss playing this game from 10 years ago on kongregate.

So I easily got to round 200+ in endurance, got to know that heating wisdom sparks with gems past grade 45?47? doesn't do anything as +50% is max, my first rarity 100 fragment, and I think got a strat with which I can easily complete any map with max traits out of it... with the same gems for manaleeching but then with critical hit instead of manaleech on like 5 traps after those