Birb – Helpful Tips and FAQ for Expedition

Expedition Tips

Progress Feels Slow: What Am I Doing Wrong?

If your progression feels slow, check the following:

• Have you maximized your body upgrades through the Forge button in your inventory?
• Have you allocated your stats effectively?
• Are you using the best artifacts available to you?
• Are you using the best fish buffs for your current progression?
• Have you unlocked Maub’birb and reached the soft cap of 53B golden popcorn?

How Should I Spend My SP?

There is no single optimal stat distribution. Your allocation should change as you progress.

Early Expedition

When you first enter Expedition:

1. Invest enough in HP and Regen to stay alive while killing enemies.
2. Put the remaining points into damage.
3. After defeating the F2 Boss for the first time, you unlock the desert progression area.
4. Work on the desert progression before returning to Expedition. Two important upgrades to reach are Emergency Flask and Maub’birb.

After Rebirb 1+

Once you unlock Emergency Flask, it becomes your main source of healing. This allows you to put most of your SP into damage and push forward more aggressively.

Strength becomes your primary stat. Players often use ratios such as:

• 1:0:4
• 1:0:10

Floors 7 and 9 may require significantly more HP because of the flies and fireballs. In these cases, ratios closer to the following can be more effective:

• 1:0:2
• 1:0:1

Respeccing is cheap, so avoid investing heavily in Strength if the additional damage does not allow you to one-shot a new tier of enemies. Put those points into more useful stats, such as HP and Regen, to reduce potion usage. Once you have enough SP, respec back into Strength.

Why Is One-Shotting So Important?

One-shotting enemies has two major advantages:

1. Higher SP gain: If an enemy requires two attacks instead of one, you spend roughly twice as much time killing it. One-shotting can potentially double your SP rate.
2. Lower damage and potion consumption: Dead enemies cannot attack you, so one-shotting significantly reduces the damage you take and the number of potions you use.

As an additional benefit, Health Regen is more powerful when you have not taken damage for several seconds.

Regen vs. Vitality

Regen provides free long-term sustain, but as long as you have potions, Vitality provides significantly more value per point.

Vitality benefits more from higher Body upgrades, and potions restore a percentage of your maximum HP. Regen, by comparison, is a flat rate and is temporarily reduced after taking damage.

You also receive a full heal whenever your parrot levels up.

Artifacts

How to Get Artifacts

Elite and boss monsters can drop artifact chests. Deeper floors provide better chests.

The trio of elites on Floor 3 is a good early location for farming artifacts.

You can also combine three artifacts and some Aura in the Forge to create a better artifact.

Which Artifacts Should I Use?

Before your first rebirb, use whatever artifacts you can obtain. Artifacts that provide +Damage or increased SP gain generally offer the greatest benefit.

After your first rebirb, artifact recommendations are currently subject to significant rework. The current setup is:

• 1x Point Hoard
• 2x Tempest Harp
• 2x from the following:
  • Spirit Amulet, the best choice in most situations
  • Skull of Reckoning, although Spirit Amulet is more stat-efficient overall
  • Storm Locket, if you are only two-hitting enemies or its splash damage is one-shotting them
  • Depth Chronicle, only on F9
  • Predator Instinct
  • Lone Strider Boots

Fish Buffs

Two of the large +SP fish remain the go-to choices, but the recent rebalance has changed the recommended final slot. +Damage and +Move Speed can each provide better results in some circumstances, and there is currently no settled recommendation for the final slot.

The current best fish are the Floor 2, 4, and 6 Leviathans, with the Floor 6 Oraclefish being a close alternative:

Floor	Fish	SP Bonus
F6	Borealis Leviathan	+155%
F6	Starfrost Oraclefish	+80%
F4	Deepsong Leviathan	+115%
F4	Fathom Oraclefish	+55%
F2	Twilight Leviathan	+86%
F2	Velvet Oraclefish	+40%
F1	Gladewarden Leviathan	+32%

Once you obtain Shiny fish more regularly, Shiny Starfrost at +240% and Shiny Fathom at +165% outperform the weaker Leviathans.

Contracts

Contracts provide different benefits depending on your needs:

• Health and Damage allow you to push farther.
• Regen improves sustain.
• Move Speed provides a useful boost if you are not keeping up with enemy respawn rates.
• SP contracts stack additively with Quest bonuses, making them deceptively weak.

Tiers and T1, T3, T5

Each floor is divided into five enemy tiers, with each tier representing a substantial increase in difficulty.

You can identify tiers by their position on the floor or by the large increase in enemy health.

• T1: The first tier, located level with the portal.
• T3: The third tier, containing the elites.
• T5: The fifth tier, containing the boss.

Update v0.9.9.7 added tier numbers to enemy tooltips, along with enemy health and damage values.

How to Get Auto-Potion

Auto-Potion is an upgrade in the desert progression tree called Emergency Flask.

You can set its activation thresholds from the Equipment page.

What Is Maub’birb?

Maub’birb is an upgrade in the desert progression tree that provides an SP multiplier based on how much golden popcorn you have.

The recommended target is the soft cap of:

• 20x SP multiplier
• 53B golden popcorn

After reaching the soft cap, the bonus scales more slowly. Every additional 5x multiplier costs approximately 10x as much popcorn.

How to Maximize Maub’birb

1. Get Dave to 1,000 Rebirbs

Get Dave to 1,000 rebirbs as quickly as possible to obtain his milestone bonuses.

Use the following leveling build:

1. Spend 9 points in Travel.
2. Spend 1 point in Forage.
3. Repeat the sequence.

Do not invest in Gilded yet, and do not help Dave, because doing so will take XP away from him.

2. Farm Golden Popcorn After 1,000 Rebirbs

Once Dave reaches 1,000 rebirbs:

1. Reset your instincts.
2. Put every single point into Gilded.
3. Use your birb for AFK popcorn farming. Your birb gathers popcorn faster than Dave.
4. Run around in the desert on Auto until you reach the 53B golden popcorn soft cap.
5. Use a GP fish, specifically F4’s Crownwake Serpent.
6. Also equip the largest +Radius fish you have.

You can reach the soft cap in a few hours. This costs some Expedition time, but it is considered worthwhile.

3. Return to the Idle Farming Build

After reaching the soft cap, reset your instincts again and leave Dave on the idle farming build:

450:30:520