The guy asked for LOW LEVEL solutions, but everyone keeps talking about the chasing shadows trait (which I dont even know what it does yet) and glaring difficulty? These are not low level things.
Hey, I found this method, and have been using it to farm 900-1100 cores every 4-5 miniutes.
I'm lvl 1434 - so not too high yet, my skills are as follows: Y:45 W:45 R:15 All the dmg enhancing skills are at 45, I think Amps at 15 or so, freeze at 21 and bolt at 21. Mana gain and gem costs at 45. I start with 22k mana, 18 being the lowest I can get if I want to do it quickly.
Go to field F4 (first tower), choose Haunting difficulty, put 7 points in shadows and orblets (156 cores total cost).
Start with 6/5/5 RW, upgrade 2 times add grade 7 and 8 1:1 Y/W (you get grade 9 gem). put it into the main tower, block all the extra passages with towers, start at 9x speed. Make sure you destroy all the locks first (use 2 starting gems for this and an extra tower), while building 4 amps and putting grade 7 Y gems into them. once all the locks are destroyed set main gem to Flying add bolt and send all waves early.
That should yield you 400-500 Cores in 2 minutes if done quickly. Proceed to Endurance mode, keep sending waves until 85-90, upgrade your gem to lvl 15 and send waves to 135-150. After than any flying thing that appear are too hard to kill anyway. That should bring the total SC to 1100 subtracting the cost 156 and we get 900 cores in 5 minutes.
Simply put, give up farming anything until you can at least play glaring difficulty. especially do not attempt to get talisman pieces, they are lategame bonus.
Other than that, you should be just getting some shadow cores every round just to enable few traits.
Shadow core gain increases with level. until wizard level 500.
a few on orblets trait (for those who have premium) is a good way of spending sc to gain extra xp without increasing the difficulty.
However for low levels, getting your level up is priority in order to get more Shadow cores. However, if you need SC it may involve replaying levels and if possible replay early stages on higher difficulties. 500+ you can play haunting runs with high yields.
From another thread, I use E3. Create a kill tower far left, above the orb between the paths. Ctrl-click to send all and 9x speed. If you have the Chasing Shadows trait, set to 7. You should get 360 cores in 3 mins start to restart. My max was 660. Other methods can give more cores per map, but in my experience, not more cores per minute. Do not use Orblets, as a previous poster suggests. Orblets trait does not increase Core production, and costs 28 cores for no gain.
The key is Send all Waves. Early sending raises the probability of Apparitions, Shadows, etc. More waves faster = more cores. You can use any map: find one that plays to your style and stick to it. Ididn't start doing this until L400, but I was already using Haunting, so it should be do-able at lower level.
If you need a mana farm, then you're doing too much work and slowing yourself down, lowering cores/min. The Kill Tower is necessary in any case to take down Shadows, so it must be built. It does some of the work, so it may as well do all of it.
I don't think that shadow core farming is really worth it until you're later on in the game anyway. The time required for relatively little gain (compared to higher levels) isn't worth it imo.
The progression to my mind is:
- Just going through the levels until you get to the point where you can mana farm. - Once you can mana farm you can rack up the XP pretty quick. - At level 1000+ you can start shadow core farming, and should be able to get ~1500 cores on F1 in a few minutes.
People keep saying to do this on F1 but wasn't the game nerfed? Best I can seem to find is map T7 no traits rush all waves. I get about 155-172 cores a run and each run is under a minute with no cores spent on the battle (I don't even up the difficulty).
I just go to a stage I have not beaten the Glaring or Haunting difficulty on, and do a speedrun of the stage.
Tower, 8 amps around it. Make my killing gem of G1's : 1 red, 8 yellow, 7 orange, and 16 white. Shift-G until they're all combined, stick in tower. Look at remaining mana - find highest gem grade I can make 8 of. Go down one grade, make a yellow and an orange, combine, then dupe 7 times. Place in amps. U to upgrade the tower gem as much as possible, then turn on 9x speed and call all waves. Run around hitting U on the tower gem and the amps as much as possible.
That gets me a bunch of SC, usually, in just a few minutes. If, somehow, I get overwhelmed (Yellow/Orange is a really bad gem combination, after all) I attempt it again, this time without using any orange. 1 red, 7 yellow, 24 white, and just pure yellow amp gems.
Sometimes I even remember to turn Chasing Shadows trait to max.
Astro, you're the one who told me not to use white? Lol. Well then again that's for long haul matches not for these quickies...If I act quick the method I'm doing is like 1.5k core per 15 min. I just hate the repetition. I might just try a quick manafarm send all waves thing. I did it once, got like 2k cores for the match but it took almost a half hour. Little less repetitious though.
Thanks for the advice, I'll toy around with what you said and my own ideas after work =)
White is actually stronger than Black up through about grade 30. After that, Black is stronger than White.
When doing a quick run, gems rarely get into the 20's, so White is better than Black. The quad tower gem (WROY) generally results in a higher grade gem than the triple color gem (RYW), due to the mana being stolen from the monsters, but even then it does not hit Grade 30.
When doing a manafarm, I've taken to starting off with both White and Black mana and kill gems. I'll upgrade both as I go along, and when I would upgrade from Grade 25 I just kill the White and just use the Black ones. That gets me more mana faster, and as for the hit levels, they are easy enough to farm up : traps for the killgem dupes and towers for the managem dupes.
