Idle Superpowers – Ultimate Guide for New Players

Tips, tricks, and avoiding common blunders. This is not a walkthrough, This is a crash course on some of the game basics.

Beginners Guide to Basics

All credit goes to alephyin!

First Things First

This is a semi-idle game, active play is encouraged and you won’t get very far if you just leave it running and forget about it for a day or twenty. This is also a single player game if you mess up you can always just load an earlier save(provided you have one).

Most things in the game can be clicked on and will give you detailed information. such as all stats, enemy powers, etc.

Everything is multiplicative so if you have bonuses that do the same thing, they multiply each other, not add together. (x5 +x5 =25, 10% + 10% = 1%, etc.)

A Note On Numbers

This game has exponential growth. in many games x2 damage seems awesome, in this game it is a waste. Three x2 multipliers are not as good as one x10 multiplier.

Gems and What to Do with Them

• You get gems throughout the game from achievements and sometimes from the daily reward.
• Gems can be used in the gem shop or to reroll your power choices when you have a power to pick.
• Best uses for gems are autostory in the gem shop and saving the rest for rerolling.

None of the other options in the gem shop are worthwhile and while you can get some meager stat multipliers here if you want. I strongly suggest you do not get the vitality upgrade as this can cripple some builds and cannot be changed later except through a hard reset.

Stats

Mainstats

• Strength – provides max damage and block rating.
• Dexterity – provides minimum damage and accuracy.
• Agility – provides evasion and attack speed rating.
• Vitality – provides health, regeneration, and block rating.

Substats

Max Damage

• Only damage on death will always deal max damage.
• There are very few powers that multiply strength or max damage.
• There are powers that convert any of the other substats into max damage so focusing on multipliers for that stat will multiply your max damage.
• It is not recommended to focus directly on this stat.

Min Damage

• Provides max damage.
• Many things will always do min damage (at start of fight, on evade, on negative buff, etc).
• There are very few powers that multiply dexterity or minimum damage.
• There is one power that converts another substat into min damage (accuracy via eagle eyes).

Block

• Reduces damage you receive.
• Can be converted to max damage.
• Due to the nature of exponential growth, this is not a reliable defence.

Evasion

• Gives a chance to not be hit by attacks (based on your rating compared to the enemies accuracy).
• Can be converted to max damage.
• Has several powers that increase it, but some of them only work against some enemies.
• Evasion dodge chance has a minimum of 5% and a maximum of 95%.
• Not a reliable defence.

Attack speed

• Can be converted to max damage.
• Increases your attacks per second (up to 30. While it can display higher numbers, the cap on actual attacks is hard-coded and cannot be acceded).
• A decent amount of attack speed is required for any attack based build to run smoothly.

Accuracy

• Gives a chance to hit the enemy with attacks (based on your rating compared to the enemies evasion).
• Can be converted to minimum damage.
• Has several powers that increase it significantly.
• Accuracy hit chance has minimum of 5% and a maximum of 95%.
• A significant amount is required for any attack based build to run smoothly.

Health

• You can take more damage before dying.
• Has several powers that increase it significantly.
• Current health can be converted to str, agi, or dex (the dex conversion is unlocked later).
• Missing health can be converted to str, agi, or dex.
• It takes longer to heal to full after dying.

Regeneration

• Can be converted to max damage.
• Has few powers that multiply it.
• Reduces time spent dead.
• Very important to have some of if you can die.
• Undesirable if you rely on having a lot of missing health and can’t die.

Basic Progression Build Planning

One-shot everything.

Don’t plan layers of defences or try to be a jack of all trades. Hyper focus on maximising clear speed and take only the required utility powers.

Mechanics to plan for:

Death

Either be immune to death, or make death work for you. (with the power of undying you only have a 1 in 1000 chance of dying when the enemy would kill you)

Block

The enemy blocks a percentage of all damage you would deal. While it’s technically possible to overcome the block with enough damage, that’s not really feasible most of the time. so every build will need a way to bypass block. The amount of block you bypass doesn’t matter as much as your chance to bypass block and deal damage. Radiation Body and Pyrokinesis both will always get through the enemies block.

Stuns

Some enemies stun you preventing you from making any attacks for the duration. that duration can be rather long and sometimes permanent.

There are a few ways to deal with this.

1. Die. Dying removes all buffs and debuffs.
2. Reduce the duration of negative buffs. There are eight powers that do this and one or two will easily solve this issue.
3. Don’t rely on attacks there are other ways to deal damage without attacking.

Powers, What Is Good and What Is Bad?

Radiation Body (unlocked after you receive 30k damage) is one of the best powers in the game. the damage on death is very useful at the start and it has the best block bypass.

Quality of life powers are important. focus on best effect for fewest powers. one power to to give you the agi/attack speed you need, maybe an attack charge power(you attack is ready at the start of combat) or forcefield (you deal 10% of minimum damage before combat even starts and it always hits) a good regen power if your hero can die, or buff duration increasers if you’re using a buff focused build

Synergies are what you want to focus on, power combinations that directly complement each other. converting substats to damage means that any multipliers to that substat or the mainstat that provides that substat will apply to your base damage before any damage multipliers. and you can convert health to mainstats allowing vitality and health multipliers to also multiply your damage output. there are other types of synergies to be found.

There are six types of powers:

1. Powers that you need for the build to function (How you deal damage or basic synergies.).
2. Utility powers that don’t affect your damage output but are needed to progress.
3. Powers that multiply your damage output (Not add to it, but in some way multiply it.).
4. QoL powers that help speed things along.
5. Bad Powers that actively make your progression slower or stop it altogether.
6. Useless Powers that do none of the above and just waste a power selection.

Powers that seem good but are actually bad (AKA the noob traps):

God Power

• This power is actually good, but can be bad.
• It gives x20 to all four main stats. this is one of the best stat multis in the game. If you’re converting current and/or missing hp to another stat this becomes a x400 multiplier for that stat which is great.
• The other thing this power does is gives a 90% of healing to 10% instead of dying when an enemy would kill you. This seems good, but a 1 in 10 chance of dying is not something to rely on keeping you alive when you’re getting hit for several times your health 30 times a second.
• Do not take this for death avoidance, it doesn’t replace undying.

Acid Generation (AKA the worst power in the game)

• This power provides a stacking debuff on the enemy reducing their block by 90%.
• Seems great. Except this applies to block rating instead of block %.
• Okay, but a few stacks of that and the debuff says their block is reduced to 0%.
• You may think at this point 100% of your damage is going through
• And you would be wrong. Because 0% is not 0%, it’s just rounded down in the display, it’s actually 0.000001% or something similar. A fraction of a huge number is still a huge number. You will never be able to ignore enemy block with this, only slightly reduce the insane amount of damage you would need to overcome it.
• It does sort of work at very low levels when there is no significant block yet, but it still requires longer combat which means you’ll be progressing an order of magnitude slower than if you could just one-shot the enemy with proper block bypass.

Dots

Three powers (Poison Tears, Emotion Manipulation, Music Waves) deal damage every second based on your missing hp.

This is bad for two reasons.

1. it’s really, really slow.
2. there’s no way to scale the damage aside from increasing health.

While these aren’t bad powers because of this, the damage over time part of the powers is useless.

Yes, even on the zero attack speed challenge.

These aren’t bad powers, just ignore the damage over time aspect of them.

Head explode (and other chance to deal % of enemies max health on hit)

Looking at it, you’d think this would give a chance to instantly kill any enemy. Unfortunately the damage this power deals, like all other damage, is reduced by block. The Chance of this skill triggering enough times to outpace regen is tiny and is never worth taking.

Power Removal and Gear removal powers

These powers gradually make a fight easier over time. Combat should not be lasting long enough that they can make an impact. Some players insist these are useful powers and it helped them get past hard areas, however those areas were only so hard because they invested in slow powers like these instead of increasing their damage output.

Stuns

There are numerous stun powers in the game. They can briefly stop the enemy from attacking you. no build benefits from this and several are will slow down or be stopped by stunning he enemy.

Fear Powers

There are four powers that boost a mainstat based on how much health the enemy is missing. This is another power that only matter in longer fights, better to make the fights shorter.

Equipment

• Equipment unlocks at level ten.
• The shop can be upgraded, each upgrade will add a new piece of equipment to the shop inventory every time it restocks.
• Restock cost is based on the level you’re on and amount of times you’ve restocked it this run.
• Restock cost gradually decreases over the course of five minutes until it reaches zero.
• On your first few runs the cost of equipment will outpace your gold income and you will no longer be able to buy equipment around level 100.

• Equipment increases your stats.
• Common equipment only has one modifier and it will increase one of the four mainstats. The name and image for it will reflect which stat it benefits (Hammer increases str, Shield increases vit, Glove increases dex, Hunterglove increases agi, etc)

• Uncommon and better equipment have more modifiers on them based on the rarity (up to six).
• Mods beyond the first can be any of the four mainstats or eight substats (min damage, max damage, health, regen, accuracy, evasion, block, attack speed).
• The rarity of gear does not affect how strong the mods on the item are, the power of the mods is based solely on the level of the item.
• When restocking the shop looking for a specific substat you can automatically hide all common items so it’s easier to see (this is done in the settings page).

• In the gem shop you can buy upgrades to allow you to spend more gold to restock for one guaranteed rare, epic, or legendary item. (at an increased restock price)
• These upgrades are not worth getting since we only care about common, uncommon, and (for the achievements only) godlike. In most cases having multiple items giving the same benefit is only a marginal and not significant increase.

Powers and when you get them (and also a note about timelines)

You gain a power choice on completing level 1, 50, every 50 levels after that until 300, then every 100 levels for a while.

There are a couple exceptions to this.

The first is timelines which i’ll cover below. The second is the boss at 1500, it has three phases and each one awards a power choice.

At first you are only given one power to choose. This can be upgraded up to eight powers to choose from later on.

If the powers you can choose from aren’t good you can reroll to randoms power in exchange for gems. The first reroll is always free. The reroll cost will go up sharply the more you progress, so early on it’s advised to only reroll the first couple of powers as needed since they only cost 1-2 gems per reroll and then stick with what you get after.

Timelines

• The first time you play the game you get a power when you beat level 30. This is the Original Timeline. After you time travel (unlocked once you reach level 70) you have the option to choose which timeline you take.
• You choose the timeline by either taking the quest choice to talk to timebro at level 20(alternate timeline) or taking the quest choice to touch the gem at level 30(original timeline)
• In the original timeline you get an extra power at level 30, and you fight a powerful boss named Rezorb at level 70 (beating him here unlocks the power Undying)
• In the alternate timeline instead of getting a power at 30 you can time travel and restart as soon as you select timebro, and Rezorb is much weaker and you don’t face him until level 110.

• If you have autostory from the gem shop and wish to change timelines, you must disable it in settings first.
• It’s almost always better to take the original timeline for the extra power.
• It is sometimes worthwhile to take the alternate timeline if you want to quickly restart or if you’ll be unable to beat Rezorb at level 70 for some reason.

Time Travel, When to Do It and What It’s Good for

Time travel when things are slow and combat is taking a few seconds or longer. Unless you’re about to get a new power that will speed things up, or you’re close to unlocking something important. (a power, a challenge, or you’re 10% or more towards a major time energy upgrade).

• The most important time energy upgrade is portable powers. Each level of this upgrade allows you to select one of the power you have to keep with you when you start the next run. This is huge.
• The second most important upgrade is chooseable powers. Each level of this upgrade increases(up to 8) the number of powers you have to choose from when you get to pick a new power.
• You can through spare time energy at the other upgrades as you like, there’s no need to save it up.
• There are 17 more upgrades that can be unlocked by completing challenges.

Portable Powers, What Should I Take?

• This is an easy one, take what you need.
• And by that i mean take what power(s) you absolutely need for your build to function.
• This should be reserved for irreplaceable powers only. If more than one power can fill a slot in your build, you can find one of them during your run. Same with stat multipliers, they’re easy to get.
• Focus on core mechanics only and utility/quality of life if you have spare room.

Challenges, Always

Challenges make the game harder for a bit in exchange for some rewards once you beat them.
Or so it seems at first glance.

Challenges change the game slightly, some of these can be used to make it easier for specific builds.

• Yolo is a buff to high health builds.
• Frugal is a buff to low health builds.
• Fat is integral to builds that rely on getting hit.
• Decay is great for builds that can make negative regen work in your favour.
• Dice is incredibly useful when you want to find a specific power to make portable.
• Mimic has been used in several interesting ways.

Chances are, one of these challenges will benefit your build no matter what it is.

But wait, there’s more. Each level give a multiplier based on the highest level you’ve reached in it, Challenge completion has no bearing on this, so you can do just 20 levels or 20 thousand levels. The multipliers for each challenge are all multiplied together, and the resulting number multiplies your time energy gain when you time travel.

So doing just a bit of each challenge is a great way to increase your time energy.

If you can be in a challenge, you should be.

Challenges of note and importance.

The Daily Challenge

• As the name implies, this changes every day and is proceduraly generated.
• It can only be attempted once per day.
• Unlike the other challenges, The multi is based on your total levels, so each run will increase the multi.
• You are awarded gems based on how far you get every day.

Unpopular

• The powers you can choose wile be the ones you chose the least.
• Rerolling powers doesn’t work
• Unlocks the incredibly useful (and expensive) Portable Equipment upgrade.
• This is easiest to complete either as early as possible, or much later.
• Strategy to do this early: move to this when switching from one build to a new one that you haven’t used the powers of yet(your portables are safe though). Maybe do a few runs to 20 to knock some useless powers off the list before you give it a serious go. Or do it later when your portable powers are enough to carry you past level 600.

Just Some Guy

• No powers, no gold.
• Unlocks sublevel multi, this upgrade decreases the amount of enemies you have to fight to pass each level.
• If you have portable equipment it will make short work of this challenge, otherwise have a high exp multi and be sure to take the alternate timeline.

Dice

• Every time you take a power, all your powers are randomised.
• Unlocks overkill (if you do more damage than the enemies current health, that damage carries over to the next enemy)
• Strategy is to rely on 3 portable powers to take you as far as they can and then slowly pick powers until you get a combination that can take you the rest of the way.

Dumb

• You can’t get exp.
• Unlocks overkill limit (Your excessive damage can keep killing enemies, upgrades to 100)
• Simply have portable gear for base stats and play as normal.

The remaining challenges are not as important to complete and will happen in due time. That stat multiplier upgrade some of them unlock is not terribly useful as it only applies to the base stats bought with exp and not base stats gained from gear or powers.

Mastery, How Does It Work?

Mastery is a way of upgrading powers.

Initially the upgrades are very minor for most powers but they do keep increasing linearly.

Mastery powers upgrade every hundred levels. at first you’ll only be able to get a few levels in a couple powers, later on you can get hundreds of levels.

You gain mastery by having only one power and killing new enemies. The mastery rating for any power is equal to the highest level enemy you’ve killed while having only that power and no other powers.

Once you upgrade a power it will unlock rotation (The third tab of the power model, after the powerdex) Your total amount of mastery levels with all powers is used to unlock rotation powers. There are 36 rotation powers in total, but only four are available to unlock at any time. A new power cycles in and the oldest power cycles out every day.

Once you have 36 unlocks of rotation powers, New procedurally generated powers become available. These can be the best powers in the game.