Puzzles & Survival Resources Guide: Build & Upgrade

Main Resources

The game features four main resources (Food, Wood, Steel, and Gas) that are used to build, research, and train in your Sanctuary. Having enough resources to upgrade will be by far your biggest hurdle for most of the game.

Any resource you have on-hand is displayed at the top of your screen and can be used immediately for training, building, etc. However, it also means they’re vulnerable to being stolen (except for Diamonds) by other players if they successfully attack your Sanctuary.

Thankfully, resources in your bag can not be stolen. For that reason alone, you should never convert your resource items into actual resources until it’s time to use them.

If you try to start a project and don’t have enough resources on-hand, the game will prompt you to automatically convert just enough resources from your bag to do so. If your bag is also lacking resources, the number will be red, and you should hold off on converting your items.

How to Get Resources in Puzzles & Survival

• Gathering at resource nodes in the open world.
• Collecting from your resource generating buildings in your Sanctuary.
• Stealing them from other players by successfully attacking their Sanctuary.
• Killing zombies and lairs in the open world for supply boxes that you can open from your bag.
• Exchanging Rare Earth you earn from the Pit for resources.
• Earning enough points in events to claim tier rewards.

Food and Wood are used in large quantities for pretty much everything, but are also a lot easier to obtain from events and gathering. Steel and Gas are mostly used for higher-end projects and tend to be a pain point for most players due to their slower gathering rate.

On occasion you’ll obtain Resource Boxes (mostly from events) in your bag which can be converted into any resource. We recommend saving them and turning them into Steel/Gas when needed. The Pit is another fantastic place to get large amounts of a specific resource by exchanging in the Rare Earth shop.

Diamonds

Diamonds are the premium currency (bought with real money) of the game but can be earned for free in large amounts by actively completing events. They can be used for pretty much anything – instantly finish timers on any projects, buy any missing resources you’re missing, and obtain extremely valuable items.

However, we strongly recommend hoarding your diamonds and waiting for the diamond-spending event. You’ll be able to obtain some very nice rewards, and a special diamond shop (or some other major diamond spending event) will be active allowing you to obtain rare items for discounted prices.

Alternatively, wait until the diamond-spending event and instead use your diamonds to purchase VIP points to increase your VIP level and unlock special benefits.

VIP Points and Levels

The VIP system is a secondary leveling system that grants you various permanent benefits. If you look at the top left corner of your screen, you’ll notice a VIP button next to your avatar picture. Tapping it will show your current VIP benefits and how many points are needed to reach the next level.

You earn increasing amounts of VIP points for each consecutive day you login to the game, but this is a rather slow process. The main way you’ll obtain VIP points is by spending diamonds specifically for them (ideally you buy 5k VIP points for the best price-to-points ratio). Waiting to do so until the diamond-spending event just earns you substantially more rewards.

Additionally, your alliance can also choose to stock VIP points in your alliance shop. However, the amount of alliance coins needed to purchase a meaningful amount can be a bit much, but it is another method if you have nothing else you want to spend your alliance coins on.

While each level’s benefits are nice, the really noticeable levels are the following ones:

• VIP 2 – Able to record your first troop formation
• VIP 8 – Gain an additional march queue
• VIP 10 – Able to reset and swap talent sets for free

Once you hit VIP 10, you’ll have all the major benefits. The rest of the levels provide some nice bonuses but aren’t game-changing until you’re amongst the highest echelon of players and scrounging for anything that can give you the edge over others.

Speed Ups

One last major resource you’ll be using is speed ups. The nature of this game is that you’ll be waiting around for your upgrades to finish. A lot.

While most timers at the start of the game aren’t too bad, you’ll quickly experience an exponential ramp up in the amount of time needed to complete any project. Multiple day timers become a common sight.

Thankfully, the game offers multiple ways to consistently obtain speed up items from the following:

• Completing daily quests and opening up the boxes.
• Beating opponents in the arena (open Arena boxes in your bag, trade medals in the shop)
• Completing event tiers.
• Exchanging resources for speed ups in the Mystery Shop
• Buying them from the alliance shop
• Beating stages in the Campaign
• Trading for them in the Ruins exchange shop

As painful as the wait can be, we strongly recommend saving most of your speed up items for when specific events are live. Most events last a handful of days at best and give points only for completing certain tasks like training troops. This is when you’ll want to use your speed up items, so you can earn enough points during the event window for the really good rewards.

IMPORTANT: Resource Note

You do not get refunded if you use a speed up that exceeds the remaining time on a project. The game will give you a warning if you do this, so be careful when tapping on which speed ups you’re trying to use. It’d be terrible to waste an 8-hour speed up on a 5-minute project.