Beginner's Guide to Clicker Heroes

This guide is intended for those just getting started playing Clicker Heroes. It will cover the controls and features of the game and provide a suggested walkthrough to getting started.

In the top right of the screen you will see a wrench icon. This opens up the options menu. From here you can make a save of your progress so far. On clicking the save button a collection of text that encodes your games current state is copied to the clipboard, ready for pasting into one of the on-line tools that have been developed for the game, and a save dialogue is opened to create a text file that contains a copy of the same code.

Note that, the game also uploads a copy of you game to the Steam cloud when you exit the game. If you suffer a powercut or other abnormal way in which the game is closed, your progress may not be saved when you next open the game. As such performing a manual save periodically is generally advised as a good idea.

The Steam version of the game by default saves in the following location.
C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Clicker Heroes\clickerHeroSave.txt

The next option allows you to import a saved game by copying the code from within a save file and pasting it into the window where indicated. When importing a game in this fashion, the time since the save was made will be treated by the game as if you were in the off-line farming mode. Next are a series of toggles.

• 'Show +gold texts' and 'Show damage texts' toggle the display of the quantity of gold collected form each coin and the damage done with each click respectively. Toggling them off can help if the game becomes laggy.
  
• 'Tiny monsters' toggles if the monsters scale in size with the current zone level that has been reached. This is purely visual and has no effect on the monsters health or gold dropped. Toggling it on can help if the game is suffering slowdown.
  
• 'Show individual hero DPS' toggles the display of how much DPS each hero is currently contributing on their bar in the left hand pane.
  
• 'Always use scientific notation' toggles if all numbers are displayed using conventional notation, e.g. 6,341B or scientific notation, e.g. 6.341e12. As numbers reach very high levels they will automatically switch over to using the scientific notation but this toggle allows that to happen from the start.
  
• The final toggle switches the game to running in full screen. At the time of writing(0.17d), in order to close the game it is necessary to switch back out of full screen before you can exit the game.

The final button on the options page allows you to perform a hard reset, causing all progress made in the game to be completely reset. Steam achievements will remain awarded, but otherwise it will be as if you had started the game for the first time again. It is heavily advised that you make a save prior to doing this and periodically through normal play to guard against accidental use.

While most actions in Clicker Heroes are performed by the mouse, there are also a number of keyboard short-cuts and modifiers.


Note: when using q to add a very large number of levels, it may be a good idea to hold Shift first to avoid lag problems experienced by some players.

The game has three main modes of play, Active, Off-line and Idle. Only the first two will be available on your first run and on following runs until one of the Idle Ancients is purchased.

The game is in active mode if it is open and there has been a click causing damage to a monster or an ability has been activated within the last 60 seconds. Progress can be made to higher zones. The game is in Off-line mode if the game window is closed. In this mode, gold is acquired based on your heroes total DPS and the highest zone level that is accessible, as seen at the top of the screen. No progress to higher zone levels will occur while in Off-line mode. If not in Idle mode when going off-line, it will be calculated as if Idle mode had been entered at the same time as if the game had been left running.

If a game save is imported, the time since the save was made will be treated as if the game was in Off-line mode until the time of import.

Idle mode becomes available once one of the Idle Ancients, Libertas or Siyalatas is purchased. Idle mode is entered 60 seconds after the last ability was activated or 60 seconds after the last click that would cause damage to a monster occured, whichever is the later. Progress can be made to higher zones.

Idle mode is broken as soon as an ability is activated or a click is made that would cause damage. Notably, clicking on a clickable that appears within the game area(currently appearing as a small headcrab as of Steam version 0.17d) does not break the idle mode.

Following the first ascension after beating the boss on zone 100, a new button can be seen on the right-hand side of the screen. This toggles between Progression and Farm modes, where Progression mode causes the game to advance to the highest unlocked zone upon the death of the current enemy while Farm mode causes the game to remain on the current zone level.

If a Boss is not defeated within the allotted time while in Progression mode, the game will automatically change to the prior zone level and switch to Farm mode. This is to allow gold to be accumulated to enable the upgrading of Heroes to defeat the boss that blocked progress.

You will be visiting many, many times.

On the right you will see your first monster and on the left you will see Cid, the first Hero waiting to be hired, but Cid is greyed out as you lack any gold to do so.

Click on the monster and you will see it's health drop by one point. Do this ten times and you have killed your first monster and will see a single gold coin drop to the ground. You can either move the mouse over/near it to collect the coin or wait a short while for it to be collected automatically. Either method gives you the same total gold.

You will also see the counter by the skull in the top-center of the zone area increment by one. This is the number of monsters that must be slain to advance to the next zone level.

Slay another four monsters and you will have sufficient gold to hire Cid. You will also see an new Hero appear greyed out in the list, Treebeast. Hire Cid, and you will see your damage per click will have increased to 2.

Occasionally you will see Treasure Chests spawn instead of monsters. These are attacked and destroyed in just the same way as other monsters but they drop seven times the gold as a regular monster.

Kill another five monsters and you will have cleared the zone. As this is your first run, you must manually advance to the next zone by clicking on it at the top of the game window. Later once you unlock Progress mode the game will automatically advance each time you clear a zone.

You will see that the health of each monster has increased greatly from 10HP to 26HP, but also when you kill your next monster you will see that the gold dropped has also increased from 1 to 2. This sort of pattern, of monster health increasing faster than gold dropped, will continue as you advance zones and along with the increasing cost per level of each Hero leads to the games various 'walls' points where progress stalls. But more on that later.

By this point you should have sufficient gold to level up Cid. Do so and you will see your damage per click has increased again to 3. Continue killing monsters and possibly levelling Cid again until you clear the zone, then click at the top to progress to zone 3.

The health of the monsters and the gold they drop has again increased. At this point it may be worthwhile holding off on upgrading Cid further and gather the 50 gold required to hire Treebeast, your first DPS Hero. As soon as you hire Treebeast you will notice that the monster's health starts dropping without you needing to click. This is because Treebeast and all following Heroes cause continual damage over time. Active clicking by yourself provides additional damage above and beyond this which will speed the process.

Continue through zone 3 and 4 levelling Treebeast and Cid as you go. Then proceed to the next zone.

In this zone you encounter your first boss. You have thirty seconds to defeat it or it will re-spawn back with full health. If you haven't paused on a zone or been particularly lucky with Treasure Chests there is a good chance that you will not be able to do enough damage to kill the boss within the time allowed.

If you find that you can't cause sufficient damage to kill this or any following boss, use the zone selection at the top of the screen to jump back to the last completed zone before the boss and earn money to allow you to upgrade your Heroes until you cause sufficient damage to proceed.

At this point, or soon after, you will likely advance Cid or Treebeast to level ten. Their first upgrade will become available and can be purchased once you have accumulated sufficient gold. Upgrades generally become available at Hero levels 10, 25, 50, 75, 100 and 125. Not all heroes have more than four upgrades and some have no upgrade at 75.

The majority of upgrades available to heroes cause a percentage increase in their damage done and these bonuses stack together multiplicatively. Other upgrades can give a smaller bonus to every Hero's damage, improve the critical chance and damage multiplier of your clicks, grant a percentage of the total DPS of your Heroes to your click damage, increase the gold dropped by monsters and unlock abilities.

There are a total of nine abilities that can be unlocked by purchasing and upgrade from a Hero. Abilities can be activated by clicking on the abilities button that will appear to the right of the Hero pane or by using the corresponding number key. They all possess a cool-down after activation before they can be used again, varying from ten minutes to eight hours. Most have an active duration of 30 seconds. A full list will be given later.

Abilities, particularly when used in combination, can give a temporary enormous boost in the damage done by your Heroes and clicking and can be vital to getting past bosses during your first run.

After you have upgraded your Heroes sufficiently to pass the first boss you will see the pattern of levels repeat, with four levels where you must clear ten monsters followed by a boss level. This pattern continues throughout the rest of the game.

A general piece of advice for hiring and levelling Heroes is to level each Hero to level ten and purchase their upgrade before moving on to purchasing the next Hero. Continue doing this until you have five Heroes at level ten, then return back to your first hero and Increase their level to 100(holding the Shift key while clicking will enable you to purchase ten levels per click) and purchase their upgrades. Level the next Hero down the list to level 75, the next to level 50 and the following to level 25 and purchase all available upgrades. As you proceed further level the next Hero to level ten before keeping to the same pattern fir the preceding Heroes. At this point, it is not advised to continue levelling a Hero if they possess no further upgrades.

Continue levelling your Heroes and progressing to higher zones. You should be aiming on this run to reach zone level 140. This is typically the slowest part of the game and it may take one or more days to reach 140.

Note, do not purchase Amenhotep's final upgrade, Ascension, at this point. This upgrade removes all gold and Hero levels and places you back at zone one and should be used later once you have gained Hero Souls that will carry over to your next run.

You will likely need to use your abilities to pass bosses without waiting for great amounts of time to farm gold to upgrade your Heroes instead. Before using them, let one pass of the boss occur and note how much damage was done to the boss. If damage of more than half of the bosses health was done then just use the first two abilities Clickstorm and Powersurge to defeat the boss. If more than a quarter but less than half of a bosses health was done in damage you will need to use the third ability Lucky Strikes in conjunction with the first two abilities. If less than a quarter but more than an eighth of the bosses health was damaged you will need to use the seventh ability Super Clicks along with the prior three abilities. If you are not doing at least an eighth of the bosses health in damage you will likely have to go back a level and farm some gold to upgrade your Heroes before trying again.

Eventually you will reach the Hero Frostleaf. You will notice the jump in cost to the next Hero Dread Knight, which you will not be able to afford on this run. Get Frostleaf up to level 100 and purchase his upgrades then go back up the hero list to Treebeast. Use the Ctrl key to add 100 levels at a time to Treebeast and you will swiftly see his damage increase to be comparable with that of Frostleaf. This is because from level 200 and every 25 levels after the damage done by a hero is multiplied by four, with a multiplier of x10 at level 1,000 and following increments of a thousand. Combined with these earlier heroes being much cheaper to level up, this allows you to increase the DPS of your Heroes faster than just trying to level Frostleaf.

Repeat this for the other early Heroes, Ivan, Brittany, Samurai and Forest Seer. You will notice certain Heroes have been skipped, that is because they do not have a full set of damage upgrades so are less worthwhile investing in.

Continue adding 25 levels at a time to these Heroes(use the z key to do so with a single click) and to Frostleaf if it is cheaper to add 25 levels to him.

After reaching zone 35, you may start to see clickables appearing. They appear at random intervals and only one clickable of this type can be on screen at once. In the Steam version of the game these currently appear as small headcrabs that appear in one of six locations. Five of these are around the edges of the zone land block, while the sixth is near the vertical center of the screen, slightly to the left of the scrollbar, on the Hero pane.

Clicking on one of these headcrabs will drop a quantity of gold equal to ten times that of a monster on the highest level unlocked in the current run as well as a reasonable chance to drop a ruby, the currency that can be purchased for real money. Later when you have Ancients such as Libertas, Mammon or Fortuna they will effect the gold dropped from the clickable.

It is also important to note for later that headcrab clickables persist through an Ascension but do not persist if the game is closed and reopened.

A sceond type of clickable also exists in the form of a small creature that will slowly fly across the top of the zone from right to left, disappearing if it reaches the left border of the zone. Clicking 50 times on this will cause a random ability to be activated, without causing the skill to enter cooldown, and can include abilities that have not yet been unlocked.

If the random ability activated is Clickstorm it will break Idle status, but other abilities will not. This may not be immediately obvious as it is very easy to click once too often when clearing the creature. One note, if you have the Energize ability active, the random ability will use the Energize charge.

Continue on through the zones until you reach level 100. Here you will encounter the first Centurion boss, Omeet.

Omeet is similar to the previous bosses but on his defeat will give one Hero Soul(HS) that will be granted after you Ascend. The very first time you defeat Omeet also grants you one additional Hero Soul directly into your bank and grants you your first Gild. A new tab for managing Ancients is also opened on the Hero pane, but should be left for now.

The progression mode/farm mode toggle button should now also be unlocked and appear on the right hand side of the window. If it doesn't appear, try saving, closing and reopening the game, or wait until after your first Ascension.

Gilds are a boost that is applied to a single Hero. It causes a change in their portrait and grants a 50% boost in damage done by that Hero. A hero can have more than one Gild and the effect stacks additively. A gild is granted the first time you beat each zone that is a multiple of ten past zone 100.

It is possible to move Gilds between Heroes, but initially they should be left on whichever hero they are granted to, as initially the cost in HS is more than it is worth to move the Gild.

Hero Souls are the currency that carry over between Ascensions, unlike gold. For each HS sitting in your bank you gain a 10% boost to the damage dealt by your Heroes or by clicking. It is highly advised not to spend all of your banked HS summoning or upgrading ancients.

One Hero Soul is granted for every 2,000 levels possessed in total by your Heroes at the time that you Ascend. However this will relatively quickly become a very small proportion of the HS you earn on each Ascension.

The other, and main source of HS is defeating Centurions at every 100th zone and primal bosses that spawn 25% of the time for each boss past zone 100. Note that, you only receive HS for the first time you defeat a Centurion or Primal boss on each run.

The actual number of HS that will be dropped by a Primal boss or Centurion can be determined by the following formula.
HS=(((Zone-80)/25)^1.3)*(1+Solomon bonus)

Rubies are the paid-for currency that persist between Ascensions. They also drop randomly from clickables. Rubies are used in the shop window, opened from the button at the bottom of the screen.

They can be spent on three different boosts.

Timelapse for 20 rubies resets all abilities that were on cooldown and grants gold as if the game had been left farming for eight hours at the highest unlocked zone. However this is regarded as a very poor use of rubies in all but a couple of specialized circumstances.

For 30 rubies a set of three gilds will be granted each of which will go to a random Hero. These are otherwise identical to the Gilds awarded every ten levels.

For 50 rubies you are granted a Quick Ascension(QA). Without effecting your current run, this adds one to your count of ascensions for the purposes of stats and achievements and grants a number of HS directly into your bank. A QA always grants a minimum of 7 HS, even if you have not yet passed zone 100. Beyond that Souls are based on the highest zone you have ever reached as well as the Ancients Solomon and Atman.

It has been proven that QA results in the greatest increase in damage potential per ruby spent, the maths of which can be found on the Clicker Heroes subreddit.

Following Omeet, continue advancing zones. You should encounter a few Primal bosses that will grant HS on defeat, and pick up a few Gilds from zones 110,120 and 130.

At zone 140 You will encounter the Octotentacle boss. If this boss is not a Primal it will not be worth your time defeating it, and you should go straight to preparing for Ascension.

If it is a Primal then you will need to have upgraded your effective damage dealing Heroes as far as you can and utilize all of your damage dealing abilities in a combination right at the start of the fight. Using Energize on Super Clicks or Lucky Strikes usually provides the best chance of defeating the boss.

Zone 140 is one of the first walls you will come across, points where it takes far too much time to pass and trying to push further will be even slower.

Once you have either defeated the primal boss on zone 140 or seen it is not primal, it is time to Ascend for the first time.

Prior to ascending you will want to go back through your Heroes and buy as many levels in total as possible. For every 2,000 total levels you will receive one Hero Soul. You should be able to obtain between five to eight HS in this fashion on your first Ascension.

Once you have purchased all the levels you are able to afford, move to Amenhotep and purchase his Ascension upgrade. All of the HS you have earned will be added to your bank, your gold total will be set to zero, you lose all Hero levels and upgrades and are moved back to zone one. The progression mode toggle is also switched to farm mode.

It may be tempting to now purchase an Ancient from the new tab that has appeared on the Hero pane.

Don't.

Each Soul that is sitting in your bank gives your clicks and your Heroes +10% to damage. At this point that is far more valuable than any Ancient you could purchase.

Starting from zone one, progress back up through the levels, similarly to how you did before. You will find that it is much quicker, and what took one or more days now only takes several hours. Again, when you reach zone 140, see if the Octotentacle is a Primal and defeat it if it is, collect as many hero levels as can be afforded and Ascend again.

Again, don't spend any of your Souls and repeat the process. you will find that it goes even faster, perhaps down to one or two hours. Keep repeating this process until you find you can reasonably easily defeat the boss of zone 140 then start trying to push five to ten zones further with each Ascension.

Once you have amassed a bank of at least 50 HS it is time to buy your first Ancient. The first Ancient you purchase depends on which style of play you intend to follow.

Active play involves you clicking and using abilities frequently. Vaagur reduces the cool down times on your abilities and is fairly cheap to level up, letting you use your abilities much more frequently. Juggernaut is a good second Ancient to pick for this style as long as you can maintain the combo by never pausing in clicking for longer than 10 seconds.

Idle play where you let your Heroes do the damage and only periodically check in to level up and purchase upgrades is based around the Ancients Siyalatas and Libertas. Purchase whichever one you see first and when it comes to time to purchase your second Ancient pick up the other, re-rolling if necessary.

Don't let your HS bank drop below 50 at this point when purchasing or upgrading your Ancient, and proceed to gather another 50 HS before purchasing your second Ancient, with the total of 100 HS becoming the new floor below which you should not spend.

Upgrade both of your ancients to level 10, never dipping below the floor of 100 HS, then expand your bank by another 50 HS and purchase one of Mammon, Dogcog, Mimzee, Dora or Fortuna.
Again level the ancient you purchased to level 10, never dipping below the new floor, and gather another 50 HS for a total of 200. Purchase another one of the five and level it to 10 then increase your bank by 100 HS. Repeat this each time until you have all five purchased and leveled to 10 and are sitting on a bank of 500 HS.

From here which ancients are picked depends on if you are using an active or Idle playstyle. A sample order for an Idle playstyle is shown below.

• Collect 50 HS into bank, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Siyalatas or Libertas. Level to 10.
  
• Collect 50 HS into bank. Total 100 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Siyalatas or Libertas. Level to 10.
  
• Collect 50 HS into bank. Total 150 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Mammon, Dogcog, Mimzee, Dora or Fortuna. Level to 10.
  
• Collect 50 HS into bank. Total 200 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Mammon, Dogcog, Mimzee, Dora or Fortuna. Level to 10.
  
• Collect 100 HS into bank. Total 300 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Mammon, Dogcog, Mimzee, Dora or Fortuna. Level to 10.
  
• Collect 100 HS into bank. Total 400 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Mammon, Dogcog, Mimzee, Dora or Fortuna. Level to 10.
  
• Collect 100 HS into bank. Total 500 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Mammon, Dogcog, Mimzee, Dora or Fortuna. Level to 10.
  
• Collect 200 HS into bank. Total 700 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Level all ancients to 25. Try to keep them equal as you do this.
  
• Purchase Bubos or Kumawakamaru. Level to max.
  
• Collect 200 HS into bank. Total 900 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Bubos or Kumawakamaru. Level to max.
  
• Collect 300 HS into bank. Total 1,200 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Atman or Solomon. Level Atman to max or Solomon to 20.
  
• Collect 300 HS into bank. Total 1,500 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Atman or Solomon. Level Atman to max or Solomon to 20.
  
• Collect 500 HS into bank. Total 2,000 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Argaiv or Morgulis. Level Argaiv to 25, place all bank HS into Morgulis.
  
• Collect 500 HS into bank. Total 2,500 HS, don't spend below this.
  
• Purchase Argaiv or Morgulis. Level Argaiv to 25, place all bank HS into Morgulis.
  
• Purchase Khrysos or Iris. Level Khrysos to max or Iris to 33.
  
• Purchase Khrysos or Iris. Level Khrysos to max or Iris to 33.
  
• Level Siyalatas, Argaiv, Dora to 50. Level Libertas, Mammon, Mimzee to 45. Level Fortuna to 40. Level Solomon to 35. Level Morgulis to 5,200.
  
• Purchase Chronos. Level to 18.

Following this will give you a good base for playing in the Idle style. To continue follow the rules of thumb for the Ancient levels.

Based on a post by /u/Awlcer in the Clicker Heroes subreddit.

The Ancient Siyalatas(Siya) is used as the basis to determine the appropriate level that other Ancients should be at. If using an active build that doesn't use Siyalatas, Argaiv can be substituted instead as a base.

Reload ignores Energize when determining the previous ability to target. Energized Reload causes cooldown of the two abilities used before Energize to be reduced by 1 hour.

If Energize is activated and waiting for the next ability to be used, activating the moving clickable will use up the Energize.

As the game has been present on-line for some time, there are a number of tools that have been developed that can use the games save data for various helpful purposes.

• Clicker Lister[lilylicious.deadmano.com] - Extracts information, on Ancients, Gilds, Souls and others from the code of a saved game and displays it in a friendly format ready for copying and pasting into discussion posts. Use this tool if you want to show off your progress or ask for advice rather than vaguely describing your game.
  
• Gilding Calculator[theriebel.de] - As the order in which gilds are assigned is fixed by the games seed and is unaffected by saving and reloading, it is possible to use this tool to determine if it is cheaper to use the 2HS degild option multiple times when moving gilds to specific Heroes/Hero later in the game rather than using the 80HS direct assigning option.
  
• Ancient Optimizer Calculator[s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com] - This tool will take the data of a save and calculate the optimal levels of Ancients that you should spend your current and after next ascension total of HS on to maximize HS gain per hour.
  While a useful tool, following it blindly may not be the best of ideas if you want to make progress to higher zones and it may encourage you to purchase certain Ancients at the wrong point for efficient progress. It also tends to under-level gold Ancients while over-leveling Solomon.
  
• Hero Level Calculator[calc.rbservers.org] - Not intended for use early on a run(ie not before Frostleaf is purchased to 100, and all available upgrades have been purchased), this imports the data from a save and calculates in which order Heroes should be levelled to maximize DPS for that run.

Clicker Heroes subreddit - the main location of discussion and advice on the game. Read the FAQ that is linked there before posting.
Clicker Heroes Wiki[clickerheroes.wikia.com] - currently under revision/reorganisation at the time of writing.