Forums → Game Walkthroughs → Gemcraft CS: extreme end-game guide

This guide is outdated for game version 1.1 - new guide can be found here

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Introduction
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First of all, this guide is beneficial only for 1000+ level players with all skill unlocked who also know how mana farms work and fully followable for 2000+ with at least +10 to all skills talisman. If you are lower level, better check out fractalman's and thunderrider's guides. They explain respectively low-level (0-100) and mid-game (levels 100-2000, basics of mana farming and endurance).
Another important thing is Magician's Pouch - if you don't have it you also won't be able to follow this guide as it heavily uses premium-only content.
If you are able to set up some macro for clicking mouse, it will help a lot. You will have to anger waves for example 500 times, so click-ten-times button is highly recommended.

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Skills
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Must be is 45 points (+ your talisman) in following skills:
True Colors, Fusion, Mana Leech, Bloodbound, Freeze, Amplifiers, Fury, and Traps

Very important and heavily needed but not essential are:
Masonry, Critical Hit, Chain Hit and Barrage

Least important (but also recommended) skills:
Mana Stream, Resonance and Poolbound

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Map to choose and difficulty settings
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Easiest places to set up a mana farm are maps with a single entrance. I prefer fields M7, Q4, U1 and X4 (not single entrance but nice too). Q4 is nice for beginners because no beacons will spawn there, and the gem resocketing ones are really annoying. I will use this map for my example in the rest of this guide.
I prefer all traits except manalock maxed and haunting. It really doesn't matter for a play and gives huge 70x XP multiplier.

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Gem combining methods
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As you probably know (or not), pressing "U" isn't the best option for gem upgrading, and not every colors proportion in gem is equally good. To squeeze every drop of power out of gems I recommend using following gem combining methods - they are carefully designed to maximize power of this particular gem combination and probably won't be so efficient for others, so for best results use them in way I recommend.

I'll introduce two kinds of methods: 32-spec and 16-combine. First one (32-spec) is one-use only, it combines 32 g1 gems of three colors to get g5-equivalent with the most specials. Second (16-combine) is repeatable, it combines 16 equal grade gems to +4g-equivalent. It's used to upgrade gems and allows faster special growth.

32-spec for mana gems

32-spec for killing gems

16-combine

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Basic setup
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Get around 1,000,000 mana however you wish (white mana farm or something). You will now need 6 amplifiers surrounding 3 traps and one trap directly after and one directly before - just like on this picture:

You can also perform a corner setup.

First make 32-spec for mana gems to get basic g5 gem. Then set it to random targetting. Copy it and save a copy somewhere in order not to need to craft it again in case of mistake. Upgrade it twice with 16-combine.

Create 2 white, 1 red, 1 blue slowing gem, upgrade it by pressing "U" to 1/8 of mana gem value. Duplicate. Place in traps before mana gem. Set targeting to Random.

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Early gameplay
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Anger 2-4 waves of reavers by g1 gems (no swarms and no giants) to e24 armor and send them all. Using permafreeze (freeze spell with recharge time shorter than minimum freeze time), freeze them all as precisely over the managem as you can. When your mana is high enough and you have got barrage spell reloaded then pause, use 16-combine on managem (sometimes your mana grows so fast that you can do it two or three times), put in back into a trap and reload it by barrage. Upgrade your slowing gems to keep them 1/8 of managem price, (but not higher than g40) and reload if have got some spells (other than bolt!) to spare. If not, upgrade first of slowing gems, wait it to reload and upgrade second then.

When your mana gem is about grade 29, craft amplifier gems. You do it by simply getting g1 orange and applying 16-combine for amplifier gems to it. Go until it's grade 28. Always keep your amplifier gem 1g lower than mana gem!

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Late gameplay
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When all monsters are frozen, remove slowing gems. Keep monsters in this state by constantly freezing them. Then upgrade your mana and amplifiers using methods explained to g59 and g58 amps. It's enough for very good xp gain, ideally you do it by wave 65.

If you wait very long for 16x mana to upgrade mana gem, I advice to duplicate it and hide somewhere a copy and then perform the formula step by step - wait for enough mana to perform next step of 16-combine, duplicate your hidden copy enough times and combine into mana gem according to current step of formula. After that don't forget upgrading amplifiers.

In order to farm hits slightly faster, create some duplicates of managem, put them into towers and combine in during next iteration of 16-combine.

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Killing gem building
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You are now ready to build killing gem. Similar to the managem, build g56 one (using 32-spec for killing gem and 16-combine). Also build 8 g58 yellow amps, using 16-combine for amps. Don't farm hits yet. Combine 1 red and 7 black. Upgrade by pressing "U" to grade 50. Place in tower and farm some hits on this gem.

Build "fortress" - 8 amplifiers around the tower. Put yellow amp gems in. Perform 16-combine, but combine your g50 gem with hits into one of 16 copies of basic gem before combining it with anything. Now your killing gem is ready to kill the mass-enraged monsters, but still don't place it on tower.

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XP gaining
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You should be now around wave 90 if you did everything right. Fill at least 1/10 of your mana pool. Finally, you can put your killing gem into its tower

Create a gem with value about million times lower than your mana pool. Take your killing gem's damage (round it down to two digits) and multiply by critical hit multiplier, rounded down the same way. It's HP of monsters you want to reach. Anger by gem you've created untill you reach it. Try not exceed it more than 10 times or you probably won't be able to kill the monsters.

Anger in this way every wave and send angered early. Remaining 40-50 waves should boost your XP by roughly 300,000,000,000 points before endurance. You can then proceed in endurance with exactly the same bombing technique, further boosting XP. Go into endurance as deep as you can and then finish it - I recommend around wave 500

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Final conclusions and other stuff like that
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- You don't have to follow this guide exactly, it's just an example.
- I can play it through in about 3 hours, but it surely can be done faster.
- Feel free to leave comments, as I can use them to improve this guide.
- If you want to know some even more complex gem combining techniques (in order to perform g100 run for example) also ask, I can post them for you.
- All gem combining techniques I use are computed by my PC, I will probably share software I used for it somewhere.
- The guide is published over CC-BY-ND license. If you want to copy it, please also post link to original one (there will be the newest version).

Good luck in hardcore GC:CS gaming!

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Informations for true addicts
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64-combine, use it instead of 16-combine if you wish to beat g100 or something. Doable, but lots of patience. About 2x better at g78-e than 16-combine.

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Credits
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Main author and math dude - psorek

Man who wrote everything I've forgotten and inspirator of every manafarm-crazed person, including me [psorek] - thunderrider (Armor Games) aka Takiza (On IRC and Kongregate)

Our fantastic graphics author - cronos51

The people who helped us in creating this guide and developing showed methods - Astroshak, borthelcash, dsizov and many others.