Realm Grinder beginner's guide
Tips and to-dos for this surprisingly deep fantasy idle sim. You'll be earning billions of gems in no time.
Do your research
Research is one of the end-game systems for progressing in Realm Grinder, which is first unlocked at R16. Before actually doing any research, though, you’ll have to unlock the facilities for each faction’s specialty. Fortunately, the tooltips for the research facility quests do give their requirements to unlock.
To save yourself a bit of heartache, consider starting with the Elf faction. The final cost to build each research facility includes a large number of Faction Coins, which Elves excel at producing. Make sure not to abuse your excavations ahead of these big purchases. You’ll likely need the boost in Faction Coins they can provide.
At each Reincarnation level, you will have a set number of research points to spend and finite upgrade slots to use them on. Upgrades must be unlocked by meeting certain requirements (sound familiar yet?). A full list of requirements by upgrade can be found on the wiki. While working on unlocking upgrades, don’t worry too much about increasing your gems. You’ll spend most of your time focusing on unlocking upgrades. The requirements for these upgrades are pretty steep, requiring a lot of patience and repetition.
To alleviate a bit of the memory work, you can save and import research builds which purchase the desired upgrades for you. Bear in mind, loading a template will only purchase as many upgrades as you can afford at the time it’s loaded. Each build is a long string of letters and numbers denoting the facility and desired upgrade.
As Realm Grinder has been updated, different sources for tested builds have fallen in and out of use. G00fball’s Not-a-wiki is one of the more up-to-date sources for tested builds at the moment.
Read onwards
For a more detailed itinerary to starting Realm Grinder, check out 1bookboy’s guide on the Kongregate forums.
G00fball’s Not-a-Wiki is an up-to-date alternative to the Realm Grinder Wikia site with plenty of build templates for your later gameplay needs
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Lauren has been writing for PC Gamer since she went hunting for the cryptid Dark Souls fashion police in 2017. She accepted her role as Associate Editor in 2021, now serving as self-appointed chief cozy games and farmlife sim enjoyer. Her career originally began in game development and she remains fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long fantasy books, longer RPGs, can't stop playing co-op survival crafting games, and has spent a number of hours she refuses to count building houses in The Sims games for over 20 years.
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