Just had another game crash to white on me. This time it was right after I started a new level when it crashed to white. The memory footprint was at around 850MB, at level 587, and I was focusing on paraibas late game. Refreshing the page allowed me to see the game again for a fraction of a second before having to start over from the beginning. In the end, while the new updates did help bring down the memory slightly, it is still unstable late game. I also confirmed that I am able to reach higher levels when I do not build paraibas. Hmm, I'm almost wondering if these crashes are somehow related to the fix that originally caused the game to slow down organically as the memory increased until the enemies eventually started vibrating in place.

It finally crashed to white level 735 at almost 1.2g of memory (v0.9.0) Interesting my game lasted longer this time around for me without focusing on paraibas late game. Now to see if 0.9.2 improves the stability (depending on if I can get another good run).

I don't know how useful this info is anymore as the game I'm running is version 0.9.0, but instead of focusing on paraibas, I'm filling the board with jades and the occasional emerald for now which minimizes on how much I have to repick each level. I'm also saving any perfect aquamarines that drop for filling in the final parts of the maze on the chance the game still doesn't crash by then. So far I'm at level 628, memory has been around 1GB for the past 40 levels now, and still no crash. Anyway, this is still an older version of the game, but it's interesting that I'm lasting a lot longer this time around since I'm not focused on fishing constantly for paraibas. https://imgur.com/a/uoAVOVl

I forfeited at level 136. By using ff dev options, the snapshot I got was around 17-18 MB, so nothing unusual so far.

@CarlHR I was told it might be the Phaser.Text for the Level, Gold, Lives and Time. I have switched them over to Bitmaps, please test to let me know.

If its a memory leak, the main obvious reason are JS closures. There must be some variable somewhere on your code that gets created over and over, and it holds some allocated memory, and that variable is never set to null. So, the garbage collector never releases memory afterwards. Coincidentally, I did made a question on stackoverflow years ago about this: https://stackoverflow.com/q/74007560/14956120 That's why programming in JS is weird haha. I hope it helps. Finding this type of bug is hard, even more given that the browser crashes and you can't catch any feedback.

@216 @scgmeister @carlhr thanks that means upgrading to Phaser 4.1 didn't solve the issue. I'll keep exploring what is causing the crashes.

0.9.0, freeze at 730 mid lvl (not responding, couldn't open console), waited few min and page went white(but only game tab this time). Like previous times chrome magically ate much (~15 GB) of DISK space, instantly restored after closing tab

Just had another crash to white, and here is the most recent screenshot before it happened including the memory footprint https://imgur.com/a/xCwJ5lC. Keep in mind this crash happened using the 1.8.10 version of the game. Hopefully the new version fixes these crashes.

I'm even more impressed for the fact that there are no ads, no DLCs, nor even account subscriptions, even when this guy owns this .com url address for years.

Awesome work - I've been intermittently addicted to this website for MANY YEARS! Super impressed that you came back to work on it again.

@hutchins @G I have migrated to the new game framework Phaser 4.1, I'm hoping that might solve some of the crash issues because I cannot find the root cause.

Crashed in Edge on a gaming laptop. 675. Admittedly I was doing like 10 other things in another browser... https://youtu.be/gnGUyr8G5IY

Another crash in chrome on mac, this time at level 735. Like the other times, the tab was using roughly 1GB of memory.

@Peter: Good idea i think - the most active part of game is around 20-100 (and new players won't even know about that lag).----- @CarlHR: this lag exist since 2 days only and is very small - around 0.1s, so on faster PC it might be invisible. I can see it already at lvl ~20, when main maze is build. Btw the maximum possible gems + rock on map is 341, so also i dont get that amount of sprites

I never noticed this sort of lag. But.. maybe that's because I never go on runs past level +100. When I reach that point and I haven't lost, I simply close the page (so I do not submit the score). I don't have the time to do it irl lol. So, maybe its something on the late game levels if I'm not aware? Or my PC runs too fast? Haha I also don't get the phrase "At late game this drops the rendered sprite count from several thousand to a few hundred", as we're talking about rocks. The map is of 520x520 pixels (anyone can download those textures using the correct url from assets), and check that a rock has 26x26 pixels size. So, the map supports a maximum a grid of 20x20 rocks on the screen. That is just 400 rocks, which, some of them, will be gems and towers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see it as something that causes too much lag.

@216 Its because of this change: Batched all "rock" sprites from past rounds into a single render layer instead of one sprite per rock. At late game this drops the rendered sprite count from several thousand to a few hundred and is aimed directly at the white-screen crashes Chrome players have been hitting in survival runs past level 500. I could batch the rocks only at say level 200+?

Noticed very short lag each time removing rocks in 0.8.10 - rather minor issue, but can be little annonying. --- In JS version only pink damage(most important though) is affected by weakness. Are all original(flash) modifiers for color/weakness planned to be restored?

Sorry fixed the rock placement issue, should be fixed now in 0.8.10.

Yes, being not able to remove rock while placing gems is actually very serious issue! (making well-placed GO is best example). Btw old, rather minor bug: armor reduction aura sometiems are not applied constantly(despite being in range), making armor changing fast( between 5 and 11 or 13/19 if no EG), Observed mostly near uraniums, possibly also happened outside burn aura - not sure though

@Peter, during the build phase, when you need to place gems on the map, you cannot click over the rocks to select them, in order to remove them with R. You can only select and remove rocks, during the wave, or after you place all gems somewhere else. Anyone can test it at level 2. Just click on the 'Place Gems' button, and attempt to select a rock afterwards, a prompt showing "Cannot build there" will be shown for a few seconds. I assume that at late games, there'll be no space left to build anymore if this bug persists.

A new version has been released which should reduce the memory usage at high levels.

Crashed on level 709 when I placed the fifth gem. Chrome on mac.

crashed at 766 didn't have network/console opened. was playing on chrome in mac OS. whole page went white

crashed around 775 to white frame. I'm glad that it's doing the auto-saving of scores though!

And the game just crashed to a blank white page at level 590 while repicking gems. Like the others, I'm playing on chrome, and I also tend to have a lot of tabs open which might be why it's happening on earlier levels than on others. No lag though that I could tell.

Looks like, I've got another good run going despite the lack of a great opal. I'm now up to level 324, and we'll see how long it takes this time around without the game crashing. https://imgur.com/a/8pdJUny

Another crash at level 651. Memory on the tab was around 1 gig as well. It happened while repicking gems again too.

Eventually chrome completly crashed...not only the game, other chrome window too. Both windows white screen and error pop-up. But something else was strange: I was running out of .. disc space. was 200 MB free when crashed, after re-opening chrome is 19,4 GB (probably it was like that before). Is possible that chrome store temporary files that take AS much? Anyone else observed disc space loss on long runs? (the game tab was using just 900 MB, and its RAM as i know...)

at lvl 673 finally i got a GO.. and another in 685. I hope it will crash soon, so that boring test won't be wasted. I noticed few very shot freezes, (0.1s-1s) but they might be my laptop fault. I started getting a console error basicly every action/placed gem, but game is still working

@carlhr As Chrome and all other browsers "background" tabs now when you switch away, I have added an explicit Pause to the game loop when the player switches to another tab.

It's situational, but I got to reproduce a crash. I'd post as an email, but I think it's cool that everyone here can also see it. This is all I do: 1. Open the browser 2. Open gemtowerdefense.com in tab A 3. Open viktor-n's gemtd in tab B 4. I click on tab B's canvas. 5. I don't even play the game. I just wait for a few minutes. 6. When I come back, I check tab A's canvas, and... it's blank. If the canvas is blank, it means it stopped working. The webgl context was lost. The canvas doesn't disappear from the DOM though. It's still there if you inspect the page. This is my output: https://imgur.com/a/sK4xXjk This is the error: "WebGL warning: texImage2d: Unexpected error <enum 0x0507> during upload" ------ If right now, after this error occurs, I attempt to refresh tab A, here's the console output: https://imgur.com/a/4sqsKpk The error: Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL creation failed: * tryANGLE (FEATURE_FAILURE_EGL_NO_CONFIG) * Exhausted GL driver options. (FEATURE_FAILURE_WEBGL_EXHAUSTED_DRIVERS) Keeps repeating until I close the browser, and open it again. ------ It's not viktor's fault of course. It's nice that I got to use his site to reproduce a bug though. It helps a lot. It's probably my browser's fault, as it's not properly handling two webgl contexts at the same time (even on different tabs). In other attempts through Gemini's answer, it said it could be an incomplete GL_FRAMEBUFFER that's being used to upload the texture. Now, why a similar crash happened on me before with a single tab... I can't say it. I have no idea. @Peter, did you ever attempt to use webgl2 instead of webgl-experimental? Idk, but it says on the internet that its deprecated.

I have added extra logging to determine the cause of the crashes. I have some theories but it isn't clear without data. Please try to reproduce the issue.

Wawe 44 always have been like that, due to speed jump - though its possible to kill all, its very hard(especially if no GO) and need good RNG to make about 4-5 EGs at this point (GA, GAq also welcome). 1-2 EEs also may be needed, but while later EEs are essential to kill flyers, wawe 44 is more burst-based - bloodstone/uranium helps a bit too. Assuming 13 special towers (39 of 44 turns used + some need for opals + initial malachite), for especially wawe 44 i would choose : 2 EEs, 5 EGs(preferable with decent amount of kills), 2 jades(slow) RC, BO, SYS, BS . But honestly i don't remeber when i last time leaked 0 in 44

Wave 44 always gets me, I never complete it without any leaks. Does someone have any hints to kill all the bats? Or is it just impossible?

I made it to level 689 before it crashed again while repicking gems. Zero lag or signs of issues prior to this. Using chrome on mac, browser tab had gotten up to about 1GB of memory by that point.

@Peter: Slowly increasing stun resistance + additional penalty for leaking enemy ( 2 lives cost might be enough). I suggest using x/(x+100) or similar formula for stun resistance ( example: lvl 252 has 52 points of stun resistance which means 34% chance to resist stun). But due to reported crashed maybe its good idea to temporary keep survival easy for testing

One suggestion I have would be to lower how much gems are able to slow down a wave in a way that you would need to build both a yellow sapphire and a uranium in addition to the typical gems in order to get the wave speed down to its minimum speed. Also I'm not sure, but I wonder if there was a way to prevent the snowflakes and fire icons from being able to overlap with itself (or possibly removed completely after around level 400) in order to reduce the sprite clutter and potentially helping with the lag/game going white in late game?

@216 What would you suggest for balancing the game past level 200?

Hit the whiteout glitch again, was around round 515-520. Was in the middle of repicking gems and then the screen just went white. Was a crazy run, got a dead center Great Opal in the mid 30s of rounds.

@Peter Hard to say, i did fast run yesterday, but ended it after 300, while crashes were reported at 600-700. Memory usage was about 300 MB - not very much, but little memory leak is still possible. Maybe others have long run ongoing. Sadly game need huge rebalnce after 200 - after lvl 200-250 you can build now random towers, rather no way to lose not intentionally - stun is not only issue, also late game gold generation is naturally high - with absurd amount of jades is possible to survive with 7 air leaks (if no more - slower killing ground units = more gold) every flying wawe after 44. (likely 2 lives cost after 201 would prevent such low stun + high gold generation strategies)

@216 Is 0.8.5 better now, I see you have the highest score for this version

@216 Requiring email was a mistake. I have fixed a few more late game memory issues, hopefully that helps. Also, the game won't ask for your high score name until after level 500.

@CarlHR I am using chrome version 145.0.7632.160 (arm64) on macOS monterry 12.7.6, noVM. I had just under one gig of memory on that single browser tab when it crashed. I've never seen this type of behavior before where the DOM disappears and there's nothing to inspect, and I have almost two decades as a web developer.

To everyone having this DOM error at late levels, what browser are you all using? Do you run the game inside a VM our outside it? I had an error back then, that made only the canvas stopped working (I submited a report by email), but the navbar, the buttons, the recipes list on the bottom were left intact on the page. By inspecting the DOM, the canvas was still there, but the rendering had stopped working giving the impression it had disappeared. I use a Firefox 150.0 64 bits, windows 11, no VM. I ask this because, its probably the browser saying: I got no memory.. crash! Get it? Like the windows blue screen of death.

Yes, why must we provide our emails when submiting a score? I mean, there's no login on this site. Our emails do not appear on the high scores board, so what's the point of providing this data to the server?

There should be an option to continue run without sending high score every lvl/start doing it later - lvl 100 is not high enough for many players. Also why forcing to fill "email"(typing anything works, though). I fell little uncomfortable when game ask me for email in order to continue mid-game. Also no option to change nickname after 100 ("name" field was often used for some short messages/ run comments) - - - Minor bug: sometimes one projectile remain visible after lvl end and stay in place even for multiple levels

I just had another run crash at level 711 while I was repicking gems. Same type of crash where the DOM is gone and I just see a gray screen. I had zero lag or any other signs of an impending problem. I used 4x most of the game, but toggled it occasionally to 1x or 2x.

That 702 run is what happens when you waay overtune for cash after barely hanging on in the 100s, and you also don't plant for the end game and scramble for space. That said, 4x the whole time, lots of idle hours, hibernation, and zero stability issues or crash warnings. Only dropped to 2x once, like halfway through.

@Peter I was on 4x when it crashed (and basically the entire game). My experience sounds similar to @DC's as well, with no lagging at all leading up to the crash.

@Peter I was on 4x from start to finish. Aside from the crash performance was really good throughout. None of the lagginess that used to exist at the later levels.

@dc and all. The crashes could be due to the speed ups, could everyone make note which speedup they were using when a crash occurs? Secondly, I will explore saving the high scores every X levels as a quasi backup. Finally, I will also explore save/load feature.

@G Not sure if exactly the same thing as you but my game also just crashed out when I was somewhere in round 670-680. First two random grey squares on either side of the game screen started flashing and then the whole thing crashed and the page just went completely white. I gotta just terminate one of these runs early on purpose so I can get on the High Scores at least.

https://imgur.com/a/vDDzSA1 Hahaha, finally the first sighting of Great Opal at round 580. I dunno you meant about the speed fix @216 (I didn't totally follow your convo with Peter) but I definitely feel the difference - never would've been possible for me to get this far without GO before, would've gotten run down in the mid 300s if not before. Also I'm building a lot more nonsense this time around than I usually would since the combination glitch has been removed - tbh it may still be possible to do pure PTs, especially with the gold generation I have going on. Went way overboard on EEs and Jades especially.

Jades weren't changed since dec 2021. But since speed is fixed, its little easier to kill flyers. Less leaks, more Jades = more gold left. But seriously, unless doing NEC no point of making 50 jades(~15 should be way enough, if many leaks - work on EEs positions then), just repick more for EEs, EGs, ABSs. - - - - - In early 2021 jades production was 2x higher, so you could upgrade jade asap then max chances at lvl 15 :) Then it got nerfed 5 times for few days - I managed to get (stable) past 200 with GO, but game was very hard before 100 -I (and every1) was losing without GO ( speed bug wasn't helping)

@216 I was going to ask, was Jade gold production boosted? I wasn't sure if it was just because I was building more of them bc a little harder to force EEs now but I swear my gold generation way outstrips what I was used to when I played before. In fairness I would also usually stop at around 30-35 of them and I'm currently in a midgame with like 50+ which has put me at 100+ million gold, absolutely nuts.

For late game, besides EGs and EEs also worth to mass build ABSs - flamestrikes do a lot on stunned targets. - - - However in current version defeating lvl 200 or 250 = win, gold production from jades in late game is very high in addition to fact that wawes gets *easier* after some point -eventually adding new stun tower overcome linear HP increase, which is only parameter that change after 41 (same speed, armor,...) I managed to "win" without single DE/EE (No EE Challenge, NEC) just by absurd amount of jades (7-8 leaks every flying wawe) at first try, without even GO. (Years) before combine exploit was fixed, i managed to do "One Jade Challenge"(1JC), with (early enough) GO. - - - Is stun OP? is first 150 lvls definitelly no, but with 20-25 EEs i can effectivelly stun and kill all flyers. Are jades OP? in early game little , then naturally in late game they should produce a lot, However penalty for late game leak fells a joke , even when life cost 100k gold ( In flash version 1 leak after 195 = game over). Likely, to balance late game, leaks *must* cost 2 lives ( possibly more), IN ADDITION to some stun resistance. Only lives cost - do nothing if i leak 0, olny stun resist do nothing, just make 100 jades and kill ground olny + 2 flyers. Even if potential jade nerf ( which may ruin early game for most ppl, though minor nerf may be good) late game gold (with 50-100 jades) will alllow for consntant ~5 leaks( instead 7-8), which fells unacceptable for me.

@WGW thanks for the tips. Yeah the level of fatigue/boredom with deleting rocks (I feel like in the old game you could shift-click to select multiple at a time to delete?) meant that there ended up being a slightly chaotic arrangement of perfect opals haha. I was trying to get decent coverage and then got OCD rage about spots that weren't covered XD So I ended up with way too many. But it did mean that later on I was going to have the option to get near total coverage with Black Opals which would have been nice if I chose to go that route. In terms of the Great Opals, I just got two opportunities to take them I think somewhere in the 200s or early 300s, they weren't perfect placement but I figured it was worth it, they are super powerful upgrades. Re: the Dark Emeralds, yeah I just repicked an absolute ton of times. I've had a search down and have now found your post on the combine special bug. I have observed that in-game, but was worried about it potentially working the other way round and consuming multiple Perfect gems so I haven't been using it (I mean it would also feel like cheating as well which would make the whole grind a bit pointless IMO). I hadn't put thought into the ordering aspect of it, I guess you can set it up like you say so that it never consumes the Perfect one? (Or could - I see from Updates that it was fixed on 15 April lol). The main key for success on this one for me was just an absolute ton of upgraded Jades as gold farms. Then being lazer focused on Egyptian Gold and Dark Emerald to the exclusion of almost anything else. A 'Surrender' or 'Resign' button would be very welcome. I do still think I experienced a bug where my level jumped from somewhere around 100 to 200! But could well be imagining it lol.

I got to level ~650 and then the browser tab suddenly went completely blank, like no DOM to view in the developer tools

@216 I understand now, thanks!

The chance of getting PE by placing 1 gem is 1:80. By placing 5 gems (including combine from 2 flawless) is around 1:13 . Max chances are at 22 or 19 , depends if You upgrade malachite first or no. So by lvl 400 you have around 380 turns with max chances + repicks

@216 sorry, I'm not getting that formula, would you explain it?

I can see nothing unusual with amount of emerals - assuming average 1 repick per lvl (380+400) / ~13 = 60 estimated perfect emeralds by lvl 400.

OH, and also, @ElGrillo, you should never have to build a great opal in anything but an ideal location if you: (1) Pay attention to when you've drawn a perfect opal before pick #5, (2) leave at least 4 open spaces for ideal great opal placement, and (3) after picking the first great opal, place all subsequent gems in the spots reserved for the great opal. That way, you will always end up placing the second perfect opal, if you get one, in one of the reserved 4 spaces. After that, you can use the spaces for whatever you want. You never want to-- or should need to-- end up with a great opal all the way on the side of the board. Unsolicited advice over-- but, you know, you posted the screenshot, so. . . ;)

I think I'm gonna hold off investing in playing out a run for hundreds of levels at this point. . . @ElGrillo: How did you build so many dark emeralds by level ~400 without the combine special bug that's been fixed? Also, why so many perfect opals? :) If the game works as it used to, when you run out room to make place 5 gems for a turn, you're soft locked. You have to make sure you end the run intentionally before that. @scgmeister requested a "Surrender" button, which I think is a great idea and would be dead simple to implement.

Cheers @DC, good to know. Sadly, after ~4 days of the game, it crapped out on me (the app space in the web page was just a grey square and then reset to a new game). I did make it past lvl 430 though, and I had gotten to the point that I was taking out all the flyers, which I think is a first for me in high levels. Here's the map for anyone curious - got the maze design from someone in the comments on the old site many many years ago: https://i.imgur.com/VNeGLlJ.png

@ElGrillo: The easy method is to leave a blank rock in the beginning of your maze that you can delete when ready to drastically shorten the number of loops and allow runners to start going through. As an alternative, you can begin managing lives more carefully toward the end to voluntarily die on a flyer level when ready, but the former is more preferred due to consistency.

Anyone know what happens if you get to the point on Survival where you can't place any gems anymore as the map is full (except for 'blocking' spaces)? Lol. I am on level 417 at the moment and seem to be inexorably heading towards a full population, at least at the moment. Given that there's no 'Retire' button for me to quit and record a score, would be good to know whether I should make sure I allow enough flyers through to let me 'lose', before I can no longer place any further gems. On another note - possible bug: I'm pretty sure that at some point after I went over level 100, my level jumped by +100. I ended up at over 200 and am now at 417 as I mention but I think I should be at 317. Difficult to be certain, because this game has taken me several days so far lol.

If anyone was using my templates from my github, and couldn't submit your username/email because no inputs appeared: my fault. Sorry. I've only seen this now when I got to level 88 and lost.... If you go to scores, you'll see my run published as Anonymous :( I've "fixed it" now. I added a button you'll have to remember to click it, when you reach the submit score. That'll force the inputs to appear.

carlHR that grid display looks cool

@Peter I've sent an email to gemtowerdefense@gmail.com about a bug that froze my game at level 61. It forced me to refresh the page afterwards. The sad part was that I got a GO at level 39... https://imgur.com/a/VFGsRm3

https://imgur.com/gKrqJ4t.png Trying to get time under 1000 but seems like u need to get very lucky with early BS, will keep trying.

Seems like there is still a bug where enemies don't get slowed properly until level 40. Another idea that would be very useful: add an second repick button that replaces the gems in their current positions so you don't have to place them out again.

Wow just discovered the game also works on mobile, fascinating...

Well that's disappointing, right as I clicked to select a gem at level 632 (I believe), the game disappeared and the web page went white and completely unresponsive until I refreshed the page, causing me to lose all progress :(. I played the game using google chrome, and I think I was still on version 0.8.2 that allowed 10x speed. Not sure if that is what caused the crash or if it was something else. Also, there was no sign of any lag before it happened. It'll be interesting to see if anyone else runs into the same issue if they also try to push the game to being able to fill the board. If you see my link, https://imgur.com/SB2VWHE, I had all the right side, and almost all the left side full of paraibas when the game crashed.

First off, thanks for the new updates! Might be getting close to the end of my first 250+ run. Level 250 being stun-proof I thought was the end, but it's holding out longer than expected. This is only my second run on a chromium browser, though, and it's smooth as butter on 4x the whole way on a decently beefy igpu laptop. I had been playing only on firefox before, both recently, and years ago. Recent versions on firefox had huge slowdown problems about lvl. 40 that are completely absent on chromium. Thanks again!

https://youtu.be/8De_GXyV6uw Hi, I made a little video showing my early game, until level 30 something where I accidentally delete my maze.. I'm using a script to make sure I roll a flawed diamond at the start of the game. I also made a script to build the maze for me but seems like I lost it and it takes quite a while to set up. But that helps you not make any misclicks.

I remember seeing stuff like this on Dota's GemTD mod. There were enemies with all sorts of buffs: - Evasion (basically to counter stun) - Magic Resistance/Imunity (vs emeralds, bloodstones) - Invisibility (opal had true sight) - Regeneration (forces you to have large damage over time) - Blink (breaks your maze apart) - Hastened (moves faster than usual) - Extra Lives (tougher to kill) - Charm (slows down attack speed) - etc... It was fun. It's cool idea imo, and not just on the late levels. If done since the start of the game, it forces you to choose many types of builds to overcome each challenge. That is a nightmare to develop. But very fun to play it.

@Peter: At least 4 ways of partial stun resistace are possible: 1. constant on given lvl % chance to resist stun 2.similar, but resist % of duration. 3.both above combined, but less affect (can be different % function for each) 4. Starting at 0, then increasing stun resistance while being stunned, falling back while not stuned. Speed of growth and/or fall back may depend of lvl. Any level-based function of stun rsistance rather should be hyperbolic, so it never reach 100%, similar to armor function.

Btw, there exist other way to balance game - increasing number of enemies. I can kill 10 flyers, but 12, 15, 20? i dont think so.

@216 @scgmeister I am open to changing how stun works after lvl 200 but that will greatly affect the game and possibly make it impossible to survive past lvl 200. Thoughts?

Without any stun resistance lives cost will do nothing for me when i leak 0, passing 500 will be about making enough gold. Stun immune air levels could be exluded from extra lives cost to prevent extremely hard to pass walls. Meanwhile i tested if i can survive without any emerald, only jades stun (something opposite to 1JC) - after 44 and 48, leaked 7-8 (rarely 6) every flying wawe, but gold production was enough to recover - i could continue to 350 at least, but it was going too slow (even at x4). In fact i was close to lose around 170 and 252 (4 lives i think), but imagine what if i had a GO

I'll second the idea of slowly adding stun resistance to the enemies after level 200. As much as I like the challenge of trying to fill the board, I do admit it can get tedious after awhile. Hmm, increased lives lost instead of stun resistance would also be interesting. 2 lives lost per leak starting level 200, 3 lives at 300, 4 lives at 400 etc. That in itself could make completely filling the board impossible, as then when you reach 500, you would effectively lose 50 lives that level and lose the game. I'd say with this method, passing level 500 might be possible, but extremely difficult to do so.

@CarlHR You didnt take account GO (or at least PO) aura. @scgmeister: I leaked abolute 0 since ~230 and it was with quite bad emerald RNG and little unoptimal positioning. Funny that i failed to lose in 253 - remoned rocks near checkpoints and blocked main maze, but had 6 lives and EEs still catched 5 units. But that run was interesting untill i got GO in 178 - was leaking 3-4 consistently, once 7 and no gold for more than ~10 lives after each flying wawe - i built 11th jade, because afraid of lvl 200. GO ruined that fun.

I was wondering how strong it is to place many chance-based towers, given the discussion below, and I found this here: Here's the source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskStatistics/comments/y0odc7/probability_of_at_least_a_given_number_of/ This is an algorithm in python syntax ``` # x is the probability of success 0 <= x <= 1 # n is the number of attempts, given that at least one needs to succeed def adv(x, n): return 1 - ((1 - x) ** n) ``` Or in javascript ``` // x is the probability of success 0 <= x <= 1 // n is the number of attempts, given that at least one needs to succeed function adv(x, n) { return 1 - ((1 - x) ** n); } ``` If you place, for example, 3 LAJ on the map, each of them attack once each 350ms. So, in each second, they'd attack 2.86 times. If one wants to calculate the gold trigger rate per second, it could calculate it as follows: `adv(0.05, 3 * 2.86) * 100`. This outputs a 35.60% chance of trigger gold once each second! And, if you pick just one: 13.63% gold/s. No wonder it triggers more often that you'd think. If one is wondering how strong are 3 basic DEs: `adv(0.125, 3 * (1000 / 700)) * 100`: 43.58% stun/s. If we get 3 upgraded DEs: `adv(0.15, 3 * (1000 / 700)) * 100`: 50.17% stun/s. I found this interesting for some reason. Like, you see it happening on the screen, but you just don't understand why the triggers happen so often. An increase of 5% is a lot when you have lots of towers to trigger that single effect.

I have officially surpassed 216's current top score and it's looking like I should be able to completely fill the board with this run. https://imgur.com/SB2VWHE Overall I leak about 3-4 flyers consistently, and on level 251, I only leaked 1 enemy.

But i wish game was getting (slowly) harder and harder starting around lvl 200, so game will end around 200-400 without clear maximum. Late game enemies must have some kind of partial stun resistance, so they won't be stunned forever as easilly (but stun still should be important). Also i think late game leaks should cost 2 lives (but not before lvl 201). Unless too strong anti- stun meachanic - but then game will become about maximizing gold production, not stun effeciency. Also i dont like fact that lvl 48 leaks are the same punishing as lvl 204 leaks

After speed fixes game should be even little easier, space is still only limiting factor. But making excusively paraibas may be impossible sometimes - you get the wanted perfect gem every ~13 turns (combinations included), which means average over 2 repick per lvl, so 2500-2800 repicks total in 1200+ runs (2500 repicks cost 78 milion gold). Because you finished a lvl 1301 with 30m gold left, it could be not enough without combine expliot (more jades required). So I not sure if 1300 is possible now, while 1280-1290 should be little easier

I wholeheartedly second the suggestion for a "surrender" or an "end game" button. Perhaps not as necessary with the changes, since without the combine special bug, I don't know if it will even be possible to play the game to the point of running out of room. Which is a good thing, I think. But it wouldn't do any harm to have it even if it ends up not being necessary, and it's also easy to implement. I haven't really tried the updated game yet, been a strangely busy week. I love that Peter preserved all the scores with a tab for "Fake Scores". Cracked me up. :)

One more feature request: would it be possible to add a surrender button to the game? That way if one were to run out of space, they will still be able to submit their score @DC If you haven't yet and are able to change these settings, go to group policies/administrative Templates/Windows Components/Windows update. Then in legacy policies, "find no auto-restart with logged in users" and enable that. Then in manage end user experience, go to configure automatic updates and choose option 4 to auto download and schedule the install. Both policies need to be enable for this method to work. Also in the windows update settings, make sure the notify me when a restart is required is turned on. Doing that, I'm still able to choose when I want to restart my computer, or even putting off restarting my computer for several days if I wanted to once I'm notified that it needs to be restarted.

correction: fix to the combination glitch.

I'm liking the recent updates and bug fixes so far. While the combination glitch makes it harder to get enough EE to stun lock the flying rounds, the fixes to the slowdowns making uranium mor viable along with the fix to the star sapphire seems to make it so may not have to depend on EE as much in order to get a high score. Anyway, I do seem to have a strong maze going right now which should easily beat my previous pb in the current update. https://imgur.com/a/Bz7RknI With this current maze, I seem to be leaking only about 4-5 flyers which seems to be quite a bit better than what I was leaking around this stage of the game in the previous version from my memory.

RIP the combination glitch. Interested to see if this will affect the rarity of a good deep run - before the GO was the only limiting factor but wondering now if a heinous streak of bad luck in setting up EEs could end things prematurely by running you dry on money.

Yikes! I don't check in for a little while, and look at what's been going on. :) I guess I should abandon my current run which is at level 980 which I started over a week ago. I doubt I can submit a high score for it since I started the run on an old version of the game (and even if I could, that doesn't feel at all fair. First decent run I'd had in ages. Oh well. Looking forward to checking out the new version.

@carlhr @216 I removed 10x because it seemed unreliable for the simulation.

Imo, anything that is automated and annoying should have a corresponding checkbox for that feature, wether you want it active or not. That includes music, if you wish to add it hehe. My PC supports the 10x speed, so it's working as intended (or well.. keep reading). It falls to 4x speed once in a while, if there's too much lag. When the speed falls, right when it happens, it's brief, but it shows an yellow text right next the Upgrade Chances button, explaining that it dropped because the game was losing accuracy (that's noted in the update log from 0.8.2). Now, @Peter, are you sure the 10x speed works as intended? I cannot read the script as its not indented, attempting to do so gives me nightmares. As there's currently no way I could run 2x late game runs on parallel, with the same build, maze layout, random seeds, but with different game speeds just to test it, I still think that running the game with 10x speed is harder than with 1x/2x/4x. I noticed it with 4x speed too, when comparing to 1x or 2x. It's a retroactive bug. It's like the gems/towers are failing to attack over time, or the projectiles are slower, I don't know but there is something different. I've run the following tests while playing (and the others here can verify it too if they want it): when I'm on the wave 44th (flying wave) for example, my build takes down 5-6 of the flying bats at 10x speed. But on wave 48th, the same build, with like, an extra pair of gems, and no additional towers and upgrades, are able to take down 9 or even all of them at 1x speed. I mean, like, am I going crazy? How is it possible? One gem does make the difference? It shouldn't.. right? 4 levels in difference... So yeah, that's my concern. I mean, it's NOT THAT KIND OF A PROBLEM. I was able to reach 95+ waves easily with 10x speed on all waves (even flying waves) you just have to heal right away after them. My strategy was to set 11 lives everytime, so I wouldn't die, and wouldn't spend too much gold. If you have enough LAJ, it's not that hard. But as I developer (or something), I just look at this speed change and think: "yep, there's something on this" hehe. Or. It's just a coincidence. Could happen. Who knows. I can't prove it.

10x speed instantly falls back to 4x for me, even at lvl 1 -I noticed it blocks possibility of 1x(2x) speed untill end of lvl (for me, its not a big problem actually). Also i can imagine a player losing game by starting flying wawe at x10 speed without enough lives(just by distraction) - maybe flying wawes should reset speed to x1 ? (setting speed every 4 lvls is less frustrating than potential fail, but its olny my opinion)

Added 10x speed up and Frames Per Second tracking to make sure the 10x speed up can be handled by most player's computers.

Is this what you want? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Properties/image-rendering

Peter - Appreciate all the new QoL updates! Just one thing - is it just me or does the game look a little fuzzy after the new update? Is there a resolution setting or something that I should change?

Foiled once again by my own lack of awareness - somehow despite turning off automatic updates, my computer went ahead and did it anyway. Run died at 720-ish, another failure to make the leaderboards. As a sidenote, playing on Microsoft Edge with the speed up seems to be performing pretty well. Even at 700+, I was getting full speed.

I see, thanks!

That exploit got fixed in 0.6.3

Peter. I'm referring to the possibility of making the perfect gem first, followed by three of the other gems, combining on the last which consumes all but the perfect one.

@JonathanA Can you provide details about the: "combine exploit" And I think your idea of the last tower in the combine to have the kills carry over is a good idea.

216: Regarding carrying over kills, I think only keeping the kills on the combine on tower makes you have to think more strategically which I like, although the other way is acceptable too.

Just played my first run after not having played for many months. Got a great start with a flawed diamond and early Jade. Then I totally forgot about perfect opal until a bit later. And I accidentally upgraded blood stone immediately when I got it. I didn't use the combine exploit which I tend not to do normally, does it still exist? Finished at level 98 as I felt I was losing momentum. https://imgur.com/RNmtZtI.png I mostly enjoy the earlier levels anyway. I really like the new speed feature, makes the game 100x more playable. Even x5 or x6 or even x10 speed could be useful for later levels. Or some kind of simulation to skip the meatgrinding every level. Dunno if that would be possible. Could remove damage numbers and projectile animations to improve performance if nececssary. Another feature idea is a damage counter for every level to see which towers do more damage. Should be easy to implement. I could possibly help with coding if that is an option. Finally another weird idea, but I've made some music that could go well (or not) with the game, although I think we all just put our own music if any to these kind of games. Just an idea though, feel free to reach out.

Wow, looks like I came back in just the right moment, look at those updates! The lack of speed feature is something that kept me playing you-td instead of gem td.

Got similar frezze at 190, caused by flamestrike(s) on dying last enemy. Error in stepFlamestrikes Looks like speed finally works correctly :) Besides frezze, late game balance is last major issue (there is few minor ones). Several ppl over last years sugested/requested to carry over kills from all ingredients(not only from selected gem) when combine special. Not sure what behaviour is intentional.

Wow. The 4x speed is going to give me back so much of my life. Thank you!

@216 Released 0.7.2: Fixed late-game enemy minimum-speed scaling so slows can reduce enemies to their intended floor again. Corrected the displayed Minimum Speed value in the enemy info panel.

I think I found the culprit for the lag in my browser (from level 20+ waves), I have to stop this process in particular: `AWPerformance.SCSubAgent`, using the task manager in windows 11. I went deep on my PC and found out that the dude on this thread had the same problem as me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/1ezg5ix/alienware_awcc_major_performance_issue_update_aug/ So, yeah, it's was something going on my PC.. not on everyone else. My bad.

The same speed issue still exist, but now its clearly displayed in numbers. lvl 41+ : max speed : 1.56 min speed : 1.47 That's 94% of max speed, making slowing gems not really important. Intended min speed is about 70% of max speed, right? Error is by factor of 0.75

@216 Thanks, hopefully fixed that freeze.

Game freeze at 21 - console error at stepProjectiles. I can see dying last enemy and 2 projectiles near. Btw can fix SYS combat stats? (original stats was base 180 dmg/0.8s/121 range and it never was op :) Thanks for speed modes.

I added a 2x, 3x, and 4x speed up mode.

@216 Sorry I'll fix it.

Thanks for fixes! But minimum speed is not working at all. 0 leaks, even in lvl 100 withoth GO Uranium very usefull atm :)

When I mean, "Or.. it's the opposite", is that I don't know what gem you should select to trigger the bug, wether its clicking on the sapphire/emerald; or just choosing one of the opals. Regardless of the trigger, the bug itself is about making all opals being consumed when choosing 'combine special'.

@wgw I don't know if that's a part of the combine special bug, but it's something I noticed very few times when playing the game. When attempting to make a Jade tower, if you place 2 or more normal opals on the map, and you build the tower on the place of a sapphire or emerald, all opals are consumed on the recipe, instead of just 1. Or.. it's the opposite. I can't remember now. I had a lot of fustration on this, like, you're preparing a set of opals, and then suddendly they vanish because of this bug. But it doesn't happen with the other gems on the same recipe. I also wasn't able to verify this with other tower recipes. It's hard to reproduce it, as the game is luck-based. Unless, of course, you hack it, which is something I dislike. So I can't verify it right now as I write this.

@Peter: Bug list as of Jul 2022. Hope this is helpful-- I know a lot of it explains things you already understand, sorry for that. :) - Combine multiple gems When you draw more than one gem of the same type and quality, you're given the option to combine them into the next-higher-level gem of the same type. You're supposed to be able to combine and upgrade TWO levels when you draw FOUR gems of the same type and quality, but a bug in the code requires FIVE gems. (observation regarding the specific coding bug comes from @216) - Combine Special The Javascript version of GTD allows for doing a "Combine Special" to create a tower on ANY gem that's part of that tower's recipe, as long as all the required gems are placed on the board (in the Flash version, you could only do a "Combine Special" on the most-recently-placed gem in a recipe). However, in allowing for this flexibility, a bug has been introduced where the game will, under certain conditions, consume two gems in a recipe and leave one of the required gems on the board. When exploited correctly, this can mean that, practically speaking, you only need to draw a single perfect gem of any type for the entire game and can create special towers off it indefinitely. - Star Yellow Sapphire When you build a SYS after having built a Black Opal, the Black Opal's 40% (max) buff gets overridden by the SYS's 5% buff. Building another Black Opal restores the 40% buff. Essentially, whichever tower is built most recently will override the buff from any previously-placed tower. The buffs from these two different towers, the Black Opal and the SYS, should either stack, or at least, the Black Opal's buff should not get erased by building a SYS. - Lack of text documentation for Jades There's no mention in the text description for Jades that they earn gold, a component of the game that is absolutely necessary to understand in order to learn how to play well. - Movement speed I defer to @216, since I don't really understand what this is about, but from his description, it has a huge affect on gameplay after level 40-- something to do with the minimum enemy speed not being correctly affected by slowing gems/towers, and I think @216 has identified what part of the game code is causing the problem in prior comments. But again, I don't really understand this specific issue myself. - Blank high score text For some odd reason, submitted high scores sometimes end up posted with blank name text, or-- I've observed personally-- text from prior-submitted high scores (and not due to autocomplete filling in the field, I can vouch). There doesn't seem to be any identifiable pattern to this, but @scgmeister has suggested it might have something to do with the browser's "process ID". - Frozen rocks I think I'm the only one to have experienced this, but I've had it happen several times: sometimes very late game, a rock will become "frozen" and non-removable, because the game fails to register its being clicked on. This has only happened to me post-level 800, and in all but one case, only one rock became frozen (in one run, I had 3 frozen rocks). No idea what causes it, but I have an unproven theory that it related to the glitched-movement bug (below). - Glitched movement/game speed Late game-- depending on system specs, as early as level ~500, on my PC, level ~800-- enemy movement becomes glitched such that, depending on whether the bowser window has active focus or not, their movement or the overall game speed is glitched. With active focus, enemies become permanently frozen in place, vibrating back and forth but not advancing. Without active focus, the enemies move normally, but the overall game speed slows to 10-20% of normal. This seems to be related to the still-existing, but much more manageable, memory leak problem. If there were no memory leak, presumably the enemy movement/game speed would remain stable. - Memory leak @216 identifitied long ago that the critical hit text was the main culprit in GTD's previously crippling memory leak. Peter H. subsequently turned off the critical hit text after level 100 as a quick patch, which worked well enough to keep the leak from prematurely crashing the game. But it didn't actually close the leak, which still exists and is tied to the animation for frost and fire attacks (again, thanks to @216 for confirming this).

@Peter: I completely missed your message here till just now! I had posted a bug list (which is definitely not exhaustive-- @216 in particular, you already know, is an excellent debugger) But the comment has been truncated away. So I'll put it in a separate comment, and I'll also try to send via email during a rare window of your having time to work on the game. As always, I'm immensely grateful for it! Still playing-- I have a run going now at level 789. CAn be played out till I run out of room on level 1250 or so. Which I know was never your intent. ;) Thank you so much for clearing out the fake scores as well!

@viktor-n: will have to be a few days, but I spend a little more time on it and come back later! @DC: I feel the pain. And there have definitely been times that I ended up killing a really good run over just that mistake! (or accidentally downgrading any other gem into something useless)

I just accidentally downgraded a normal opal which means I'm going to have to build a Uranium. My gut instinct was to immediately quit and restart so I don't have to have that eyesore but unfortunately this is a good run. Life is pain.

@WGW Thanks! Are you having trouble loading the game? on what device/browser?

@viktor-n: The changes in the game you've described sound, to me, quite promising! I particularly like your approach to softening RNG for getting a great opal. But for what it's worth, I wasn't able to do much to test out the game on the actual site. I'm very intrigued, though, and hope you keep at it!

I have moved Gem Tower Defense to a new host and cleared out a lot of high scores and some fake scores. @WGW Please list the bugs that you would like me to fix, I have time now.

I have developed a version of this game, hosted here if anyone would like to try: https://viktor-n-code.github.io/GemTD/ While very similar to this version in many ways - I've fixed some issues and added features. Issues fixed: Kills carry over from all gems when combining Star Yellow Sapphire and Black opal auras stack New features: MVP bonus, gem with most damage each round gets +1% damage Additional scaling, gem effects like crit, splash, auras scale with gem level. Tracking of damage with leaderboards for Kills, Damage for each round and overall. Bad luck protection for Great Opal. After reaching max gem chance, any time a Perfect Opal is spawned, the chance of all other gems placed in that round to be Perfect Opal is increased. This chance increases with each round, bringin the mean number of rounds to a Great Opal down from ~700 to ~100. Once a Great Opal is created, this feature deactivates. At high wave levels (100+) enemies start getting resistance to stuns, which degrades with distance traveled. So long mazes are needed to make them able to be stunlocked. More features in plan, like a button to speed up the game.

@wgw regarding the game starting slow from the 1st level, it happened with me this week. For me, it solved the problem by cleaning the browser cache, and cleaning cookies and data related from THIS site. But.. one strange type lag I can report here, is when I reach level 20+, then, for some reason I need to drink some water or just leave the room where my PC is at the time, and the browser's tab is kept open for hours without any interaction. When I comeback, the game is slow. You can see it when you attempt to place a gem. There's lag when you just try to move the cursor on the screen. For some reason, cleaning the cache doesn't solve this particular type of lag. I don't know what causes it. But, it only happens if I don't play the game for too much time. If I keep playing up to 50+ levels, there'll be no lag at all. It's weird.

I ended up ending that run at level 152 after a misclick, too many leaks on flying levels, and I couldn't get even a single gold until around level 90 or so which also didn't help. So far, speedmaster pro was still working. I have yet to test the extension beyond that. Biggest thing with this extension, along with other speed hacks like cheat engine, is the game needs to be in focus for the increased speed to take effect.

@scgmeister, well, let us know in, what, about two weeks? You said even for you, SpeedMaster Pro stops working after level 100 or so. . . That's a lot of levels left to go at normal speed. . . I'm not sure anymore if it's a blessing or a curse to get a run with luck that good, cause then you kinda have to play it out. ;)

lucky me. Getting a great opal at close to the earliest possible moment in the game. https://imgur.com/a/U6oz7Sn Now to see if I can capitalize on it.

@WGW, that's interesting. for me I've had no issues with speedmaster pro yet. At least I've used it up to level 100 at 5x speed without it breaking (haven't had a run worth pushing past that level yet since coming back to mess around with this game). I think once, the speed of the game did reset to normal after a couple levels, but I was able to click on the extension again to increase the speed back to 5x without issues after it happened. I did attempt at 10x speed first, but it started to cause the game to glitch out fairly quickly. On that note, I do have every option in the extension check marked. I have found a few other speed hack extensions for chrome, but so far this is the only one I've found that is capable of speeding the game up past 2x.

@scgmeister: I just tried out Speedmaster Pro for the first time, and was delighted to see it work immediately. But then it just. . . stopped working at level 10 or so, and the game went back to normal speed. Refreshing the page, closing and reopening, resetting Speedmaster Pro's setting, nothing changed it. Strange. But it was nice for the 10 levels that it lasted. . . !

@dc check out the extension called Speedmaster Pro if you happen to be playing this game using google chrome. This extension will change the speed of the game, and I have a feeling that if you put the speed to something like .7, or .5 speed, it might fix the issue of the run freezing. It's just a theory, but I do know if you use the extension (or some other speed hack) to speed the game up too far, that causes a run to freeze until it gets slowed back down again, so slowing the game down slower than the base speed should fix the freezing, in the same way it fixes the vibrating glitch that happens in late levels.

@DC: Yes, I've had this happen a couple of times. No idea what triggered it. I've also seen very rare times where the whole game is slowed to a crawl from the first level. But of course in those cases, you just refresh the page. You're not gonna want to do that at level 797. Sorry I can't offer any solution, but at least you'll know it's not just you!

https://imgur.com/a/bgcFZbT Not really sure what to do at this point, my game is 100% frozen now. As I said previously it's been getting slower and slower since like level 500 but it hit a new absolute low this evening and at this point literally hasn't moved in over an hour. I can't even kill the run and get it on the rankings, pretty depressing ngl. I don't know if I have it in me to try again, especially since it might literally just happen again. Anyone else have this issue and find a fix?

One more example of combine special glitch. (special recipe - A+B+C=S, first A, B and C are marked in []) build order: [A] A [B] A [C] B* C A change to [A] A - A - S [C]A [A] A [B] A*[C] B C A change to [A] A - S - [B][C]A (no double gem consumed) if u click [A] or [B] or [C] they combine normally, else no matter what you click(*), consumed gems will be [B], [C], *. ( can be any amount of other gems than A,B,C placed between) Using glitch is easy to save [A], but way to save gems [B] [C]. If build Normal Auqa (or Flawles Diamond) before Perfect Opal, this PO will be consumed even when combining on other PO ( but not reverse, combining on 1st PO will not consume next PO)

I just lost another high score in the late game. Should have made it to level 1267 but it crashed at 1263.

@Pandakite yes it sounds like you fell victim to a known glitch. The specifics are outlined by multiple people below but essentially if you have one of every gem required for a recipe and then you make an extra of one of them and combine on that, you will eat two of that gem and spare one other gem (should be the first one placed). The downside, in your case, is it ate your extra opal. The upside is that for longer term runs it can be exploited, allowing you for example to craft dozens of Enchanted Emeralds with only one perfect emerald, which saves a lot of time and reroll gold. Also an update on my own run, I have passed 700. The game really slowed down in the mid-500s - I don't just mean hp-wise things got tankier I mean the game literally runs at half speed or less now. I was clearing 150-200 floors a day and now I'm clearing like 50 haha. I guess this is why it takes two weeks to set a top tier record.

Not sure why, but I made a black opal after getting a diamond and combined it on a opal. when I made it, it took my other opal along with the other gems it needed, is this a glitch?

I think I had two, but I was starting to run out of space within their perimeters at that point. The leaks were brutal though, had to pay for 5-6 lives every flyer round. The good news is my latest run finally hit a great opal (coincidentally not until like 250) so I am hoping to finally finish a good run.

@DC: Also, I hope you learned your lesson to always have 11 lives in the bank at the start of any run!

@DC: 250 with no GO isn't easy! I'm curious, how many perfect opals did you have at that point?

First real run in awhile - lost it on 250 because I wasn't paying attention and forgot to have enough lives ready, oops. Didn't have a great opal though so a deep run was probably unlikely.

@G, that's truly unbelievable. I mean, I BELIEVE you, but it's still unbelievable! Ouch!

I just had a run end at 1260 that should have made it to 1270 because I misclicked with only 5 open gem spots remaining, meaning I could not place the 5th gem anywhere. So upset right now that I've wasted the past few weeks on a run that I won't complete.

I haven't had a halfway decent run in months now! Not that I play very often, but then again, I haven't been able to win a single run of FTL in normal mode for months, either, and I've sunk thousands of hours into that game over the years, too. Maybe I've had a stroke. ;)

@TJ: Once you reach that point, it changes to a game of minimization. You cannot "beat" this game, so you either lose intentionally at a certain point and record your high score, or the game crashes and you don't record it.

The game crashed but I got a screenshot pretty close to my last level.

Help! I can't lose. I have tens of millions of gold but nothing to spend it on and I'm rapidly running out of space to build on!

Out of curiosity, has anyone made an unbeatable gemTD maze before? At what point does it just bug out? I'm at level 472 and have what seems to be infinite moneys.

Don;t know how this happened, but I'm sitting on level 335 with so much money I don't know what to do with it. Never made it this high. After this it's probably time to retire this game.

@Pandakite: I recommend trying to build a few Lucky Asian Jades as early as possible. Unlocking the ability to repick is essential. You also should construct your maze such that it divides the board into two sections with even numbered platforms on one end and odd numbered platforms on the other.

I have been playing this game for a while and only had 1 time that I managed to get past level 150 and now the best I can do is maybe 60's-70's. What are the recomendations by more seasoned players as to how to build a successful maze and what gems to save and build?

@WGW: thank you!! I ain't done yet ;)

Hay, @G! I see you've got a bunch of 1200+ level high scores by now after having been cheated with that first one that ended up with blank text-- Congrats!

@Mikis: Yes, I believe the user named Peter who commented on 2025-10-14 is the creator, though I am not sure if he checks in regularly or not

Does anyone know if the creator of this game still lurks here? I wonder if there's any chance for an update. I've lost interested quite some time ago because of all the bugs and imbalances, but I remember this game so fondly. I just wish it got back to actualy maze design, not bug exploits etc.

It should work. But PE must be build before any FS/fT .No matter what gem you have duplicated (or even more than 2), combining on not 1st build saves very first PE/FS/fT But in early lvls i often take flawed part of specials. So untill they are removed its impossible to exploit perfects. And its easy to forget which gem was first, unless you make 1 each (Perfect first), then duplicate + instant combine.

@parsons, So would it be "perf emerald, flawless saph x2, flawed topaz", chose combien special on 2nd, flawless saph and end up with DE + Perfect Emerald? Just tried and didn't work

@Peter simply need to reduce required gems for double upgrade by 1 (noticed numCombine function intentionally don't count selcted gem) Chrome displays its line 992, column 33555 it if helps :) Other high priority bug could be SYS (only upgraded): 1.stats 2.often overriding 40% aura with 5% (maybe just temporary disable aura if can't fix?) (So I never build SYS, new player may get frustratred by that)

@mmkay can you post a screenshot of that exact: "Easiest to fix is 4-combine bug (double upgrade requies now 4 OTHER same gems = 5 total instead 4)"

I thought the letter R not typing in the highscore submit box was fixed? My guess was that this was due to the fact that the R key is a keyboard shortcut for the "Remove Rock" feature. It's been ages since I posted a high score, but I thought I remembered it being fixed. In any event, you can always copy the paste from elsewhere-- the submit box will accept pasted R's even if you can't type them. Fwiw!

Only lvls 50, 100, 150, 200,... have stun immunity.

In the Javascript version, does stunning not work after level 150 anymore? I had loads of DEs and Jades that stopped working at 150. Also for some reason I can't type the letter "r" in the highscore submit box

Universal speed hack browser extension? Hi guys, I had been using this extension to speed up gtd: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/html5-universal-speed-hac/eckionmoiajpjncecfebdmmbcboblkja But there is a limit of 3x speed. I tried downloading the source files and replacing 3 with 20 and then adding this is a local browser extension, but that didn't work. Has anyone figured this out before? thx

@216 Oh yeah you're right, that's way better. I died to wave 26 this time. Got perfect opal + BO so it was a good run but I don't think there's any strategy because they just come too fast and I can't get enough money. I don't think it got submitted to the leaderboard for some reason but I have a screenshot

I put malachite to cover the most of path, but I wouldn't complain if uranium got malachite kills. I upgrade malachite after 110 upgrade (in NMC, in normal runs even after 80 ussually), why 140?

I got to level 25 twice in the No Maze Challenge. I put a malachite to the left and I try to give it all the kills. After paying the 140 for luck, I save 280 to fully upgrade the malachite. Since the enemies go so fast, I think it's good to make sure you have sapphire and emeralds. A jade is probably necessary to pick off individual guys. I got a Uranium too early and it stole too many kills from the malachite, so I still lost at 25 even with a perfect opal and dark emerald

you put on the field: first, second(1), second(2), third jem. Then you combine second (2). In this case the special is melded from second(1), second (2), third, leaving first on the field. If it is perfect then here you go.

Can someone please remind me how the special combo glitch works again? I was doing my no maze challenge again and I somehow made a uranium without using my perfect topaz. I haven't played gtd for a long time so I forget all of the metas and tricks. Thanks!

I meant 2x FA* ( =PA and gold, had FA,fD eariel)

lost in 25, some luck: got 2x PA in lvl 19 -> gold, with BO would be possible few lvls more. min. speed is cruel in this challenge!

No maze challenge: I beat survival level 20 without placing any gems on the path, so every level is like a bat wave. It's really tricky!

Easiest to fix is 4-combine bug (double upgrade requies now 4 OTHER same gems = 5 total instead 4)

@216 @infinite Sorry is there a very annoying bug that I can easily fix for all of you?

All of those gems slows even after 30 - but by very little(~5.5%) due to MINIMUM SPEED BUG. Intended min. speed was olny ~70% of max.

Just learned about the bug to not need flawless gems, gonna try that out. But about the slow effect. Does that go away after lvl 30? Seems that neither saphire, emerald or even uranium give any affect then. The mob speed stat reduce but the actual movment is unaffected, is that a bug or intended?

To anyone interested, I uploaded a js script in the file I posted on my github, allowing you to display a GRID or MAP TEMPLATE of choice, overlaying the game through js injection. It works for me, but if you run into any bugs, you can let me know! Maybe I'll fix it. The MAP TEMPLATE needs to be an image of 520x520 pixels, that you may create and edit yourself, stored on your PC. You may use the filechooser in order to load that image. Remember to clear out the filter input before uploading, otherwise you'll set a 20% transparent pink image covering the entire map by default, unless some parts of your image are transparent. Maybe I'll make the gui more user-friendly during the next days or weeks. Maybe. Also, although it injects js code into the page, it just changes the DOM not the game itself. So its not a cheat. Its more like a decoration.

@WGW: I had a two runs in the mid 1200s crash on me in the last month. Not gonna lie, it bummed me out pretty bad after basically wasting weeks of effort. However, I'm still motivated to beat my high score since I'm playing early game runs still, similar to how you've described. I have done some experiments with skipping the initial malachite and instead going for flawed sapphire but it hasn't proved fruitful. Any tips you'd like to share? I'm basically playing for early cashflow, i.e. lucky asian jades, then pivoting towards enchanted emeralds with the occasional egyptian gold. Trying to optimize EE/EG placement to aim for a pre-level 200 switch into paraiba tourmalines for the rest of the game. I usually won't quit a run until around 100-120 if there's still no great opal, but that's probably just because I'm stubborn lol

Of course, I understand. My comment will be lost in time during the following months/years. I hope that the google engine (or... bing?) shows my file link when someone is attempting to search for the related info! That reminds me, I'll leave some keywords here just in case someone attempts to find it in the comments section: tutorial, instructions, javascript, js, info, wiki, link, how to play, uberstone, bug, armor, weakness, wave, tower, score, difficulty, gem. If anyone is interested to put my essay into the wiki, feel free to do so. Bye!

@WGW I played the GemTD mod from Dota2, it was in 2016/2017. A few months ago, I had urge of playing it again, resulting in me finding this site. What motivated me to write that essay? I wanted to come up with a strong build myself to beat this game. First, I thought that the enemies (dwarves), had indeed a weakness against every tower type, and it was implemented on the game. Instead of manually going for each wave, writing it down and taking notes, I decided to open a file, download and inspect the script myself (as the wiki didn't had all the info), putting every piece of useful info in there. The file on my github is just that. But then, everything shattered, as I discovered that enemies only had weakness/resistance when it came to Amethyst tower. So, I just wrote about stuff I was indeed curious about, instead of coming up with a strategy. I mean, the game doesn't explain what is armor, and how its used. I went from there. The game doesn't explain that certain towers have only one tower damage type. (Example: Gold always deals Amethyst damage; Silver always deals Sapphire damage). In my head, it was probably a combination of the 3 gems used on the recipe. But it's not! What were all the stats from each tower? Upgrade costs, range, damage, cooldowns? Which one was the strongest tower? Wait, is there a UberStone? What's that? See.. those were all stuff I saw only by inspecting the code. The wiki doesn't have that kind of info. Nor did I found it here (not denying that it isn't here, but for a noob, its really hard to find the info in the comments section. There's just too many comments!). So, even after I was not able to come up with a strategy, I just wanted to share what I found. Maybe someone else will not waste their time redoing all of this again.

@CarlHR: Very interesting info. I bet @216 would have more to say on the specifics, since he's made so many comments referencing the game code over the years. I've only really just glanced it over for now, but you might want to take a look at the comments here about game bugs to incorporate in your work here. E.g., I noticed your description of damage buffs: "Damage auras (BlackOpal, StarSapphire) don't stack. There's no need to place multiple of them nearby." It's worse than that-- whichever tower you build most recently overrides the prior buff. So if you build a Star Sapphire after making a Black Opal, you lose the 40% buff for a 5% buff. It makes the Star Sapphire an absolutely worthless tower that should really never be built, not even if you're handed one in a single turn. They can wreck your game. There's lots of relevant comments on this page if you do a text search for "bugs", but I also put together a pretty long list of bugs which you can see at "WGW - 2022-07-27 3:32:27.114045" I'm curious what motivated you to do this? Another player, @lement, whom I haven't seen around in many years, had started a gem tower defense wiki a long time ago: https://gemtowerdefense.fandom.com/wiki/Gem_Tower_Defense_Wiki

@G: Well, you've proven your endurance with that level 1256 run that you didn't get to even leave your name on! That would have sent me to the emergency room. Planning on ever playing a run that long again? I still play every now and then, but usually bail around level 200 when I do manage to have a good run. And a "good run" is rare now, considering the extra restrictions I now put on what I consider to be a good run. Like e.g., now I'm trying to get a good run going without building the first turn tower, to save two whole turns. And I need to get an upgraded jade before fully upgrading the first malachite (which, again, I don't even build on the first turn anymore). And of course, I have to get a great opal by level 60, or it's a waste of time. But one of these days. . . I'll get that almost perfect RNG, and can possibly squeeze just a FEW more levels out of this game. In the meantime, it's more "fun" doing the shorter failed attempts at a near-perfect run than playing out any run to level 1200 again! In the Flash version, I had no problem grinding out one level 196 game after another, cause that only took around 10 to 12 hours. In any event, congrats (sort of) on joining the small club of folks with far too much patience and/or time on their hands who've gotten such a high score. Blank text or not. :)

Hey there! To anyone interested, I passed my entire day today gathering info about this game and posted it on my github profile. I wanted to post it here on this site, but I have no way to confirm right away if this site's db supports more than 20k characters per post (there must be a limit right?). So, instead of posting incomplete data, or attempting to crash the site, I'll just post the link here: https://github.com/carlHR/GemTDdotcomInsights

@Steve: Gem Tower Defense is now a game of endurance

Can we get a button that speeds up the enemies for each round? Maybe a toggle, 1x speed, 2x speed, 4x speed? Many of my favorite tower defense games have that option, and it helps when on upper levels and it's taking forever for everyone to die off. Thx for keeping it going after all these years!

Good to see people are still playing! I've gotten back into the game recently but struggling to break free of the 80-120 range albeit with terrible GO luck. My puzzle is (I think) solid and investing heavily in Lucky Jade, EE, and Egyptian Gold, with the occasional blood stone and paraiba. Thinking I may just need to commit to double digit Jades (I usually use 6-10) if unable to get a GO?

I remember, @_mmkay! But beat me NOW. I dares ya. ;)

Hi guys. I was just reminiscing on playing the flash version of this game in 2021. I was one of the only people to get past 195 https://imgur.com/a/mmkay-first-success-may-28th-lE7WWkN I also recorded a video on my old phone of wave 196 and my reaction. When I fly back to my home country, I might try find that video for archiving purposes. I was trying my best to copy 212's emerald placement when he beat 196 without a GO: https://imgur.com/WuLVc8I

@G thanks, and np. That great topaz was a result of thinking it might be fun to keep whatever great gem that happened to come my way instead of going for a high score, but I later changed my mind to see how far I could push the maze instead.

@SCGmeister: appreciate the tip, that's definitely what happened. Congrats on the 1200+ run! We've basically got the exact same final maze, so I feel a bit validated in how I'm doing it now. Why the Great Topaz? Just an early game necessity due to RNG?

@G If you fail a run (health goes down to 0), make sure to close out that page and re open the page in a new tab when you start a new game if you want to ensure your name gets recorded when submitting a high score. Either that, or make sure to reset the game before your health goes to 0.

I recently upgraded my computer due to some of my older hardware not being officially compatible with windows 11. Anyway, I decided to come back to this game with my upgraded hardware, to see how my new build handles this game. It ended up being a huge time save (with the help of the universal speed hack addon that still works, though you have to jump through a few extra steps to accept the risks and enable it after it's installed). As a result, I was finally able to fully fill the board and reach level 1246 in a reasonable amount of time (took about a week of grinding total instead of about a month of grinding just to get to level 1100 on my old build) Anyway, here's my final maze: https://imgur.com/a/QSZBQKV

I just finished a run to level 1256 but it (once again) did not record my name on the high scores

Hey, I'm looking for your feedback on my Gem TD inspired game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3324380/Gattai_TD/ It includes weaving paths between waypoints, slates, and all that good stuff. (sorry for the promotion, but this seems like the most active Gem TD community)

andddd for some unknown reason, my tab just refreshed...... I still gotta do the math, but I think I would've beaten my previous 1096 record... https://imgur.com/a/801-still-going-wS3bN60

So cool to see folks are back! I haven't checked in for a while. I see, as usual, @216 has "giving good advice to new players" well in hand. :) Cheers all.

801 and still going https://imgur.com/a/801-still-going-wS3bN60

It's been a while but I've decided to come back to GTD! Just finished a run at level 1111. I probably could have made it to around 1200-1250 with that map layout but I decided to end it early to lock in the fun level number on the high scores. I didn't get a GO until level 1058! I ended up with 4 MBO at the end because I used 3 perfect opals to cover the maze with the cooldown bonus, plus 1 MBO for the damage bonus. No GO most of the game meant I had more LAJ and EE than I would have liked, which meant less levels in the late game. I'll probably start a new game this week and go for 1400+ because why not

Thank you for the tips on EE positioning, and this time my luck on opal is better. Only leak 4-6 air with your positioning, that's amazing. Despite 4 leaks on 150, i made it through 200 and gaining gold since 160. I think this could be my first success run without GO. https://imgur.com/a/yKLlXBk

8 air leaks is too much.. ofc 9th jade would give you gold to survive 100, but dont go that way.. Uranium is generaly weak gem(can be fun early, but BS better anyway), so yes, building 2nd is bad choice.. (unless 1-turn maybe). Forced to take 2nd fO? (in early lvls) - reset game (1st fO sometiems reset too - risk of geting next.. and better no uranium at all). I thought its obvious that all EEs MUST be in opal range - here 2 wasn't. About EE positions: lowest EE REALLY should be 0.5 gem higher, then it would perfect place! but if no, it dont hit at all, untill flyers are near c6. Your maze dont allow to build there, but it can be moved little letf/right Upper left 2 EEs: generally good, tactical place. but: 1. opal must range here. every EE must be buffed or it works too bad 2. consider adding few jades here, if that 2 EEs aren't stunning efficient enough ( but too long stun here means they wont stun on other side later) 3. might be too early to build here (not a mistake, but there are little better places) Upper-right: not so good at this point, that position is a little bait - "range 3 fragments", but its basicly 1 fragment of path(single-role EE, like that lowest). However after you have ~15 well placed EEs, this position becomes best(for a 2-3 EEs)... assuming opal range! where you missed EEs: - below c3 (that range flyers near exit too), most underesitated place to make stunzone, very effective. Need EG(s) here too -left (max 3.5-4 gems left) to your lowest EE, but at least 0.5 gem higher - near that empty space. -(as mentioned before), near that lowest EE but, again 0.5 gem above :) notice that all 3 places are on same "height" (though EEs below c3 can be little higher). Builing full line here was important part of my stragey leftmost EG - why so far? And generally could be few more EGs + upgrade your lowest BS. ABS on long stunned target is doing more than EG. Also 1 RC is enough (if central placed). But i guess the thing that ruined that run was having EEs outside opal range + bad RNG maybe. Notice that only middle stun+ burst zone nearly guerantee to kill 2 flyers( first stunned, then next when they come form c5), so leaking 8(unlesss visible very bad RNG) is a bad sign.

On the previous run I misunderstood EE and EG. This time position of EE is better? No ground leak, leaking 6-8 air after 48, and still died at 100, too less LAJ? Right most uranium was a bad choice? https://imgur.com/a/6zHIrOM

Its probably depends of order of placing gems, but i saw replacing 40% buff with 5%. Also SYS had 180 base dmg (blue dmg, it WAS matter), 800 cd in flash version

omg i never paid attention to SYS until you mentioned it. so if some gem is in range of both SYS and BO, the attack is only +5%, not +40%?

Really no BO at 128? +40% dmg helps a little.. But definitelly NOT too many EEs! only 8 and mostly not in "tactical" places. EE is a specific gem, if it had more range it could be .. worse (in most cases). The point is we want to stun different flyers at same time without having an option to set "random taget" on EEs. Looking at screenshot, imagine that 1st flyer get stunned (due to bad RNG in first shots) just near the middle , over that jade - it will take "attention" of all 8 EEs, while other 9 enemies will pass untouched ... unless its killed fast enough. That why you want to spam EGs that range middle (and more spread EEs, try limit EEs that can hit same point to 6) so, 1. avoid middle EEs (1 maybe ok if its first, here are 3), that 2 lowest placed EEs lets say dont count as "middle" - they have other roles too. But they could be placed 1 gem lower - which is ideal Y-position for such EEs - it would force those 2 to hit different target (at c2-c3 path) 2. That rightmost EE is too far - do not range c5-c6 path at all, after enemies pass c3 its useless. Avoid such single-role EEs (few exceptions, but after you have ~15EEs ). 3. all EGs should range mid or importat stun zone. (avoid upper EGs like that 2). Armor reduction is not needed on entire map (same for RCs) 4. Avoid junk gems like SYS(most bugged gem), star ruby,2nd malachite, silver (unless 1- turn and notihng else to take). 1 paraiba may be enough, can have 2 or 3 for lvl 150. Keep in mind it takes 4 turns to make and helps to kill faster olny grounds, so i recommend olny 1 (rarely 2) untill 130-140. 5. more dmg in middle, i would upgrade that BS near opal ( no good aoe here anyway) Some good places for EEs: -5 gems above lowest possible places (with not too far left/right position ofc) . The ones below middle can range mid and its ok - above/little below your leftmost EE - sometihng between mid and c3 EE positioning can be little not intuitive, but I hope it will help a bit (but its not all :)

Does this count as "putting EEs into tactical places"? https://imgur.com/UnolPyL This run failed due to gold income not catching up with air leaks, and ran out at 128. Too many EEs and too little LAJs at this stage for sure. ..

I'm still able to get the universal speed hack to work. While chrome did initially disable it "to keep you safe" as it doesn't conform to Chromes new policies or something, it gave me the option to reenable it so long as I agreed to accept the risks associated with running older extensions.

GO makes game much easier and faster, but its not mandatory to reach high lvls. GOless runs require more jades to survive. With more optimal stategies you can survive with 5-7 jades, if less optimal... maybe need 20-30. Note that total chance of getting GO depends of jades ( more gold = more repicks). Problems with 152 suggest ground leaks in 150 (which rarely happens to me, mostly because EGs amount). losing lives at 150 is almost as bad as before 44 (but at 150 you dont want quick restart) General tips to reduce leaks: -concetrate damage gems (mainly EGs!) in middle -don't concentrate EEs in middle, put them into tactical places (that range 2 completly different fragemts of flyers path) -work on lvl 150 (i extend maze before it) VN: Sadly kills aren't transferred. But, at least stay on gem that you combine special.

Is GO mandatory? I can't get pass 152 without GO. The only two runs with GO got 220ish and 320ish, both ended due to chrome update... Chance to get a GO per repitch is like 0.16%. Any trick beyond luck?

Is the kills from the small gems not supposed to be transferred when combined into special gems?

Is there a new browser hack to speed the game up? previous one isn't working

Since my last comment i did much speedrun attempts (50?, i give up at 50-70 if no GO) and... only 1 GO. Many other Great gems. At least that GO run had decent times (despite some imperfections) - 1,9k in 60, 4,1k in 100. Breaking 4k seems possible, while i had problem to break 5k some time ago. Did screenshot in 90, can upload, if someone want (and read those comments) @WGW: before my comeback in 2019 generally i was a GTD noob. Also, jade performed a different role in flash version - there was rather enough gold (from other sources) for (super cheap) lives, so jade gold was for repicks. With non-bugged minimum speed jade's slow was crittically important as well. Now jades provides over 5x more gold, but you have to split gold between repicks and lives, slow (almost) no matter cause bug (only 1% stun effect is similar important in both versions) So, my 1JC success is not really related to not knowing about jade's gold in past :) How was my gameplay in past? - First time was playing in 2007 or 2008 (was 10 or 11 y old) on other webside, without special gem recipes. for some first runs i didnt even know that i can place gem on fly path to make maze and i was losing in easy mode :) note: maze in not needed to win in easy, but i was playing so bad. When i moved to survival mode my strat was: start from silver, absurd long maze and i was trying to keep 1 of each flawed, normal, flawless gems, and when got combine special, was trying to realize which gems dissapears. often was losing about 20, but i could get to about 100 sometimes, with many air leaks. I was coming back to this game in 2008-2015(?) several times, every time figuring out (or trying at least) spcial gem recipes (then forgetting them :) Some motivation to coming back to game was that i was really curious what would happen if i get 4 same perfects. but i knew the chances. I had few years break before 2019, then i found (fun fact: found just after figuring out almost all special gem recipes) this website, comments, wiki, sandbox. Started looking for more "serious" strategy (started to carrying about what flawed gems at start i take and i knew that EE are needed form comments), but i didnt have much hope for breaking 196 - i though it require super luck. Really helpful for testing strategies was sanbox - had to find out how to force EEs to stun different targets. One of first ideas (but very good) was builing line of EEs at max distance that range path. With some other ideas, it took me 4-5 months of rather hopeless runs ( wasn't much leaks, but 2x flyer stacks was a problem and i had no idea of solving it - somehow i made it to happen less likely later) to frist, unexpected succes - was nothing special run, but got GO (about lvl 80) and it started going well (also luck in some dangerous situations), then on my next run, 2 days after i broke 196 again, before even WGW relized my first score :)

@216, took me a long time to answer, just preoccuppied with other stuff, but I wanted to finally comment about how amazed I am that you didn't know jades earned gold until so recently-- no wonder you were able to manage a "one jade" challenge run-- you were used to playing without counting on jades for gold at all! You're right, that the Flash version did have a problem displaying the full text of the jade's description. I know it did correctly scroll when I first started playing, but I don't even what browser I was using at that point (back in 2010 or so). I did notice at some point that I could no longer scroll the description, but I didn't need to since I already knew what I needed to know. So I guess due to the text scrolling issue, there must have been lots of people who played the Flash version who also didn't know that jades earn gold. I think it's even more important in this version, considering how fast the cost of buying lives skyrockets, and the inevitable leaks of air troops and on no-stun levels.

@StarLion, sometimes quite a long time. I haven't been playing much for a while, but I do still try a run every few days and I haven't gotten a good run going in months. But. . . Part of that is because of self-imposed restrictions that make getting past level 150 much, much harder. E.g., using a sub-ideal maze layout in order to enable filling in the maximum possible number of spaces; not taking any single-turn tower except the first malachite and a single great opal (because each single-turn tower you build reduces the number of possible turns by 3); not building as many bloodstones and egyptian golds as I'd like to (so I can build mostly paraibas); etc. These restrictions, which serve only to make it possible to play out an ungoldly long and boring 2 week long run filling in every possible space and taking the maximum number of turns. Even playing in a looser style (as I have been lately, since I'm no longer interested in any more runs over level 1250), my first good run maybe since the start of the year was just this week, which I lost due an automatic Windows Update reboot. Getting past level 150 is far easier with a great opal. But of course you can't force a great opal pick. One of the big problems I've been having with so many runs lately is that the game is refusing to give me any decent opals, forget about a great opal. If you can't get anything better than a flawless opal by level 50, the run is hopeless. I've been getting lots of runs where I don't even get a flawless opal by level 50. Very frustrating-- except that it spares me having to play out another two week long run!

@WGW, how much time do you spend restarting before you get a viable run going?

I didnt know about jade's gold untill 2019 (!) Idk if from comment or wiki. In flash v. you had to scroll jade text to see gold chance, which was reported to not work in some browsers. Now there is (at least) yellow text over jades when gold drops, so it's more likely to realize it. ### Flash vs current version? flash had bugs and horrible lag. But v0.6.2 is just an unfinished game, without goal. Beating 196 was hard enough (little RNG based, but MUCH less than you think!), for first time it was really satisfacting (but very stressful too). Maybe even more than game itself, i liked disscusion and helping others to beat 196. Only @mmkay succesed, but nearly sure @lement would too...if stronger PC - lag was causing projectiles were relative slower, affecting average leak amount (stunning later). More specifically, he has a GOless lvl 196 run with SIMULATED ~52% chance for 0 leak (in 196) , but changing projectiles speed to looks like his run (he posted a gif with lvl 196) dropped chance to about 20%. (That run inspired me to do few 196+ GOless runs, which was much more possible than i expected). ofc, lives mechanic in flash (autocliker need) was a joke... So in GENERAL i liked flash more ... but NOW i prefer JS , cause i play olny to beat my 60,100,200 times. Remeber bloodstone lags? (and fact it had impact of actual times). There is counless things that i hate in JS version, but flash wasn't for lvl 200 speedrunners (extreme was ok) IF lvl 100+ game would be balanced, that some players can get to 200, better to 300, without clear max - it would be great. Anyway, i play rarley, basicly only comment activity is inspiring me to do osme more (speed)runs. Sadly 0 competition for that. Time score even no work btw, olny lvl counts + 1 point every killed enemy. Ah, and never again 1JC (very limited repicks was a disaster)

I'm curious, for folks who have played GTD going back to the original Flash version, which version of the game do you prefer? I don't think this has ever been directly discussed here yet, but now seemed like a good time to ask when there's a new flurry of comment activity (which is great to see!) Worth noting that noth versions have very big bugs that fundamentally alter the designer's real intentions. E.g., Peter H. is on record in comments here that he did not intend it to be possible to play survival mode until you literally run out of room. But I'm asking about preferences for the game as it actually plays, bugs and all, whether you enjoyed the Flash or Javascript version more. For a whole bunch of reason, primarily that Flash GTD runs took 10 hours or so, now it takes literally weeks to play out a stable run, and it's just a slog for 800+ levels. I didn't love that the Flash version was nearly impossible to get past level 196 (only a few folks ever managed it, including @216-- I never did). And that having any shot of getting past 196 meant building endless amounts of enchanted emeralds. But man, oh man, do I miss the days when I could play through a whole run of survival mode in about a DAY. But there were also some much more annoying bugs in the Flash version, e.g., opal cooldown buffs getting overridden by whatever is the most recently placed opal.

@Emmie, yes knowing that jades earn gold is an absolutely a game-changer. Survival mode past level 100 is practically impossible without the gold earnings from jades mitigating the cost of escaped air enemies. (Although @216 did manage an insanely difficult self-imposed "One Jade Challenege" run a while back!) I've said many times in comments here that I don't know how anyone new to the game gets anywhere in survival mode without knowing that jades earn gold, it's a central game mechanic that isn't noted in the jade's description anymore (where the old Flash game's description for jades did note that they earn gold). So folks like me who have been playing GTD since the Flash version days, well, we already knew, so it didn't matter whether the current game's jade description included this info or not. :) But for a newer player? Literally the only way to figure out that jades earn gold is to either (1) carefully observe a pattern of your gold amount going up when jades are hitting but never with other towers, or (2) read the 153 million lines of comment history and see where somebody talks about jades earning gold. I can't imagine how frustrating survival mode would be for someone who has no idea about jades earning gold!

I didn't know the jades drop gold! That's a total game changer. thanks! I will try to focus more LAJ early for the extra gold

Even if u leak 7 every flying lvl 44-76 (63 leaks), you need to buy 54 lives survive 76 (51579 gold). LAJ at lvl 60 has 5% chance to gain 35 gold, assuming perfect opal(227.5 cd) makes ~7.7 gold per sec. My best lvl 76 times are about 3k s (and its with GO rather), while 44 times are about 1.1-1.5k s. I assume jades can hit enoguh efficient for over 1k sec So every LAJ should make nearly 10k gold ( or more if killing ground slower) untill 76, which means 5-6 jades allows you to surive with 7 flying leaks every time If u leak average 6, requied gold drop for lvl 76 to about 30k. Its very important to not leak anything before 44. lvl 12 is often an issue (but only without fully upgraded malachite, which i ussually do). Also, jades should be able to hit an enemy most of time

Interesting! I only leak 4-7 flying guys every flying round but i seem to never have enough gold to buy lives after lvl 72. Long time lurker, been playing for like 8 years, recently started following @WGW 2022 guide, hope to get a good as you all soon! :)

Sanbox doesn't even work since year or more... Reaching 100 is really not hard if enough jades (with 0 IS very hard).

Wait so everyone reaching 100+ is this in survival or sandbox mode?

thanks for the explenation. i was afraid of that so i didnt really think about the possibility too hard. yeah i guess that's it for me then. maybe another run to use the combined special bug from the start and maybe try to get a score entry in but i probably wont be up to tinker with low amount of special gems and shortening the maze during the run

1. VERY short maze (can start with longer then reducing) 2. Spam of paraiba gem (4 parts in recipe) Max possible lvl (if infinite gold) is 1341. Having a Great Opal reduce it by 3. Every 3-gem special reduce it by 1. The only person who got over 1300 is WGW, and its really hard to beat it ( maybe possible get very few lvls more). Also it takes weeks to get as far (so i wont even try).

@216 there are people who made it to LV 1300 or something, how did they get there when space runs out?

Sadly after lvl 250 there is nothing fun/challenging in the game - the only limiting factor is space for gems (and patience). So you have to lose intentionally to submit score. Instead of going highest lvl possible i suggest improving time score (i can beat lvl 200 in ~13k seconds) or reducing total amount of leaks. @WGW: The combine bug was first reported in septebmer 2021 by Chr3y (i was suprised of that bug!) and it took little time untill we learned how to exploit it (little correction of "exploiting bug since JS release". If i got what u meant). Anyway, if u are still curious of more exac bug mechanic ( lets use EG example): Each time u select gem, the game is checking for combine special ( to display button or no), let say u selected fD. Then, the game loads list of gems needed (fs,FA,PA in this case) and searching the towers, naturally form first build to last. Let say the first build was PA. After finding PA its looking olny for FA + fD. Let say 2nd find was fD. If all 3 are found combine special is displayed. After click if selected gem is one of 3 found (1st PA, 1st fD, 1st FA), those gems are consumed( no chance to bug in that case). But if not - selected fD wasnt first fD , one of found gems is replaced by selected gem - due to bug its ALWAYS first. so it will be (selected fD, 1st fD, 1st FA). Bug reason is really stupid - copied similar line of code and one variable not changed (i think it was even looking similar, maybe "1" instead "i" , but i checked it much time ago so not sure)

uhmm..... so what do you do when you have 0 space left where you could place a gem but you have only placed 4 out of 5 gems this round...... looks like i'm stuck https://i.imgur.com/nkTrIMd.png

@WGW oh and i made an embarrasing mistake. the EG next to the MysticBlackOpal in the middle should have ben one space to the left and one space down. at some point i misplaced it and didnt notice until i turned it into the gold and now it cant be moved again. it slightly shortens the groud units path but at the current level that is completely meaning less since the one that makes it farthers barely gets passed the 3rd checkpoint. sometimes no one reaches the 3rd chekpoint. yeah leaking 3 - 7 fly units every 4 levels but i make so much gold that i always make more than it costs to heal back up to 11 (so even if i dont pay attention during the waves where they are immune to stun and all 10 flying units get through i dont lose the game)

@WGW heeey, so many thanks! great explanation and it makes sense now that it did happen to me a bunch of times unintentionally because i was preparing multiple batches at the same time so i had duplicates of any given ingredient. also fun fact: i'm currently on a game that's been going on for 3 days. i lucked out and got a great opal slap bang in the middle. currently LV330 and going strong through the power of luck. 2/3 of the uraniums i throw down in a single round so i picked them because you dont turn down a gift like that. the fire star i built and yellow star sapphire i built because i felt bad leaving them out. im going to build another black opal over the yellow star sapphire. can't wait to try out a run with the detailed knowledge on the CSB though so thanks again. lets see how far i can take this run. https://i.imgur.com/mxZsSRP.png

HOW TO EXPLOIT THE COMBINE SPECIAL BUG: I will use as an example building an Egyptian Gold, but the same pattern applies to building any special tower. 1: Pick a perfect amethyst. VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: this must be the FIRST gem on the board that is a part of the EG recipe. If you have, e.g., a flawed diamond gem already on the board when you pick the perfect amethyst, this will NOT work. 2: Keep playing till you pick a flawed diamond, and a flawless amethyst (the order doesn't matter) 3: Once you have all three necessary gems (the first pefect amethyst, and the subsequent flawed diamond and flawless amethyst), keep picking until you get EITHER a flawed diamond OR a flawless amethyst. Place this where you want the egyptian gold to be. For the sake of this example, let's say you pick a second flawed diamond. 4: Combine special on that second flawed diamond you just picked in step three, and voila, the game will consume the two flawed diamonds and the flawless amethyst to create the egyptian gold, and leave the perfect amethyst untouched. As I said below, there are a lot of nuances to how this works, which I'm avoiding explaining to keep this at reasonable length. But you'll probably be able to puzzle out some of this yourself once you get a basic handle on how the bug works without my blathering on about it. :) I hope this helps!

@Aris, yeah, unfortunately the comments page has very quiet lately (it was also not working for a while recently), which led me to not check as often. Nice to see that folks are still playing and getting hooked! I'll try to explain how to exploit the combine special bug one more time. Probably your difficulty is because there are SO MANY comments on this page to digest, and the bug itself is more than a little confusing in how it works (there are nuances I still don't fully understand), but if you follow these steps, you should be able to use it. I don't think it's absolutely essential to exploit this bug to get a long run going (meaning a run that will go past level 150), just as it isn't absolutely necessary to get a great opal. But survival mode is already hard enough even *with* a great opal and exploiting the combine special bug. I really never continue runs past level 100 unless I get a great opal anymore. And I've been exploiting the combine special bug shamelessly since the Javascript version of GTD introduced it (the old Flash version didn't have this bug). fwiw, I think you're doing very well, good maze layout and good placement and choice of gems. I could suggest some minor tweaks, but you're not doing anything majorly wrong that I can see. EXCEPT. . . you should not upgrade the bloodstones. Getting a bloodstone early (by level 30 or so) is a HUGE advantage as it will rack up tons of kills and get a huge a damage boost as a result. The upgraded bloodstone, with the flame attack, is only good once you have a ton of stun power via dark emeralds. Usually you should leave the bloodstones (which should be near the center of the map) unupgraded until level 100 or so. If I hav e a ton of dark emeralds, I will maybe upgrade them as early as level 80, but usually not. And remember too that even if you do everything right, there's RNG in this game that can screw you over beyond what gems you pick-- primarily, the effect of dark emeralds on flyers. If they don't get stunned effectively in later levels, which can happen even when you have a ton of dark emeralds hitting them all along the air path, they escape anyway and you're screwed. This is, to say the least, often an extremely frustrating game. :) This is a very long comment so I'll leave a separate one with instricutions on the combine special bug. Cheers!

LV108 yesterday. i still dont know how the CSB Exploit works but i got to keep a flawed emerald and a normal aquamarine by accident haha. i just dont know what i need to do differently so i don't have a mid game phase where leak ground units. i could get so much further if i didnt have to spend lives on ground units. i got a great aquamarine in an almost perfect location pretty early in the run and it did some HEAVY lifting especially with the black opal, perfect opal und parabia up. i also got a great topaz late in the run but that didnt do much i think. https://i.imgur.com/7OiSaGZ.png

Whelp, made it to LV100, without understanding the Combine Special Bug. i got lucky in some regards. dropped a complete Gold and a complete jade and got 4 perfect opals in total, sadly never together for a great opal. the blood stone took forever though and i was leaking a few ground units in the early 80s before i finally got it. without those leaks i probably would have made it to level 104. dunno if i could get even further with a different distribution of EGs, LAJs and DEs.... though i am convinced that my BO, Paraibas and BSs where really really good. for a brief moment during LV99 and very early in LV100 i though it could make it through 100 and could rebound and build up lives again until LV104... alas it was not so... also not sure about the GPD but i always seem to have a bit of a ground crisis at some point and i feel it would always be worse without the GPD.... sad that apparently im the only one visiting the comment section regularly... guys where are you? i need someone to explain the CSB Exploit to me like im 5yo xD https://i.imgur.com/1fDjP0J.png

made it to LV76 without CSBE hehe. dunno how far i could have made it if it had been with a great opal instead of a perfect one, maybe even more LAJ for more gold to buy more lives or repicks but i i dont think that would go very far. the bats just start leaking hard at some point. https://i.imgur.com/56wz8fs.png https://i.imgur.com/WOqY2O4.png

so, i made it to LV68. lost some fly units early on and nearly restarted. i still dont understand how combine special bug works but i actually lost a perfect aquamarine due to the bug.... guess that's why someone said to not make duplicate gems hehe. got kinda unlucky with the dark emeralds, the first one was pretty far into the run as i just wouldn't get a perfect emerald or would have another higher prority gem dropped in the same round.... man i really do like this game and survival mode i just wish it was a tinsy bit easier so one could get further with a bit less luck and without the combine special bug. https://i.imgur.com/pvkWZ6C.png

can someone give a detailed step by step exlenation on how to do the combine special bug exploit? ive read through the comments but maybe i need an explenation a 5 year old could understand because i don't get it. i have had it happen to me but i don't understand what conditions i created for it to happen

man i love this game but its so frustrating. i only got over level 50 once and i got so very very lucky and had 2 perfect opals in a single drop to create the highest tier opal and it was even in a good location where it was able to buff a bunch of special gems and some other perfect gems...... i feel like my maze is pretty damn good so i have no idea what i could do better apart from just getting insanely lucky with drops and locations

this is quite off normal topic but important for you to know my computer is currently hacked but will be fixed tommro afternoon until the do not trust any word I say also have a great day yall

@brad, if you do a search on this page for the phrase "combine special bug", you'll find lots of comments discussing/explaining how it works. @s is correct that this bug applies to ANY tower you build, not just Golds. But what at first seems like a bug that only screws you over (e.g., by consuming two perfect gems when it shouldn't), once you understand how to properly exploit it, the bug actually makes the game SIGNIFICANTLY easier. If you exploit the bug properly, you can build towers off of a single perfect gem endlessly without ever consuming the perfect gem. Also. . . hi, @s! :)

your right i think

@ brad that does tend to happen from time to time but it could be for any thing not just gold so you know

ive noticed when i make gold by selecting a perfect amethyst and upgrading it, if I happen to have a second perfect amethyst on the field it also gets consumed

thanks you @peter I figured that something was up but I thought it was only on my part @wgw. And cheers to you as well