HI.
This Gameplay hint is for Underworld Idle, in an attempt to help explain some of the early game play loop, to help people to not get stuck like i did, for many months...

1. Runes and Pearls give Very Useful, and (after some time) rather large effects, and only need be purchased once. they are not effected by reset. Try and max them out as quickly as possible.

2. Prestige, Batteries, and Contracts do not disappear during reset.

3. Gears (after Purchasing certain contracts) can be placed on the Boilers, The oblesk, or the chest to increase the Prestige and waste/energy gained,and do not get reset when useing any of those.

4. Use Gears on the boilers/ Oblesk/ Chest that you plan to reset with. If you plan it right, you can leave the gears on till you get a free gear reset, which you will get every week, at week end.

5. Offline Progress Effects Junkyard search (24hrs at a time), Crystal energy, and waste production.

6. All multipliers stack (I.E. Gears, Pearls, Runes, Contracts, Crystals, Spells, Etc..)

Demon
Need Gems and Souls to Create.

Runes - Boost Crystal Output, Demon output Multiplied, Gem Production Multiplied.


Boiler Reset - Gain Waste (for Drowners), and Demon Prestige for Demon Contracts
Need hell ashes- gained based on Gem Recycle - Basically More gems = More Hell Ash

Use Boiler A for some Demon Prestige, and a lot of waste - better to start off a drowners run.
Use Boiler B for some waste, and a good bit more Demon prestige- better for Demon prestige runs, for purchasing Demon contracts.
Boiler C - unlocked after purchasing a high level contract. unlocks countdown.

Undead
Need Souls and Gems to Create.

Mushroom Farm - Alows you to Grow mushrooms and harvest mushrooms. Mushrooms give a bonus based on whether they are Ripe or Unripe. Pay close attention to the prices. Bonus may be in resources or in Specific Effects.


Oblesk Reset - Earns Undead Prestige and Dark Mana.
Oblesk Needs Flour. Flour Comes from Soul Recycling. Basically More Souls = More Flour.


Drowners
Require Gems, Souls, and Waste to Create.
Create Raw Mana
Oyster/Pearls - #of Oysters effects pearl Gain rate, More gained with Raw Mana (not Lost During Reset).
Pearl Collection of each color give specific bonuses. Pearl Collection is Based Entirely on Pearls.

Chest Reset - Earns Drowners Prestige And Energy.
Chests need Magic Powder to Reset. Magic powder comes from Mana/Dark Mana Recycleing.
Basically More Mana/ Dark Mana = More Magic powder.


Warlock Faction
need Gems, Raw Mana and Dark Mana to Produce warlock faction members.
Produces Dark Mana.
Meaning progress is heavily dependent on Drowners faction progress.
this faction must also be unlocked again after each reset.
Provides access to the spell book, and thus, powerfull spells. reach each carfully as some are quite dangerous.

Demons

Boiler A gives More waste.
Boiler B gives more prestige.
Cycling the Demon Reset with boiler B gives the opportunity to amass prestige for better contracts. The contracts you focus on here are attach gears to boiler, gem production, demon production, crystal power, and waste production. Focus On Gem Production contracts first though, as it will make progressive resets easier.

When you Feel that you have reached a comfortable point, switch to Undead Resets.

If you Feel Like you are Bottle-necking On Drowners, then Cycle a full reset with Boiler A, and Build up your Drowners.

Undead
Similar to demons, with the Undead, you cycle resets with the oblesk to amass prestige to purchase better contracts. Some of these contracts are quite powerful, but focus on the soul production contracts first, as they will make each future resets that much quicker.

when you are comfortable with Undead Progress Cycle back to Demons.



Drowners

Similar to the first 2 types of cycles, resetting Drowners gains prestige for better contracts. however, unlike the Demons and Undead, Drowners need Waste to be initially created, and waste is not generated in specifically the same way as Gems and Mana. For the majority of early game, demon resets will produce the most waste, and there for can be used to begin a Drowners run.

Until you are able to produce waste in the millions or Billions, you are dependent on waste from Offline, and Demon resets, Junkyard Recycles, and later the swamp ritual to significantly progress the drowners. Anything over 4 billion waste should allow you to unlock and use kelipie.

Due to the nature of waste, you will need to alternate 1 run drowners, 1 run demons, 1 run Drowners, etc. in order to build up Drowner prestige for Drowner contracts.
many of the drowners contracts are quite powerful, and well worth the prestige. Mostly focus on Mana gain Contracts, and Automation contracts at first.

Once you are comfortable with your drowners, cycle back to Demons or Undead.


By following this gameplay loop, you should be able to make a good bit of progress though the early game.

Once Cyrstal 5 is unlocked, you can create Dark mana to Unlock Warlocks Faction. And Spells.


Spell Slots are mostly unlocked with Darkmana. Selecting a spell, places it in a spell slot, and the spell remains active untill reset.
some spells may be the key to new factions.



Once you have warlocks unlocked, and are able to start casting spells, there are some spells you will want to look at in relation to resets.

Red Flower - Boosts Demon Productivity, demons are not consumed for upgrades, extra hell ashes. there are contracts that increase these effects.

Unholy Alliance - Crystal #3 will now also effect the undead. this boosts undead production. speeds up resets.

Swamp Ritual - Free Mavka (drowners) every 5 seconds, increased if Crystal 2 is working.

Ark Of the Drowned - Increased waste and x2 magic powder from Raw Mana Recycling in the junkyard. Magic powder is needed for resets for the Drowners faction, so this speeds up the reset time.

these have fairly obvious effects on restarts.


So, in general, in your on going quest to figure out just where this game doesnt end, work to maximize contracts when you can, and keep on looping.

So this section will deal Entirely on placeable boosting items.
Each faction has their own Faction Boosting item that can be applied to the individual units of that faction, which are not exactly the same as Gears, so i will describe the faction boosters first, then the gears separately.

------FACTION BOOSTERS---------
SO each faction has a booster, they each do the same thing, they directly boost the output of the unit they are placed on, with diminishing returns (no idea when this starts, but i have had 10+ on a single unit with no problems so...)
the 4 base factions (demons, undead, drowners, and warlocks) all have an equivalent.
so i will refer to all of those as a set.
at first you will be primarily concerned with boosting the lowest teir units just to make progress,
as time goes on (more resets, more contracts, etc) you will be wanting to move those up higher in teirs.
Beyond this point, do what is comfortable for you.

you get ALOT of demon boosters, so i end up putting 2 on every demon, and then a bunch on the top 4 - 8 ranked demons.
i recomend something similar for the undead.

with drowners, put Most on the top teir one you can unlock, with 1 on each other lower rank drowner. dont put any on drowners you havent unlocked yet. and ONLY purchace the highest teir Drowner availible. (Swamp Ritual is a spell that helps raise Drowners early on because it gives you free mavka, and you you let the free mavka build up till you can purchace kelipi, then only purchase kelipi.)
Same with Warlock.

drowners and warlocks are a pain to upgrade because of how drowners work, needing waste (which isnt continuously Produced). which is why i described the loop system.

the reason you put the most boosters on the top ranked entities is because overall, they will have the most effect, inceasing the units they produce, which then you have More of that lower teir unit, which can now create more units 1 teir lower, which creates even more units down the tiers, haveing a multiplicative/ exponential effect. You will see this the MOST in drowners.

the loop system is both an explanation of how the game works, as well as a strategy for advanceing each faction effectively.

also, eventually, all of those boosters get automated, as placeing them gets very tedious with the sheer amount of other stuff you must do.

-----____----____GEARS___---___---___---

This is a separate section because while gears work MOSTLY the same as the other boosters, They have additional Functions because you eventually unlock contracts to allow you to attach gears to reset tokens (Boiler, magic chest, Oblesk, etc)
Gears also do not reset (neither amount NOR Placement) meaning, if you had all your gears on a demon, when you reset and start a new run, they will still be on that demon.

gears are given for free but you may also buy them, which actually makes them premium items.

Gears do the most good on the reset tokens, because they increase gains from reset.
For example, the Boiler A with give MORE waste AND prestige when used. its the same with each reset token. so place all your gears on the reset tokens, as i described in the guide.
--------------------------------
in the guide i recommend starting reset loops. the gears are played as part of those loops.
for example, for a week you will work on Demons, purchaceing new demons, and placeing gears on the boiler for the most prestige, at the end of the week, you blow the boiler. collect prestige, and buy contracts if you can. if you cannot purchace a contract, thats fine. the prestige does not reset, so you can keep reseting as often as you like.
also, every week, you get a free gear reset from the junkyard, which alows you to remove all the gears, and place them something else, this is actually why i recomend weekly resets, so you can do the gear replacement for free.

Demons and undead can (MOSTLY) be endlessly reset to collect prestige. i say mostly because while demons can, because they only need gems, while undead will eventually hit a 'cealing' due to drowners. you can still farm prestige but there will be a cap to how much you can farm per run.

but due to this, you can set your gears on the demon boiler and do several resets for them, then move your gears to the oblesk and do several resets for undead, collecting their prestige and buying contracts.

after you start capping off on Undead is when you want to go back to demons and do a run where you build up as much waste as you can in the boiler before blowing it.
its at this point that you start a drowners run, and when you will actually notice the most benifit to the gears, because you need to place all of them on the magic chest (as soon as you have purchaced that contract) .
as you start a drowners run with the massive amount of Waste you get from blowing the boiler.
For refference i can get up to 10 billion waste from my boilers, witht he combination of contracts and gears that i have.

in the early parts of the game this is the only way to make progress in the drowners.
later you unlock the mushroom farm, but you have to purchace contracts to make the mushrooms effective enough to be usefull. as some of the mushrooms give waste, but the mushrooms cost way too much to be of any use.


the contracts for each faction provide far more powerful and more permanent boosts than the different faction boosters, which is why the focus is resets/ prestige.
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PEARLS AND RUNES

So both pearls and runs provide permanant bonuses, though they do this in different ways

firstly, the runs cost energy and time, ALOT OF TIME. the bonuses are awesome and worth the effort, but you will wont to pay the cost of the boost as it will take more than 6 months to unlock them all.
Pearls provide a boost for each faction, and each unit.

Both pearls and runes had contracts that could be purchaced to prevent them, from being reset, but i believe the pearl contract was changed recently.

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later in the game, once warlocks are unlocked, the next significant advancement in the game is made through dark mana. which is why the loops are so important, you are eventually upgrading the amount of dark mana gained, in order to progress through the spell book.
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EACH CYCLE IS ment for upgradeing each faction through prestige contracts. that way each reset after that gives you much more resources, and you get a bit further,

Beyond that, reseting each of the 4 factions is fucused entirely on prestige gain to advace them through their contracts.

I havent unlocked the heros or the arena so i dont know how those work, i do know you need a stupid amount of mana, which you can only get from upgradeing warlocks, which you can only do from upgrading drowners... etc etc...