A somewhat comprehensive guide until Plane 10. Preface This guide was born out of sheer frustration about all the weird advice thrown around on the game's discord. Most of the people there have played this game during the early access release and their memory is both faulty and incorrect with the current version. When writing this I have actually started and replayed on a fresh save so, hopefully, everything inside is relevant in comparison. First, two massive quality of life tips: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hc8YY-APFIxy_QgNGo7Y-KJHoH68CIkbRRm1vPHYwwM/edit?gid=1059812662#gid=1059812662 This guide is invaluable to figure out who is who and what is sold where. Specifically you are insterested in "all shop" and "Hero" pages. The game doesn't have a decent enough index for these things and without this spreadsheet finding anything is PAIN. Redeem Zhao Yun with the code 6666 in the "input" box on the settings page. It will display as 6.66 when inputted but pressing OK should work. Zhao Yun is, by far, the best tank in the game and without him starting will be more painful than it needs to be. Desert Eagle Do not sell your desert eagle under any circumstances. It is the most OP broken piece of equipment you will have in a long while and it only needs you reaching plane 3 to show it. You will be able to upgrade it with quenching stones there and it is much stronger than anything else of the relevant tier for a very long while. Speed Speed is king. While the game CAN be played with slow characters in your party, Imo, everyone with the AGI stat below 40 doesn't belong in your main team. The reason is pretty simple: you are in the constant struggle with the enemies of who gets to steamroll first. If they act before you do, chances are - they have already won. The only exceptions to that rule are Diao Chan and Hua Tuo. Both because you don't really have a choice in the matter although Diao Chan is only necessary when you are transitioning from plane 1 to plane 2 and can be safely stuffed into the antique store afterwards. Hua Tuo just doesn't seem to have a good enough substitute for a healer early on (that you wouldn't want to stuff into your city) and then she is kinda sunken cost matter and levelling someone else becomes a bother. She's serviceable and her role is not as important at least. Skills > forge Everyone who tells you to "enchance your items to +5" when you are having problems is misleading you, most likely because they have never checked if it's actually required and took the "easiest" route. Here's what you need to understand about skills in the game to actually use those properly: You only have 3 skill slots for the active triggerable skills that you can fill (you can replace and rearrange whenever) The skills from classes that do not match your current class get completely disabled Every skill you can buy from shops has an active and a passive effect You can "forget" the skills and this returns all the skill points, but not the cash/merit used to learn them You can freely forget all the "intermediate" skills you had to learn to reach tier 3's without consequences Point 3 is the most important thing of it all. Passive bonuses from skills that are not on your action bar matter. A lot. They cover (and more) for that +5 advice if applied properly. Specifically, you want to learn both tier 1 passives from Mojin: Banshan faction to level 30, on literally everyone. Those are cheap and fix your speed in a huge way. the rest of the passives order is in the air, but those 2 you literally have no reason not to assing to everyone immediately. Speaking of other bonuses: with the notable exception of your shield tank everyone should only learn passives for speed and attack (or magical attack for casters). hp/def/mdef simply do not matter for literally everyone else. (Except maybe off-tank, but I am not convinced it's that necessary, you only need to keep your maintank alive at all costs, a death of an offtank is not an immediate death sentence for the rest of the party quite often) Order of active skills Order of active skills is the difference between failing miserably and actually winning. When acting, the characters will always use the leftmost skill that they have the energy for that is not on cooldown. The consequences of that are thus: there is a skill called "prewar incentive" that in the earlygame you want to have on pretty much everyone. What it does is spends your turn to generate 2 energy, effectively putting you ahead on energy curve by a turn at the cost of a turn. This is a pretty widely used thing in a lot of games, but in MLH an important distinction is that we re automating skill order. Why does it matter? Suppose we have an order: Prewar, Attack(3 energy) The sequence your characters will take will be : prewar, prewar, attack, prewar (because attack is still on cooldown), attack Note how we just wasted a full turn casting prewar a second time even if by turn 2 we already had 3 energy. if we instead rearrange skill order into Attack(3 energy), prewar The skill usage order will be: prewar, Attack 1, prewar, Attack 1 you are starting to bash the enemies a full turn earlier. Note: to gain merit for the skills you will want to assign an agent to the plane to accept quests automatically. I suggest immediately unchecking "defeat enemy" and "challenge enemy" tickmarks. Those actively interfere with the speed of quest refreshing and make things longer than they should be. Party formations There's a certain formation that's being actively pushed as the best for the earlygame called "split tank". It looks like this: _ _ _ _ O _ _ _ _ _ M D D D T T is your main tank, O is offtank, D is dps, and M is a medic. Here's my honest opinion: from the moment your main tank learns "18 bronz" shield skill (fairly early on - it's in the second world) this formation becomes irredeemable garbage. Only use it until that point and never again. Instead switch to "joint tank" _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ O M D D D T the reason is that "18 bronz" will give shields to the characters directly below and above your main tank, improving your overall survivability by a lot. The reason we are using M D D D T as a single line is simple: we are concentrating the firepower on a single line so that things in that line die faster reducing the overall damage intake we receive while our offtank is drawing all attacks from rows 2 and 3. This formation will see you through most of the earlygame and will only need to be adjusted once a summoner becomes available. City building There are two sides of a coin here: First: do not neglect the city. An understandable but unfortunate starting mistake is "I will get to that once I cannot progress through battles anymore". It doesn't work like that. You party's overall power is directly tied to the speed of your research, your research speed is tied to your builder and your builder is tied to your main plane money income. On the other hand, until you reach plane 10 you ONLY strictly need these buildings: museum, builder, forge, research institute and, maybe, depending on how you progress later, Synthesis Institute. Note that you only need to bother with the museum once your Mojin reputation is at Worship rank. Only then you will have people to actually work there. But you need a lot of faction merit from Mojin anyway so spending time there is worth it. Important note: research "auto-sell" as fast as realistically possible and in your party screen set auto-sell->"on drop items"->"delicate and below" + "priority antique store listings". This will ensure that all the actual junk you receive will produce money on the main plane. Notes particular to each building: Builder: send Xing Daorong to work there as soon as you have full party without him. Make sure that builder is always doing something, it needs exp. Research: this is a bit of a pain point since zhuge liang is actually a really great combat character, but he really, really belongs in research from the moment you recruit him and literally forever. The most important thing to understand about research insititute is that its output is directly tied to the amount and quality of the Industry buildings surrounding it. So build it in the corner, then buy two plots of land next to it, build two industries in there, build more plots, etc... When you have enough money to buy the plots further in, migrate rearch institute so that there's more industries that can surround it. Forge: stuff Young Master Lin there once you get him. Dump all the level 3 and 4 ores inside and forget about him for a while. You literally don't need to do anything other than "upgrade" the desert eagle in the forge for quite a while and that will take Quenching stones, not forge points. Just let forge points accumulate slowly for the next 50-60 hours. When someone else with forging ability joins(that is not zhao yun), stuff them there too. TLDR is that forge is great but we will not be able to get much use of it until we can level up its workers effectively and that's not for a while. Once you have enough plots of land move it next to the research institute so that it can benefit from the industries too. Do not worry about spending "valuable" quenching stones early. Later you will be burning through thousands of them regularly. The increased item find of lategame makes grinding for those trivial. NOTE: while you *can* use those forge points to "enchance" your gear early on, I think it's a waste of points. Passives and quench upgrading the desert eagle will give you more than enough attack power to push through everything for now. Museum: once your get your two clerks for that from Mojin plane, stuff it with Peerless items to the brim, *expand the stall count to level 10* and put some more Peerless items in. Additionally research ticket price in the institute. Once this is done - antique store becomes largely irrelevant. I specifically mention peerless items because museum's income is directly related to the quality of the items on the pedestals. once you have extra heavenly items, replace peerless with those, etc... Synthesis Institute: build it, stuff it with whoever (not hua tuo, you need her), dump your exotics in there, forget it exists until at least level 40-50. That's all there is to it in the early game. While you will need those synth points, it will be much later. Once you have enough plots of land move it next to the research institute and the forge so that it can benefit from the industries too. TLDR about synth points: you need them to upgrade the skill cooldown gemstones later but you will not get any for a while. When you gain some people with management ability - assign them as managers for each building you have. Assign either Tokugawa Ieyasu or Isabella as your CEO. The tldr is that building output is ceo*director*manager*(worker productivity) with ceo affecting every building at once and manager/director affecting every worker in that building at once. Of note: as someone correctly pointed out, you can level up your workers in the city to wear work efficiency gear for better output, the reason I am not sure whether this is necessary till plane 10 is because reaching abyss speeds up your leveling so much that everything you can realistically assign to them will immediately be outclassed by gear of higher level that they will be able to wear once you adjutant-level them there. So if you want take things slow - you can absolutely outfit them with work efficiency early, there is no harm in that. But the gains will also be massively smaller than what you should expect once you hit abyss for experience. Party composition The preferred earlygame composition is generally a healer, three dps, and two tanks. Notable exception to that is transition from plane 1 to plane 2 where for a short while you want two healers and two dps instead as the enemies do too much damage to stay afloat with just one medic. Once you start getting extra characters - assign adjutants to everyone. This makes these extra characters level up alongside your mains and their stats directly buff the characters they are assigned to. Do not neglect it, it's a really powerful buff as long as you keep these extra characters gear-relevant. In the same vein: once you can kill level 10 divine beasts in realistic time, make sure every character your are using and their adjutants have a beast assigned. it doesn't need to be ultra optimal for now, but everyone *does* need a beast as buffs from those, again, are not insubstantial. Note that adjutants need those too since their stats buffed by the beasts are then used as a buff for your main. Of note: do NOT use a warrior class. At all. Respec lubu into an archer or something but under no circumstances does a warrior belong on your team. This class is garbage tier until you reach the last plane when it actually becomes OP but that's that, and this is this. Can always respec and level the class then. I prefer to go physical DPS route because the archer class gets two aoe skills the earliest which means their aoe is on cooldown less often. Spec your main tank guard as a shielder. Shield is effectively free second hp pool. Who to use as your main tank is a matter of debate, but I am, personally, of the opinion, that zhao yun is strictly the best choice. he will activate his shield really fast and his INT stat isn't as garbage as, say, lubu. Some people say to use sweeping monk... yeah, I have a very vehement disagreement with that. Too slow. While zhao yun will have no use of his high strength in that role, the point is: desert eagle is *disgustingly op* and as long as you keep its level relevant it largely doesn't matter what is the strength of its user so you can give it to whoever and they will still be plenty strong, no need to pair zhao yun and deagle. Therefore, zhao yun is not needed as a DPS. OTOH, having a very fast, durable and non trash INT shielder does wonders to your party's survivability. Note: I suggest you make Xin Shisiniang your summoner once you are into Liaozhai tales, she is relatively fast and has no skills you would miss in your city. You can peruse the character index from the link above to find someone else, but I honestly think that she's the best fit until much later unless you spend an unholy amount of time farming someone else from major battles of earlier planes, but, honestly, this is exactly what "much later" means in my books. Not worth the time expenditure, when you can just push forward. Overall party progression DPS: - every dps fights individual enemies - every dps has prewar incentive and a single aoe - every dps has prewar incentive and two aoes - you break the game with skill cooldown reduction and +energy regen on your mc and everyone else becomes unnecessary for regular fights (the earliest this can happen is at about plane 8, I have done it, but do not expect it to happen realistically, until plane 10) Tank: - Two people take the hits - Two people take the hits on their shield - Fast summoner replaces one of the tanks to protect middle row - No tank necessary, once your DPS break the cooldwon reduction if the enemy isn't dead before they move your are doing it wrong Healer: - One healer - Two healers (only for plane 1-2 transition) - One healer with prewar and aoe heal - (optionally, at around level 50) No dedicated healer, just summoner healing when they do not need to summon - Healer becomes energy battery with +energy skills for MC Party itemization There's not a whole lot to say about it in the early game. Just keep your desert eagle relevant and equip the best you get on everyone and their adjutants. Everyone who doesn't have desert eagle should prioritize mainhand weapons with +speed. The most important thing happens at about level 45 where you can start farming major battle in 3 kingdoms plane for the +1 energy regen offhand. Immediately do so. Preferably saving beforehand. You kind of need two of those at least. One for your summoner and one for your shielder, they have a very low chance to drop form the first fight of the battle but it's the only thing that I'd say savescumming is worth for. They make THAT much of a difference. Not that you strictly need to savescum for those. On my first playthrough I took long enough to reach that point to have more than enough instance tickets and on my testing playthrough for this guide, despite expecting to savescum I actually did receive a second one with the last ticket I had. Go figure. Note: Make sure your autosell options for both rarity and item level don't make it so it gets auto sold when drops. Ideally, you want as many as you can get. They are MATK and you will be a physical DPS if you follow my advice, but that doesn't really matter. The loss of some ATK is more than compensated by the fact that you will be able to AOE much faster. The next important part I'd say comes at plane 7, where you can farm and create a purple two set called Victory with ring and an amulet from battle 10. This has 18% cooldown reduction and this is kinda massive, ngl. Both because the effect is incredible and the because ring/amulet are the least important of your gear pieces and thus needs replacing the least letting you keep that CDR without much trouble. Note: I found very little use of Secret area during the writing of this for actual items. The gains were pretty meh(only because this save was rushing through the content and couldn't actually stay and farm). However, I suggest you do farm skill cooldown reduction stones starting from maybe level 35-40 from it when you can. Those matter quite a bit. Stones in general matter as they directly improve your core stats and you want everyone have a full set, but CDR stones are much more important than anything else in there. P.S. It's a bit of a common sense, but try to equip your shielder with as much shield bonus items as possible. I am unconvinced about shield limit tbh. While checking this all on a new save, it wasn't really necessary most of the time. Main character and treasures from the book You will likely bounce/rebuy treasures around as needed. The outliers are +10 agi stone which you want to have pretty much always. The HP skill book which your shielder needs to start learning as soon as they have their aoe shield from Crusades plane and the ATK bonus book, which yuor MC needs to start learning immediately upon receiving his second AOE skill. You technically want +research book most of the time, but if your party suffers one way or another because it took place of something relevant- just return it for a time. Career,exp and skill learning treasures are all very nice, so try to fit them in whenever possible, but they are not strictly required. Your MC should probably be spending the stars on agi initially, then strength balanced with AGI. redistribute as needed. At one, very short, point I found it prudent to actually max his MEN+CON but that was a very brief transition moment at around japan's warring states plane. Note that MC's core talent literally doesn't matter until like, plane 5-6 at least, don't bother till then. Only when you start gaining gemstones does it become relevant and even then it's a bit early to optimize it. So yeah, planes 7+. Unless I remember something else, these are the most important points to cover about earlygame.These should see you to the Abyss on plane 10, at which point the game becomes completely different. And pretty much everything about the prior party composition loses its meaning. Post thoughts I specifically avoided doing a plane by plane progression despite the initial assertion about "until plane 10" because the above will see you through every plane until then. Once you hit the plane 10 and can start farming abyss you can just stunlock the beast king to raise the exp from beast waves and your levels start skyrocketing so fast that everything before becomes irrelevant. It is at that point where fully fleshing out your city becomes both necessary and feasible in realistic time but that's another story: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3641850808