Overview
In-depth explanation of each experiment with optimal strategies to dominate them. (scripts and nature exp solutions pending)
Preface
First thing to take note of with the laboratory is that you want it to reach tier 5 (using the construction firm) as soon as possible. This unlocks every elemental experiment, giving you access to some of the game’s best modules.
Second thing of notable relevance : Very few experiments are in their final edition. As of this edition of the laboratory guide, only the following experiments have been fully completed (Completed being obtaining the full +200% attack bonus and +99% resistance, all modules from the laboratory can be obtained) :
Nature experiment
Neutral experiment
Universal experiment
Gem experiment
Exotic experiment
This guide will give you the information you need to understand each experiment and do educated choices when it comes to prestiges in the various experiments. Do be aware, however, that updates can change the balance of experiments, and that this guide isn’t perfect.
Fire experiment
The fire experiment is quite similar to many idle games you’ve seen before, like Antimatter Dimensions. Your goal is to raise the heat by buying heaters, tickers and insulation.
Heaters :
Heaters are exactly like dimensions in AD. The first heater prouduces heat, the second producers tier 1 heaters, the third produces tier 2s, etc…
Insulation :
Insulating your system works similarly, instead that tier 1 gives a static bonus instead of producing anything over time. Tier 2 still produces tier 1 and so on. Each tier 1 reduces how much of your total heat you lose over time, but each extra one is less effective than the one before.
Tickers :
Tickers work just like insulation. The first one reduces the time it takes for the experiment to “tick”. Each tick triggers t1 heaters to produce heat, and every t2+ producer to create producers of the tier below.
Prestiges : Once you reach the maximum amount of heat (starts at 1 million), you gain access to three different “upgrades”. Every prestige increases the cost of each prestige, slightly more for the one you choose, and multiplies the maximum amount of heat you can achieve before needing to prestige again by 100 times. From what has been observed by the folks from the depths of end-game, the best course of action is to make a single prestige in heaters, insulation and tickers, then cram all your prestiges into heaters.
Water experiment
The water experiment is also an idling experience.
You have three different values to manage ; a water pump, a cooler, and a battery. Upgrades scale very slowly in both cost and efficiency, so a fast autoclicker is recommended.
Water pump : It pumps water at a rate depending on its level and your current amount of energy. Water you pump will drown out the water that has already been cooled, and will make cooling slower. However, pumping large amounts of water is required for prestiges.
Cooling : Similarly to the pump, the cooler depends on its own level and the current energy in your battery. The more water currently in storage, the longer it takes to cool it, so make sure you don’t take too much water. You can cool water down to -273.15 degrees C, aka 0k or the Absolute Zero.
Battery : The battery is different. Whenever you upgrade the battery, total energy resets back to 0, so upgrading your battery is something you want to do at the beginning of a prestige, but not in the middle of one. Also, note that having both the cooler and the pump turned on at once splits their efficiency in half.
Draining/prestige : Using the drain button (that appears once you reach enough total water, starting at 100,000 and gets multiplied by 10 for each prestige), you can reset your water to 0 and pick up an upgrade.
There are two to choose from, being a cooling upgrade and a battery one. As for which one to choose, the cooling one is better if you wish to cool faster, but the battery one also affects the water pump, which is essential to reach more magnitudes of water, and thus prestiges, making it the better upgrade.
Nature experiment (WIP)
The nature experiment is a mix of a puzzle and an idle game. Your first course of action in getting something done there is to farm what I’ll call here nature points. Nature points are the little tree symbols you can see above the upgrades/prestige menu. They allow you to get special upgrades to help you on your way to getting the harder to get mutations and longer to grow plants.
The first thing you will notice in this experiment are the different seeds. They are known as, from top to bottom, flowers, cauliflowers, bellflowers, bushes and “the strongest plants”. Each has a set of mutations to be unlocked, which is how you unlock modules and get % upgrades.
The second thing you will notice is the watering can. Watering your plants is necessary for them to grow, and the amount of time a tile stays wet is displayed (and upgradeable) using the prestige menu.
The third thing on your list is auto-harvest. This option is unlockable in the prestige menu, allowing you to farm nature points while doing something else.
The final things you have access to are temperature and a day/night toggle. These allow you to get access to specific mutations that require combinations of certain temperatures and climates.
Speaking of mutations, these are the different colors any given plant can have. Each mutation has a hint in the botany menu, which may or may not be obvious (for example, “I need a cool friend at night” means the plant needs a plant of cold temperature in a surrounding tile while the time option is set to night. Solutions can be found on the wiki, which will be expanded as we have time for it. (I’ll also make a section for it if I get all the images) 😉
Earth experiment
Welcome to micro-management paradise, population 0.
The earth experiment looks like a lot to handle, but it is actually surprisingly simple. You have mass, which logarythmically increases compression efficiency (Having 100,000 kg makes it 5x better than having 10 kg, and having 1,000,000,000 makes it 9x better than with 10 kg), you have drills to increase your mass, and you have two compression methods to increase your density. Note that diameter and volume aren’t really important and are more of a distraction.
Drills : There are a total of 5 drills, and each can be brought up to a power of about 1,000,000 kg per tick. You can turn drills on and off, because you don’t want drills to be running while you’re compressing.
Compression:
When compressing, you have two bars ; a green one, and a red one. The green one is how strong you want it to compress, and the red one is how strong it is actually compressing, lagging behind the green one to show the compressors starting up/shutting down. This bar interracts differently depending on your compression method. You cannot switch method while compression is active.
compression methods :
Slow and safe : The afk/idle way, slow and safe allows you to just ignore the Earth experiment entirely and come back in a few days to reap the module rewards. Even if drills are turned on, slow and safe will reduce how fast their progress bars move linearly with the red bar’s progress. Having the green and red bars at the far right makes drills pause entirely.
Quick and dangerous : The micro way, Quick and dangerous works wayyyy faster than slow and safe, but spends stability to work, and doesn’t impact drills while running. Instead, the higher the red bar is, the stronger quick and dangerous works, but the faster your stability goes down. This means you want to turn it off before your stability gets too low, as if you don’t, it might just be too late…
Stabilize : Simple and easy, Stabilizing reduces drills’ speed while restoring stability.
Failure to keep the experiment stable : If your stability ever reaches 0, you are forced to reset, setting your mass and density back to their base values.
Prestiges : You can prestige once your mass reaches the number right of the division (/) sign. Prestiging resets your drills and mass, but gives you access to pretty nifty permanent upgrades.
“Drill” upgrade : Now this one confuses most players. It increases your drills’ power by a small 5%, and increases the speed at which the red bar moves by 30%. It doesn’t increase your compression power, just the speed at which you can turn the compressors on/off. You might want to get a few of those to make quick and dangerous less dangerous, but you want the rest to go in the first upgrade.
Electricity experiment
Welcome to cash sink : the game. Here, you’ll basically just spend green cubes like there’s no tomorrow (because there is no tomorrow).
Prestiges : You can prestige once all 100 wires are bought and upgraded to superconductors. Prestige resets your coils back to a single 5 wires coil.
Voltage upgrade : Increases your voltage by 30% multiplicatively, which means increasing your ampers by 30%.
Resistance upgrade : reduces total resistance by 20% multiplicatively, which means increasing your ampers by 1/0.8 or 25%.
Darkness experiment
The darkness experiment is the hardest to understand and explain, but I’ll try my best to cover the bases.
But, you’ll tell me, your noise filter isn’t at 0%! Noise makes random lines appear with an average size of the noise percentage. This means you’ll be able to notice the wave starting at about 70% noise. You can also buy arc upgrades to increase how large your sight is. You’ll also notice a red line with a green arrow to the left of it. This allows you to compress the graph, which makes noise weaker, BUT makes the vision less precise. If the red line is at the top, looking in the exact direction of the particle (direction you’re exactly looking at being represented by the teal arrow on the image), the bars will go flush to the red line.
Once you know about where the particle is, you can start increasing speed, which will make you move in the direction you’re looking at (the teal arrow which you can see on my screenshot). The closer you are to the particle, the faster and thinner the wave graph will become.
Once you become close enough to the particle (base is 2.5 M), the collect button will appear, and soon will the particle enter your range of view. Simply make the particle enter the red area and pick it up! This will make another particle appear in the dark room, forcing you to find it once more.
Prestiges : Once you reach the number of particles to the right of the divide sign, you can prestige the experiment. This will reset your noise and arc upgrades, but give you access to multiple permanent upgrades. However, you only truly want to buy chance upgrades, because it by far outclasses the others and you can barely get chance maxed with the maximum amount of resources you can achieve in the current patch.
Light experiment
Welcome to cash sink 2 : Electric boogaloo. In here, your goal is to basically throw large amounts of perfectly carved tesseracts (Yup, your resource cubes are actually 4d) at the experiment until it does what you want.
Launch : When you launch, the ball of light will hurl itself at a wall, bouncing off it and splashing light on it. Light decays slowly, and your run ends when all light has decayed fully in the room. Your score is the highest amount of light present in the room at the same time. Your only control over the experiment is through upgrades that increase your light ball’s performances.
BounceLoss : Upgrading this reduces how much light the main ball loses when bouncing against a wall. Beware, because you can still continue buying upgrades after bounceloss reaches 0% (why? Only snek knows)
Life time : Obviously, this one increases the lifespan of the main ball, reducing decay and allowing for longer combos. However, it also increases how long the experiment goes on after reaching a peak.
Lumens : The base power of the sphere. Everything light-based depends on this value.
Fragment power : Increases how much light gets refracted when bounces occur.
prestiges : In order to prestige, you must reach a certain highscore of light (100,000), with a requirement that gets multiplied by 10 each prestige.
Decay prestige : not really useful, you can grab one prestige of this if you want, but the other is better all the rest of the time.
Air experiment
The air experiment is the most nebulous one (plz Speedy gimme the crabby patty formula) BUT I’ll do my best explaining what you should do (which is the exact opposite of what I did.
In the air experiment, you must manage two things : compressors and hull. Compressors allow you to pump air, and are pretty self explanatory in their function. Hull prevents air from leaking out, following a ?????? formula.
Compressors : You can buy multiple compressors, which may or may not be a good idea, depending on your current wealth. Compressors work in a simple way : When activated, they empty their internal storage (increased by the first upgrade) at a certain rate (increased by the second upgrade), then, when empty, they refill back up with a delay (decreased by the third upgrade). Your goal is to keep a balance so that you can get the most air out without having your compressors be empty at all times.
Hull : Hull works in mysterious ways (magic, probobly). You can use upgrades to increase your hull’s density, and buy more hull. You should do that basically whenever it’s not too expensive to do so, as it reduces the rate at which air leaks out. Having no hull at all makes you unable to pump air in, so be sure to check that after each prestige!
Prestiges : Notice that percentage next to your current pressure? Once it reaches 100% (starts at 100,000 KPa), you can commit prestige and delete all your progress for some permanent bonus. The amount of KPa required for each prestige is multiplied by 10 each time.
compressor efficiency : The best choice, it increases your compressors’ overall power. Don’t even bother checking out the other prestige, it’s not worth it.
Hull efficiency : So… You still checked it out… Well, this one increases your hull’ efficiency by 10% Multiplicatively. This means that having 80% total density on your first hull at max level, then using this prestige, increases it to 88%. Seriously, don’t bother with this one until a rework comes out.
Neutral experiment
The neutral experiment is similar to idle games like “clicker heroes”, because buying certain multiples of one of the “producers” increases that producer’s power.
The “expand” button : This button allows you to reset your “neutral points” to increase your maximum capacity of points. The white blob that grows in size is a visual indicator of how full your meter is and how close you are to need expanding to continue growing.
Producers : In the early game, you are better off buying the cheapest thing you can see on screen, your goal being to rack up production to get reward modules. Later on, the top-most producer becomes vastly superior due to prestiges.
Prestiges : In order to prestige the neutral experiment, you need to buy the maximum of each producer. You don’t need to “expand” at all to do prestiges. There are two prestiges available in the neutral experiment, and each can be obtained a total of 50 times (making the maximum prestige #101).
2x production : Self explanatory, this upgrade doubles the power of each producer, multiplicative.
5% cap : This one is a bit trickier. Remember at the top of this section when it was said that buying certain multiples of a producer increases that producer’s power? Yeah, this prestige basically increases exponentially the power of your producers if you can keep up with the prices of more producers (which you can if you can buy this). The 5% cap prestige is ALWAYS superior to the 2x one and should be picked all the time until maxed at 50 times.
Universal experiment
In the universal experiment, your goal is to generate positive or negative gravity (G) through passing into red or blue circles as much as you can. This part will mostly be solutions for prestige 0 and prestige 2+ G production, due to the universal experiment being the cheepest to achieve the final goal of 200% attack 99% resistance.
How do arrows work?!? : It’s pretty simple. There are 4 (5 with prestiges) arrow types. Each can be placed anywhere, and then rotated using the rotate and CCW rotate actions on them. Each action increases the cost of the next by about 40%, so beware of misclicks!
Prestiges : When you prestige, you increase all your G gains by 25% multiplicatively and unlock a new piece to place for the first 3 prestiges.
5x arrows are basically the same as the orange x3 arrows, except they can work 5 times instead of 3.
Refresh grid is a ball that refreshes all arrows and reflect blocks when passed through, then turns itself off.
Reflect (CW) is a pretty special object. It rebounds the sphere if it hits it in a straight line, and send it back the other way if hit diagonally, as if it hit a wall at an angle.
Solution for prestige 2+ (Replace the red circles with blue ones to get -Gs)
Gem experiment
The gem experiment is quite confusing when you first see it. The goal of the experiment is to fill the grid with blue gems (exotic/pink gems won’t do anything for you there) by flipping tiles. You must do this 9 times to get a “stack”, which is the requirement for a reward module.
The clicking mechanics : Whenever you click on a tile, it and the tiles directly above, below, left and right of it will reroll. The symbols you get are totally random, except for blue gems, which have a specific chance of being obtained, starting at 1% and increasing by 1% for each upgrade of gem chance. This means that the best way to go around clearing this minigame is to work your way from one side to the other of the map, in order to make it so that the last places where there won’t be gems are in a corner of the map, where you only have to align 3 gems in a single roll instead of 5.
Lock chance : Lock chance is the percentage chance that a tile which is already a gem will NOT reroll itself if an adjacent tile is clicked. Clicking on a tile, no matter if it is a blue gem or not, will reroll it. A 100% lock chance means tiles that are gems will never be rerolled unless you click on them.
Gem chance : Gem chance multiplies your chances of each tile that gets rolled becomes a blue gem. While upgrades might be extremely expensive, they are worth it, as they reduce the time you have to grind the final corner of the grid.
Prestiges : The gem experiment has no prestiges as of right now, gem upgrades are kept permanently.
Exotic experiment
The exotic experiment is exponential growth : the game.
Your goal is to reach a fabric of the universe, which is equal to e308 universes, or a few centillions.
How do you do that? Are there prestiges?
No, there aren’t prestiges. You have instead access to permanent upgrades, bought with exotic gems. However, you only want to use two of them, being the bar on the left, and the bottom-most one. Why? Because they affect each-other and themselves, slowly ramping up in power until reaching ridiculous levels.
The endgame of the exotic experiment :
If you’re one of us insane ones, you can continue upgrading the experiment after reaching your first fabric. Boosts reset upon reaching another fabric, but upgrades don’t. This means that spending a few thousands of exotic gems gives you the hard cap of a fabric per frame.