Puzzles & Survival Alliance Showdown Guide

Basics & Schedule of Alliance Showdown

Alliance Showdown is a week-long event in Puzzles & Survival that occurs every 3 weeks, starting on Monday. During this event period, members of an alliance can access a shared board of quests and try to complete them to earn points.

Earning enough points as a group will unlock various tiers of rewards that any member who participated can claim. And trust us, these are some very nice rewards.

However, each alliance member has a limited amount of quest attempts and needs to ensure they can actually complete their selected quest before it expires. To make the most of your limited attempts (and resources), you need to make sure you’re selecting the right quests to do – which we’ll go over below.

How to Participate in Alliance Showdown

To participate in Alliance Showdown in Puzzles & Survival, you must be in an alliance with at least 20 members (trivial for any active alliance). 10 minutes before the event begins, you are automatically registered as a participant of the current alliance you’re in.

You cannot change which alliance you’re bound to and can’t do quests (or claim rewards) while in a different alliance – so make sure you’re in your main alliance when the event rolls around.

Luckily, if you have to temporarily leave your bound alliance for whatever reason during Alliance Showdown, you can re-join it and continue on as a participating member (though it will automatically fail any active quest you were on when you left originally).

How Does Alliance Showdown Work?

Let’s make sure you actually understand the format of the event and don’t make any silly mistakes like accidentally claiming an impossible quest.

While Alliance Showdown is active in Puzzles & Survival, an additional icon will appear underneath your notification bar on the left side of your screen for quick access to the quest board. You can also access it via the usual event tab.

Quest Board

Upon checking the event, you’ll be greeted with the site of multiple quests. These quests are shared amongst all of your alliance. So if one person grabs a quest, it’s no longer available for other members to take.

When you tap on any quest, you’ll be able to see the details of it – requirements, how long you have to complete it, and an option to accept it.

If you accept a quest, it’ll appear in the top left box on the board. You can choose to abandon the quest at any point by selecting it and hitting the cancel button (don’t worry, you’ll receive a warning to avoid accidents).

The amount of points you can earn from a quest vary, but the highest amount you can earn from a single one is 240 points. While it would be ideal if every alliance member only did 240 point quests, it’s not practical or feasible for most alliances/players.

Luckily, R4 or higher players in the alliance can delete undesirable quests by tapping on the cancel sign in the top-right corner of each quest. Ideally, you have at least one R4 member actively checking the quest board throughout the day to remove inefficient quests.

Regardless if a quest is deleted or taken by a player, a new quest will appear after 30 minutes. Additionally, upon completing a quest, you must manually turn it in before you can accept another one.

Quest Attempts

You’ll be able to see how many quests you can still attempt in the top right, just under the point/reward tracker. If you run out of quest attempts, you can always purchase more for 1,000 Diamonds by tapping on the plus sign next to your remaining attempts.

However, we only suggest doing this if your alliance is on the cusp of the next reward tier and needs one more push. It feels rather bad to be one of the few players spending their precious resources if the other members aren’t even using up their basic free attempts.

Personal Quest

While nearly all of the quests are shared amongst your alliance, you also have a personal quest that’s offered only to you. This personal quest is always in the second box at the top of the quest board, marked by a star.

This quest is always pulled from the pool of quests that are worth 240 points, can be deleted even if you’re not a R4 or higher, and only takes 10 minutes to generate a new one. However, you can only accept 5 personal quests per day (though it’s rather rare that you’ll reach this limit).

Generally, you want to keep deleting and cycling your personal quest until you get one that lines up with the other concurrent events of the day (or the upcoming one).

Alliance Grade/Rank

Each alliance is ranked by a grade for Alliance Showdown that determines the amount of reward tiers available and how many free quest attempts each player has.

The ranks are as follows:

Every time Alliance Showdown rolls around in Puzzles & Survival, your alliance will be randomly placed in a bracket of 20 alliances across multiple servers.

At the end of the event, the top 5 scoring alliances will be promoted to the next grade and receive a couple extra rewards. Meanwhile, the bottom 5 are demoted a grade, while the rest remain at the same grade.

Naturally, your alliance will want to reach the Star grade as soon as possible and maintain said rank to get more free quest attempts and a chance at more rewards. To that end, you want as large and active of an alliance as possible. Even if it’s just alt accounts, as long as every player is actively participating, reaching (and maintaining) Star grade is completely feasible.

All Rewards & Tiers in Alliance Showdown

Here are all the Alliance Showdown rewards and requirements to claim them. You’ll have to personally contribute enough points to claim all the reward tiers, but it’s rather easy to reach the 1,000 personal points required.

We’ve marked the recommended reward choices in bold, but the final choice is up to you.

All Alliance Showdown Quests in Puzzles & Survival

We’ll be listing all of the quests available in Alliance Showdown as of December 2023, sorted by quest type, and all of their pertinent details. If there are any missing quests from the list, let us know in the comments and we’ll and add them!

Random Quests

One type of quest you’ll often see are random ones marked with a ‘?’ symbol. These random quests always pull from the pool of available quests that have an equivalent point value.

In other words, a 150-point random quest will always end up being one of the other commonly available 150-point quests that you can pick up normally.

In general, these random quests are never worth it unless you’re willing to spend real money to ensure they’re completed. If so, stick solely to the 240-point variants.

Arena Challenge

By far the easiest quest to do for most players. Anyone who has been playing for a while will have plenty of Arena Challenge tickets saved up.

You don’t even have to win to get credit, so you can immediately surrender after starting a match if you just want to get the quest done.

Overlapping Events:

• None

Bioenhancer

Unless you’ve saved up 270 Schemas to use for Bioenhancer Research (and it’s a Bioenhancer event day), you should avoid this type of quest. Even perfectly completing a level 10 Prison Trial run will only get you about halfway done through a 176-point quest.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 5 (Friday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Glory & Bioenhancer (Friday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Consume AP

We don’t recommend doing these quests. Besides probably requiring you to spend AP Refills to complete them on time, these quests don’t offer reward you with a lot of points.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 3 (Wednesday)
  • Strike First (Saturday – Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Strike First (Saturday – Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Consume Stamina

Just like the Consume AP quests, we suggest you avoid these quests. You’ll probably have to use Stamina Refills to complete these on time, and these quests don’t offer many points.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 3 (Wednesday)
  • Strike First (Saturday – Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Strike First (Saturday – Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Craft Nanoweapons

Regardless of which one you pick, you’ll have to use Nanoweapon Instant Crafts to complete this type of quest. Given how valuable Instant Crafts are, you’ll only want to do this type of quest on a Nanoweapon event day.

Note that you get credit towards the quest for starting a craft. This is useful for saving a batch of Instant Crafts if you take the 240-point quest, as you only need to finish 19 crafts and start the 20th one.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Nanoweapon (Monday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Get Nanoweapon Material

Unless it’s the Nanoweapon event day, we advise you to avoid this type of quest for the same reasons listed under the Craft Nanoweapon quest.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Nanoweapon (Monday)
  • Ace Commander Day 6 (Saturday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Consume Diamonds

It’s super easy to know if you can finish these quests or not. However, unless you’re trying to get a high rank during the Diamond Expert event or there’s a valuable currency available only by spending diamonds, it’s usually not worth doing these quests.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Diamond Expert (Saturday – Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Gain Diamonds via Packs

This quest can only be completed if you’re willing to spend real money. Unless there’s another event going on that rewards you for purchasing packs, we really can’t ever recommend taking this quest.

Overlapping Events:

• Random Holiday events will occasionally encourage you to spend real money and buy packs.

Gather Food

Points towards the quest are only granted when your gathering troops return home. If you can freely switch talents, remember to switch to Economy talents before sending your troops out for faster gathering. If you have access to the Swift Gatherer talent, try to send all your marches out to level 7 tiles before using it.

If your Alliance Resource Building is the right type, you can get a huge head start on your quest by leaving a march gathering there for a while before accepting the quest and recalling them.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 3 (Wednesday)
• Week 2:
  • None

Gather Wood

The same tips for gathering food apply here as well: switch to Economy talents before gathering, use Swift Gatherer on level 7 resource nodes, and leave a march gathering in the alliance resource building for a while if it’s the corresponding resource before taking the quest.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 3 (Wednesday)
• Week 2:
  • None

Gather Steel

The same tips for gathering food apply here as well: switch to Economy talents before gathering, use Swift Gatherer on level 7 resource nodes, and leave a march gathering in the alliance resource building for a while if it’s the corresponding resource before taking the quest.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 3 (Wednesday)
• Week 2:
  • None

Gather Gas

The same tips for gathering food apply here as well: switch to Economy talents before gathering, use Swift Gatherer on level 7 resource nodes, and leave a march gathering in the alliance resource building for a while if it’s the corresponding resource before taking the quest.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 3 (Wednesday)
• Week 2:
  • None

Get Gear Material

The first 4 daily quest boxes will give you a bit of Gear Material, but not enough to make a notable dent. You can also spend your Alliance Coins for 1* Gear Enhance material in your Alliance Shop, but there’s typically better things to spend your Alliance Coins on.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 6 (Saturday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Gear Upgrade (Wednesday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Get Gear Material Point Breakdown:

Get Chip Material

You have access to fair chunk of Chip Materials from the daily Ruins exchange shop. If you have any unclaimed chests from Defense of the Alliance, you can get a good chunk of Chip Enhancers from them as well.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 6 (Saturday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Chip & Cube (Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Get Chip Material Point Breakdown:

Get Module Material

The Rare Earth exchange shop offers quite a bit of Module Materials if you’ve saved up enough Rare Earth. Beyond that, you’ll have to mainly rely on your Enhancer/Promoter boxes to finish these quests.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 6 (Saturday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Nova & Module (Thursday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Get Module Material Point Breakdown:

Get Cube Material

In general, we suggest avoiding this type of quest. Obtaining Cube Materials is a lot harder in comparison to other types of materials. You’ll mostly rely on the Random Cube Boxes you get from the last two daily quest boxes for Cube Materials and the usual Enhancer/Promoter boxes.

You could in theory spend your Water Bottles and Flag Capture Coins for Cube Materials, but it’s not worth it since you could get Levina frags instead.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 6 (Saturday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Chip & Cube (Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Get Cube Material Point Breakdown:

Get Modification Materials

Unless you’ve been hoarding Modification Chests like a madman, you’re unlikely to complete the higher-point quests. But if you have been, make sure to take this type of quest on an overlapping event day and choose the corresponding Modifiers from the chests.

For some easy points, you can also grab the Chip Modifiers from the Ruins and the Module Modifiers from the Rare Earth exchange shop.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Nanoweapon (Monday)
  • Ace Commander Day 6 (Saturday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Gear Upgrade (Wednesday)
  • Nova & Module (Thursday)
  • Chip & Cube (Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Get Modification Material Point Breakdown:

Hero Frags

Surprisingly, this type of quest is one of the easiest ones to complete. Doing five 10-pulls from the Adv. Recruitment in the Tavern is usually enough to finish even the 240-point quest.

Unsurprisingly, you want to take this quest only on a Hero Frag event day, which is conveniently Monday for both weeks.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 1 (Monday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Hero Upgrade (Monday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Get Hero Frag Point Breakdown:

Help Allies

If you’re in an active Alliance that believes in helping its members, then this type of quest is trivial. Players can just spam healing a couple units at a time (just enough for about 5-10 seconds) and requesting help.

Simply ask for some helps and usually a couple Alliance members will help you out. Just be prepared to mash the help button.

Overlapping Events:

• Trials of Survivor has daily missions that require you to reach 50 helps.

Mystery Shop

While incredibly easy, these quests are time consuming. It always takes 3 hours for the Mystery Shop to cycle its selection. Typically, you can do 4 offers per cycle.

Notably, the occasional “bonus” exchanges that let you trade diamonds or real money will also count towards this type of quest.

Overlapping Events:

• None

Quiz

Similarly to the Mystery Shop quests, this type of quest takes a while as the time between quiz questions increases with each one. Although, this timer does restart at reset.

Overlapping Events:

• None

Build Speedup

If you still have upgrades left for your minor buildings (resource producers, infirmaries, training camps), they’re a great way to easily complete these quests. They don’t take many resources to upgrade unlike your main buildings, but still let you use plenty of speedups.

That being said, it’s only worth doing this quest when there’s an event rewarding you for spending speedups on buildings.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 2 (Tuesday)
  • Ace Commander Day 7 (Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • New Development (Tuesday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Tech Speedup

Unlike the building variant, there’s no real way to avert the resource cost associated with researching new tech. These quests are only worth doing if you plan on doing a lot of research on a research event day.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 2 (Tuesday)
  • Ace Commander Day 7 (Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • New Development (Tuesday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Training Speedup

Arguably the easiest of the speedup quests, as training large batch of troops isn’t too resource intensive. The best way to do this is set the amount of troops trained so the timer is an increment of 5 minutes (like 12 hours and 35 minutes).

After that, hit the lock button next to the slider to keep it set to that and just keep training new batches of troops while using the auto-speedup function. And yes, both training new troops and upgrading old ones count towards the quest.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 4 (Thurs)
  • Ace Commander Day 7 (Sun)
  • Break Loose (Thurs – Sat)
• Week 2:
  • New Development (Tues)
  • Break Loose (Thurs – Sat)

Build/Tech/Training Speedup

You can effectively treat this type of quest the same as the previous three types. It’s just more flexible. We suggest treating this solely as another training speedup quest.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Days 2 (Tuesday)
  • Ace Commander Day 4 (Thursday)
  • Ace Commander Day 7 (Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • New Development (Tues)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Transport Resources

This quest type has been severely nerfed compared to the past and is not worth taking in most cases anymore. Besides being rather rare, the amount of points you can get is not worth a quest attempt.

Overlapping Events:

• Trials of Survivor technically has daily transport missions, but those can be accomplished by sending literally a single resource to an ally.

Zombie Lair

Given that you always want to be spending your stamina on running lairs, this type of quest is trivial to complete, especially given the generous amount of time you have to complete each quest.

But if you’re trying to complete this type of quest as quickly as possible, run a bunch of level 7 lairs back-to-back. It’s the highest lair you can run at the cheapest stamina cost and is trivial to beat.

Overlapping Events:

• Week 1:
  • Ace Commander Day 3 (Wednesday)
  • Strike First (Saturday – Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)
• Week 2:
  • Strike First (Saturday – Sunday)
  • Break Loose (Thursday – Saturday)

Best Quests to Take in Alliance Showdown

As we mentioned at the start, the best case scenario would be every member of your alliance taking only 240-point quests during Alliance Showdown. However, that’s not really feasible for most players/alliances.

Typically, the highest amount of points most reasonable quests will offer is around 172-176. Of those quests, the easiest ones to complete are resource gathering ones, as anyone can do them at no cost.

Quests that require you to spend speedups or get materials like Chips are only worth doing when there is a concurrent event going on, otherwise you’re missing out on lucrative event rewards. As such, R4s should be deleting these quests when they don’t align with any other event.

Always Worthwhile Quests

In short, always keep an eye out for the following quests, as they cost next to nothing to complete:

• Any of the 172-point resource gathering quests
• Help Allies quests, especially the one worth 210 points
• Zombie Lair quests, especially the one worth 184 points
• Mystery Shop quests, especially the ones worth 180/210 points (ignore the 175 one, takes too long)
• Quiz quests, especially the one worth 167 points

Sometimes Worthwhile Quests

Depending on which concurrent events are working that week, you’ll want to keep an eye on the 240-point quests and determine which ones might be worth doing. The two most commonly worthwhile ones are the Training Speedup and Get Hero Frags quests.

On training speedup event days, players can easily justify spending around 20 days worth of speedups, so it’s a good time to do the related 240-point quests. As for the Hero Frags, most players will have more than enough Recruit Tokens or Hero Choice Cards on standby during a Hero Event day to even complete the quest five times over.

Quests like Get Chip Materials can be worthwhile if you’re planning to aim for a high rank during a respective event day. Just make sure you have enough materials on hand.

Never Worthwhile Quests

Random quests are never worth taking unless you’re willing to spend real money to ensure they’re completed (or are desperate to complete a quest when there’s only an hour left in the event). At most, only one or two 240-point random quests should be left on the quest board if you have an alliance member willing to take them.

As we mentioned above in their respective sections, the quests for consuming AP/Stamina and transporting resources are pretty much never worth doing due to the low point values and unreasonable criteria.