@bonannoslam apologies, your long-running game was using an older save protocol, and a server update caused its save requests to stop being accepted while the game itself continued. That left the recoverable save far behind the level you actually reached. This bug has been fixed in the latest version of Season 1, which uses the current save/reload system and records wave checkpoints. I'm sorry your run was lost.

I still don't really agree with the pathing of slates, although maybe I just have to get used to it. Again, picking a slate breaks the maze. If slates were possible to place on top of rocks or gems, that wouldn't be an issue. And in order to position the slates well, the path needs to be double width. I can adapt, just seems unintuitive that it's the intended behaviour. On the other hand it looks very neat and not messy which would be the case if overlapping. Just looking for confirmation if it will stay this way rather than how it was in wc3. The screenshots in the comments are very handy, although idk how u attach it. And my idea was to generate them automatically on each specific run page, but maybe it's better this way.

Oh no, I had a game where i was over 400 and there was no stopping me. All of a sudden my game disappeared. Did this happen to anyone else!?

The prettiest map you'll ever see: https://gemtowerdefense.com/score-maps/35138/f3d667c3a09d12418c24640b524c5d74.jpg ... regardless of the fact that it failed at 200

@JonathanA: just realized i currently don't have any decent lvl 150 - 300 run submited , but my best times are: Lvl 60 - below 2000 Lvl 100 ~4200 Lvl 200 ~13000 Also had failied attempt , lost in 180 (or 184?) at ,~11k time. I likely won't play in next 11 days ( i don't even try on mobile) , but later can do some speedruns @muellesx why so many slates ( especially wiper, which is usefull just for damage buff)

@Peter Haha I would NEVER have guessed; I always surrender and start again

Yes perfect Peter!

@Peter, you are truly the man.

@carlhr Go finish a game and click on your score.

What is this sorcery?

@jonathanA Like this? https://gemtowerdefense.com/score-maps/35082/f965a5bbd75398fb2384866d0189a854.jpg

Also I couldn't type the letter R in the high score text form field at the end

Just finished a classic run. No great opal until level 752.

Not enough: https://imgur.com/a/gSO1pWg

Thumbs up Peter. I have started speedrunning now, my best record so far is level 180 by 15000 seconds. I welcome anyone to challenge me. Maybe a game mode for speedrunning could be set up. Or somehow sort scores by time. It could be interesting to, at the submit score screen to be able to upload a screenshot which would be shown on the run page. Idk if it's possible to automatically generate a "screenshot" and submit it without any user interaction, if so that would be even better. Nice to see that season 2 allows to pick between silver and malachite, it would still be very useful to me if I can pick flawed diamond haha.

@carlhr Sorry shortcuts fixed in Season 2 now.

Meant to say season 2, thankfully can still play classic.

@wgw nope. In season 2 its not working.

@JonathanA: The R hotkey is still working for me (to remove rocks).

R hotkey removed? Unplayable xD

Thanks, Peter. I don't suppose it's possible to change the high score text. . . I mean, it's fairly absurd that a level 1101 score says "aborted at level 500". ;) No big deal if not. Have you been able to fix the intercepted R keystrokes? @216, at best it would have killed one more ground enemy per level if I'd closed off that path directly from the final checkpoint to the exit. I did have it closed off until the final 10 or 15 levels. Good eye on spotting that the maze could have forced one more short loop. But by the time I was leaking 3 or 4 ground enemies per level, I just wanted to end the run, knowing I was going to run out gold long before running out of spaces anyway!

@wgw Thanks for the report on the submission bug, it has been fixed for Classic. Your high score wasn't lost, it has been displayed correctly under: "WGW 1200+ run ruined! Aborted at level 500"

@tony, the only way to get an uber stone right now is to get extremely lucky with 4 of the same perfect gems. The extra chance button did massively improve the chances to get one, but that recently got nerfed only to only improve chances to 2 gems max. Personally, I think 1 of 2 things needs to change or be improved on for season 2. 1: If an uber stone is mandatory for being able to get past level 200, then the chances of getting one before level 200 should be comparable to, or only slightly less than the chances of getting a great opal in classic mode by level 100 (maybe either increase the extra chances benefit to 3 max, or possibly have a diminishing returns system for each pefect you get for that you're trying to fish for?). or 2: the bosses, specifically the flying bosses should get nerfed making it possible to reach higher levels without the need for an uber stone. Personally, I would love to see the chances for getting an uber stone increased a little more during season, especially considering how much easier it is to get great gems. Also, I would agree with muellesx with those suggestions. It would save a good bit of time in having to restart several times to get the gem you want right away if you run into a string of bad luck. On a side note, I noticed that that range slate is surprisingly strong on its own if you manage to get one early enough in a run on previous runs.

Hi all, is there any formula to get Uber stone? I played like 30 rounds with many variety of strategy but stopped at 200 (season 2).

I totally agree with you @muellesx. It is pratical feedbacks.

A couple more quality of life ideas: - when starting a survival (season or not) game - let the player choose malachite, silver, or none. - start the game out at 4x - Remove the big "You Lost" banner that hides the screen at the end of a game. I want to analyze my map

@WGW This number is related to rolled gems (even repicked) I can see the main reason you leak as much before great opal - maze with rocks than must be reserved to remove later, blocking good EE spots. Other reason is lack of damage in the middle. Using EGs just to armor reduction in some places(around c4 for example) is not nessesary About ground units: why they got shortcut from c6 to exit?

Peter, one more note, regarding the run stats: It says for this run "Normal Amethyst led the build with 234 placements," but that can't possibly be true. I only ever built ONE bloodstone this run, which means I only ever placed a single normal amethyst to build it. The most common gems I placed must have been the components of the paraibas, which I built a couple hundred of.

Well, finished my first long run in classic mode run without benefit of the combine special bug or glitched enemy movement in late levels. I was prompted to re-enter high score text, but again, there is no button to submit the score. So this run is showing up with the text I entered at level 500, "WGW 1200+ run ruined! Aborted at level 500". I tried entering the new text "WGW Stop the Madness", but it didn't take. This run ended with me leaking so many ground enemies once I had to shorten the maze, that I ran out of gold to buy lives long before I ran out of space. I lost at level 1101, but space-wise, should have made it to around level 1242. And this was with 24 jades, 40 enchanted emeralds, and 2 great opals. I had close to 200 million gold before I had to start leaking ground enemies around level 1075, and within 25 to 30 levels, all that gold was gone, lives costing almost 1 million gold at the end. I was leaking only one enemy per air level, maybe two, but leaking 4 enemies per ground level. You can't sustain that kind of leakage no matter how many jades you have. But no crash-- and the memory usage stayed under 300MB to the end. Screenshot of no high score submit button: https://imgur.com/a/yzDfbbX Boring screenshot of final layout: https://imgur.com/a/mqYuG1J

39 GAs and still not enough to kill boss 200... Normal flying wawes were dying fast, no much stun was needed

I'm at level 885 or so and it's interesting playing a long classic mode run with the game optimized and without the bugs, particularly the old combine special bug where you could build towers off of a single perfect gem forever. I've already mentioned that there's a lot more tedium due to having to repick to get a perfect aquamarine for every paraiaba now, but I don't see a way around that without classic mode being rebalanced so that filling in the whole map isn't really acheivable. Having overbuilt jades due to not getting a great opal until level 228, I'm earning an insane amount of excess gold, over 90 million at this point. Since there's now a "Surrender" button and you don't need to intentionally leak enemies to end a long run anymore, and with so much excess gold, there's no reason not to just max out lives to 50. At some point soon I'm going to have to drastically shorten the ground enemy path due to running out of room for new towers, but I figure there's no way I'll end up leaking enough to matter with this much gold already. By this point, before Peter patched the memory leak, the enemy movement was glitched out, making levels take 5 to 10 times longer than the 1x speed we used to be limited to. But the glitched movement also meant it was essentially impossible to leak any ground enemies, since they would freeze in place. So again, I think the improvements in the game (like fixing the combine special bug), in this case the memory leak being fixed and the late level enemy movement no longer being glitched, means you need to have a lot more gold now, to cover lots more repicks, and potentially lots of leaked ground enemies in the very late game. I decided to take a second great opal, costing 3 levels, and misclicked building paraiba number 3,427 (slight exaggeration) and had to build a malachite at level 850-something as a result, costing another turn. But I think this should still get to level 1241. Hoping I can re-enter high score text at that point. Running this at 4x speed, without the glitched enemy movement, it's only taking 2-3 days, instead of a couple of *weeks*! Maybe after Peter has solidified the Season mechanics we can get him to tweak the classic mode game. Lots of good ideas have been suggested here over the years!

I attempted one more season 2 run to give the new updates a chance, but quit after level 133 as it didn't look like I would survive much past 150. Personally, I think the increased cost of both the repicking and extra chance is now too expensive making being able to handle the waves of 15 flyers even more challenging and rng based than it was before (not to mention that by making everything more challenging without resetting everyone's score, you effectively gave anyone who started a run before the update an unfair advantage on the leaderboard). When I play this game, I do it as a way to relax. Making the game too punishing and rng based is anything but relaxing. On the plus side, I do appreciate that classic is back and with all the bugs fixed, as that seems to be a bit more my style as much as I like testing out the new updates on occasion.

How big difference? - pre-nerf Uber Stone was ~16.8x stronger than EG, making it quickly scoring kills and grow to game-breaking power,. Current version is "only" ~7.8x stronger than EG (6.5x stronger than GA) and has halved effeciency of lvling - still kills are 3.25x more effective than on GA (which hardly is getting kills due to air only attack). Also Uber Stone's range is very helpfull for boss. Range - that's why i tried to take as many GAs and even PAa as possible to maximize damage to boss - effect was good, but still 30-40% hp left. Maybe if stack 20+ GAs in mid( and some for new armor reduction) there is small hope to beat it without an Uber Stone, but honestly i think boss need some nerf

I failed in 200 around 3 times. I will do with another layout.

Did a wave 200 seasonal run. Completely forgot about the greater gem changes, will need to adjust my layout to compensate. Has anyone beat 200 without an uber stone? I have yet to see one so not sure how big of a difference it is

I thought the fame* *game Also, just wanted to mention how much I love the stats on the runs and on people's accounts-- great update! [And thanks, humbly, for the badge :) ]

@Peter, I've got a good run going, at level 628 now and on track for a level 1243 high score in Classic mode without the combine special bug. I thought the fame had ended prematurely at level 500, when I was prompted for high score text, but I see now that this is a sort-of "pre-registration" of an ongoing run's high score, as of level 500. (1) I assume this is the cause of the delay after a level ends-- the game is saving? It's not a problem at all, but sometimes the delay can be up to 10 seconds, which feels like a crash. Maybe a pop up saying that the game is saving? (2) Will I be able to change the high score text I entered at level 500? Because I didn't understand what was happening, I entered the text, "WGW 1200+ run ruined! Aborted at level 500". :) This is obviously not the text I'd want on the run when it completes-- will I be prompted again to overwrite the high score text at the end of the run? (3) The "R" keystroke bug is only partially fixed; Capital "R" keystrokes go through, but lowercase "r"s still do not. (4) Memory usage is still very low, around 200MB. Looks like the memory leaks are plugged/under control! It takes a lot of repicking now to have to draw a perfect aquamarine for every paraiba, which means needing a lot more gold, so I really doubt that it'd be possible, outside of brilliant lucky picks, to get to level 1300 now, without the old combine special bug. It's really a joy to be able to play this again, in a form I still recognize ;) and with so many bugs fixed and the game code optimized and the site upgraded with account verification and such. I'm genuinely grateful for all your work on this!

Here: https://imgur.com/a/lcwodcF I also added the .html on my github

@216 There was a small bug in storing the undefeated bosses remaining hp so unfortunately the data was lost for your run. It has been fixed now.

Do it as I do @muellesx, two words: "JS injection". When the site lacks something you really want inside it, do it yourself. Btw @Peter, I was thinking of creating a browser extension to add code on the page every time I enter the site, but if you're gonna add grids on future updates, I won't lose my time with this.

Agree, also extreme max scores should be sorted by time Decided to spend almost all gold on Amethyst extra chances -a lot PA/GA on map, did much damage to boss 200, but still missing a lot to kill. Some observations: -PA got 3rd most rolled gem for this run -while it like Extra Chances (solves unluck problem for GO) i fell like it needs little nerf. At lest they cost something now. -LAJ gold chance could be little nerfed in S2 - since towers shots faster and extra ground enemies increase fight time, resulting in more gold generated (but i dont like idea of stopping at all at 201) - It diplays spell is usable 3 times - but The Sky Warlord is moving as fast as it takes about 40s to reach end, so 3rd use is impossible - maybe allow us to slow this boss more?. -As some players noticed jump form 10 to 15 enemies is quite high; ideally it should increase it 1 by 1 at manually chosen lvls. 11th enemy can by already somewhere around 70-80 . For me 15 flyers in 104 is not a big problem, just few leaks. - Got 3 PAs before last gem pick THREE times (once it was first 3 gems - 4 real chances for Uber) - really that 3rd is regular 1/80 roll now? - no boss kill attempt % progress in highscore anymore? - no highscore text option in s1/s2

This may have been mentioned before, but it would be awesome to have the different difficulty levels for classic as their own high score pages. Right now everything that isn't survival gets lost at the bottom.

Is there any chance we can get the slate recipes on the front page along with tower recipes?

@216: Easy fix, check now.

Great Opal statistics are nice! But Uber Stone is not displaing yet The only problem with special gem stats is counting upgraded version as different gem.

you have to be a super-brain with thermonuclear calculations to reach 300

Just did a quick run up to wave 100, the new slates are interesting, the new extra chance mechanic is very good. Can't wait to sit down and grind out a high wave run

I do wish there was some sort of sandbox where we could plan out our maze

Haven't gotten to experiment with the new season but hopefully will in the next week or so! Thanks again Peter for all of these new updates

@scgmeister Yes apologies for all the changes, Season 2 had some major mechanic changes and some very old bug fixes.

@216 lucky you for getting an uber stone. Even with spamming the extra chance as much as possible and getting it up to 59% in multiple instances before seeing at least perfect, it still refused to give me more than 3 perfects of a gem. Now with the extra chance nerfed down to 2 max, and more expensive, I decided to end my current run a little early without bothering to submit my score (it wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway due to leaking too many flyers and spending so much gold on extra chances after level 100). Anyway, with my hopes of ever getting an uber stone and having fun with it back to being a pipe dream, and with the constant changes going on in season 2, I think I'm going to go back to messing around in normal survival for awhile.

Thanks Peter, but to be honest, I think you need to slow down on updates. Let a season run for a bit and collect more feedback, or just pull the plug and start a new season. Your amazing responsiveness may be a bit of a liability! :)

@216 @muellesx: Version 1.0.24 reduces Uber Stone's kill scaling from 10% to 5% damage per 10 kills. Extra Chance can now produce at most two targeted Perfect gems in one round, and its repeat price rises by an uncapped 35% of the base price per use within each 100-level tier.

Extra-chance is sooo out of balance.

Uber Stone with ~2700 kills allowed me to kill boss 303, then lost many lives on ground level - didn't notice important gap in maze... Fresh Uber Stone wasn't too op, it was fun to looks how it's growing in power. But as it grows it gets more and more kills per lvl, eventually(at ~2000 kills) it kills enemies in like 2s and gets almost all wawe kills. So nerf suggestion: instead +10% per lvl, make this gem to gain olny 5%. maybe even 4% Attack speed might get futher, but minor nerf - nerfing too much may remove the intended fun of getting it

I thought it was a feature of the season that a tower is assembled from two

For instance, I wasn't able to test it before due to several factors in real life: work, health and mostly laziness. And it seems that I am magnetic for bugs and crashes :) If more time was given, I would report a lot of stuff back then. Heh.. weeks ago.

I voted 'yes', because I think that this season should be put on hold for the time being. The game is too unstable. But I also think its fair to let people submit scores regardless. Some here find it rather fun; while I enjoy the thrill of playing a tower defense, others want to publish encouraging messages, or submit high numbers. That's fine. So, why not open a new tab called 'Beta Testers', and let people submit scores there. Even if the game is bugged, prone to exploits, people can still post scores in there. If the game version changes, exploits are found, you can just dump scores in there on the future. No need to erase them. The real season 2 was scheduled to start later anyways. I think its fair to archive everything and start fresh. But give it time for us to test the game. Only when its stable, release it. Otherwise this will happen again.

@Peter - huh? He died in the same place - level 303. With only a dozen points less than me.

No way, that Extra Chance must be nerfed - another Uber Stone ,4 PA and 1 FA in one round after 5 failed attempt, displayed chance raised to 65% which mean's about 19% for PA and 0.5% chance for 4 ones(maybe little more with "regular" rolls). Also the price should go up little faster each use, without cap Maybe gettting 2nd targeted Perfect should instantly disables this to prevent getting Uber Stones to easilly

@muellesx Nope... check's TTJ's high score right now

So... I guess level 303 is just a kill screen?

About the poll: I think few more rebalances will be needed in next days and its too fast for reset, only that's why i vote "no"

@216 I'm annoyed that the Slate/Combine Special fix accidentally opened up and relaxed Combine Special in Season 2. I should have caught that. It has now been fixed in 1.0.23.

Still is possible to combine special with 1 existing gem and 2 round gems What about armor aura instability issue? - cant't see that fix in updates Suggestion for high scores stats: "top towers" should shows actually made special gems, not all rolled gem (even repicked ones). Also it should clearly state if run contains an Uber Stone and level when it was construsted Similar stats would be interesting for Great Opal (especially for classic/S1) as GO and Uber Stone are TOTALLY game-changing gems, so existence/ lvl contruction(of first, if multiple) of them are most interesting stats for me besides total score/lvl

@tony_nguyen Boss spells available to help defeat the boss, use them wisely.

@carlhr: Thanks fixed in 1.0.22: -Wraith attacks now stop safely if round cleanup clears targets mid-attack. -Destroyed, missing, or removed targets are ignored.

Bad news.. a crash! https://imgur.com/a/cfN7I2E

Hi guys, what is the spell 3/3 we have when encounter each boss run?

@216: No gameplay changes. Version 1.0.21 improves the save/reload mechanism so progress stays more current on slower connections and completed scores submit more promptly. Sorry about that, the old anti-cheat code was still partially active saving too often. I have corrected it now.

@216: Your 200 level run was on version 1.0.13, the combine special was fixed in 1.0.18 & 1.0.19. I am open to clearing the Season 2 scores because of the repick changes and the combine special bug...

I was able to combine special FA+PA from round gems with existing fD -bug or a feature? Last night i finished lvl 200 but submitting was taking forever. It got saved at 194 - finished again

At some point I will probably check out the new game mechanics, but for now, I'm in the midst of my first real sustainable run in classic mode since Peter fixed a whole slew of bugs, including the "combine special" bug which I used to exploit mercilessly. I had a barely functional run going without a great opal, just barely getting by due to building an insane number of Jades, then at level 218, I finally got the great opal that changes everything, going from leaking as many as 7 air enemies to at most 2. Had I got it sooner, I'd have saved a whole lot of unnecessary gold spent to buy back lives and would not have built nearly so many jades. But this run should be sustainable. Not going to get anywhere near the level 1301 high score, but should be above level 1200 in the end. I've never finished a "classic mode" run without the combine special bug, which means having to repick a *lot* more to get a perfect aquamarine for every paraiba-- and you have to build nothing but paraibas to maximize turns/levels. With the combine special bug (which is rightly corrected now), you only needed one perfect gem to build special towers with it forever. I'm at around level 300 now, with 5 million gold. But even with 4x speed (so great that this is available now-- thank you, Peter!), this is gonna take a while. . . https://imgur.com/a/C7eK8wI

@scgmeister The last part was the bug I mentioned below, it should be fixed by now. I also noticed that we cannot place some slates right next to each other; The left-top slate placement thing also happened to me, and there's no message on the console about any errors when it happens. Also, even if stated that a slate has 2 moves left, sometimes I cannot move it even if the cursor display as a green color. The only issue left is this one lost in the sea of comments: "216 ✦ 2026-08-02 00:54:30" But I will not forget

Ok, I gust managed a decent run on the season 2 and wanted to mention that first off, increasing the flying waves from 10 - 15 is a bit too punishing. Ground waves upped to 15 is fine, but for flying going from 10-12 would be plenty. I do like the extra chance feature as it seemed to help me save on money when fishing for a certain gem, plus it massively increased my chances of getting a great gem/opal (even came close to getting an uber stone a few time but still no luck there). As of right now I barely mad a dent on the level 200 boss which feels impossible to get past at the moment, especially since if I were to focus on damage dealers instead of EE after level 100, I wouldn't survive very far due to the waves of 15 flyers. Slates are an interesting concept but there doesn't seem to be much use in making more than one of each of the combined slates with maybe the exception of the ancient slat, which again has limited use due to the enemies being able to pass through them. Here couple strange things I noticed during this run. There was one instance where I attempted to make a "hold slate" directly below an "ancient slate", and when I clicked create, it instantly moved the newly created slate to the top left corner of the play field, then it wouldn't let me place it back the the original spot. I had to select a different location to place that slate. Also, I don't know if this is intended or not, but in the gem selection phase, now that you can downgrade a gem without actually selecting it and triggering the next wave, it now lets you use the combine special button (or create a slate) if you have the recipe to do so . One other strange thing I encountered was something also encountered. basically while placing gems, if you place a gem that completes a recipe from gems that had already been placed in previous levels, the combine special button will suddenly pop up. Out of curiosity, I tried pressing combine special (I wanted to combine it anyway), and instead of starting the next wave, the game had me finish placing the rest of the 5 gems then asked me to pick one of the 5. Naturally I clicked on the now combined gem (now an EG) to keep that out of the other options out of fear that if I were to select one of the other random gems, I might end up losing the EG. Now that I think about it, I had another instance where when I combined 2 gems to make a higher tier gem, the rest of the gems turns into rocks, and now you have the option to keep one of the random rocks instead of the gem you just combined.

Ok, that was fast.

@carlhr, version 1.0.19 prevents exactly this bug by excluding every slate and special tower from recipe ingredients

I sent an email, its better explained there. Good luck!

@carlhr Yes good catch, the bug was due to the slates counting as "normal gems" still. It has been fixed right now.

Yeah, the recipe list is broken. And its not the same bug as before, I just created Dark Emerald by combining Flawless Sapphire alone in one go (not even flawed topaz, or perfect emerald was present in the build set). In fact, I never even got a Perfect Emerald on this run.

@Peter, another combine bug https://imgur.com/a/another-bug-found-rqq6v19 Or.. a feature!

I'd request a feature that allows us to replace the current background image with some other image of choice; that basically solves it. Anyone can edit the maze on gimp/paint and draw their own custom grids this way. Imgur is there to share the map on the comments section so everyone else can use it.

@ Peter some aura issues i mentioned weeks before about uranium removing armor penatly auras for short time - now there is way more gems(slates) that also cause that issue

@carlhr Thanks, isn't that an very old bug... I'll get it fixed. Also, I should add an optional grid for you to toggle so you don't have to use any 3rd party javascript...

@Peter... take a look at this bug https://imgur.com/a/IBDR22Y

@216 @carlhr Feedback heard and repick is back: Implemented Season 2 version 1.0.18. Restored Repick for exactly five untouched gems. Repick retains nothing and costs 50 × (repicks + 1) × tier. No cooldown or per-round limit. Downgrading, upgrading, combining, or committing a round gem disables Repick. Special/Slate crafting waits until all five placements are complete. Special recipes can still use stored board ingredients.

I meant not* only then in the middle of my comment, can't edit ..if anyone even read this (sorry for such long comment)

Repicks are a key-important element of this game - i dont like like idea of removal. It will make game way more RNG depended and frustrating sometimes. While i agree that repicks could be more expensive to increase importace of carefull placement, gold-repick management is important of element of strategy. Because we (experienced players) don't want to build dozens of Paraibas*, SYSs, Black Opals, Uraniums, Red Crystals - those gems are support/buff and we want mosty 1-2 of them (rarely few more) . And we don't want pink diamonds at all... untill preparation for boss 300 maybe. Gems viable to mass-build: - EG good, pink direct damage and armor debuff. Main late-game damage source (if no Uber stone:). - EE needed for stun, also decent damage - ABS -good damage on stunned targed (a bit weaker in s2), alternative to EG, but need some stun first - LAJ - gold... but where to spend if no picking and no leaks (well, there likely will leaks without repicks) - some of Great gems - several uraniums might be viable What comes with S2 (slates): -Ancient slate -strong stun, might replace most EEs, some damage Elder slate seems to need buff, strong early, but later - likely too weak spells/poison. Armor debuff do not stack with EG = not usefull, while EG is main gem basicly. viper, wraith are just buffs, no viable to build many So in late game many gem are not usefull to take. some gems are not even viable to downgrade: PD, FD, fR, NR, FR, fA, fAq, NAq, fE, FT, PO (very needed early - useless late game), also fO/PT if don't want uranium. When i get only those gems i really want to repick, not take a junk gem, but only then Sometimes, due to RNG i have a lot of parts of mulpitle gems. i.e 8 Perfects Emeralds, 5 flawed Topazes, 4 Perfect Amethyst, 6 flawed Diamonds, (maybe BS parts too) but RNG don't give me any FS , FA - repicking is naturally way to solve the problem. Witohut of them i predict more proble wth it Ofc, Extra Chance is a way to fight it too (for exaple chosing PS in orded to get FS) - but its just a chance - repick is a good plan B There are other situation that are frustating without repick: -missclick ruining maze - attemps to get well-placed GO - when i get a PO as first gem, then i put other gems in reserved middle area for this. But not succesful GO attems ussually should be repicked to preven blocking those placed But speaking of first 10 - 20 lvls : I dont repicks - 5 different chippeds = reset game Idea of repick cooldown: in my experience repick are needed very irreguraly. Sometimes not at all for many lvl , then several in one lvl. If bad luck, you can get same useless gems in row, right? - - - - - - - - - - - - - About combining while placing gems: with repick or no, i fell like cheating when chain-combining gems - in theory possible to make 5 specials gems in one turn. Also its possible only on gems 1-4 and just after getting them (can't go back to prevoius gem) - strange mechanic, i thought its a bug. --------------------- * in classic paraiba spam is important to save space --------------------- But i respect other's opinion - if majority of players will wants repickless S2 and some junk gems on map - ok then

On the first levels, 1-10, you don't have much gold to spare. So no Extra Chance button until you get a LAJ, or upgrade a tower so you don't die on early fliers. In this case, repick is quite useful to make sure you don't mess things up, and need to restart until you get good luck. But repick has also a good reason on late levels. At least for me: I play this game while being distracted on other tabs. Dude, I can't focus all the time. Sometimes, it happens, I misclick and place gems on wrong spots which cause my maze to break. A repick is useful to fix my own mess. Not to cheat.

I think the issue Carl is pointing out is an early-game only issue. Why not consider starting season play with gem chances maxed out on day 1. Nobody likes sitting around re-rolling the first 4 levels over and over so they can get to their strategy.

I disagree - I think lack of repick is maybe the most important mechanic to retain. It makes you have to think strategically about what downgrades can be done to achieve something keepable. Keeping any gem for towers beyond the necessary utilities is a last resort and one you only fall to if you fail to downgrade your way to a slate.

For me, it sucks not being able to repick on the early levels, because of low chances of getting flawed and high chances of getting chipped gems, which greatly limit our choices during that time. Why not, instead of banish this option, make a cooldown? You can repick once every, say, 10 levels. This way, no one would be able to abuse it. I think.

Just lost on season 2, nothing showed up on the high scores FYI

last comment: it would be really nice if we could add a note to our high score.

"The Splitter (ground) On death it splits into four ground fragments that must also be defeated." Not true. I failed to defeat the spawn and the game continued.

Yes, agree. I think you can lose the repick option altogether.

@muellesx Maybe we should get rid of repicking for Season 2? Season 2 already offers several ways to shape a build: Extra Chance, downgrading, combining, moving slates, and choosing among placed gems. Repick overlaps with those systems while letting players erase an entire unfavorable round, which reduces the importance of placement decisions and creates awkward interactions like locking a combined gem and rerolling the rest.

@216 Balance changes and I added "Boss Spells" to help with the bosses.

Combining gems and then repicking retains the combined gem, locking it in, allowing you to repick the other 4. Is this intentional?

Is there any chance that the concept of Mana could be less opaque?

If that's the case, I often use Google Drive on my office PC (windows 11 + Firefox), and its rather uncommon, doesn't happen every time; only if you let the window untouched for a while, the entire page on google sheets goes black. Refreshing the page doesn't fix it; What does fix is to shutdown and turn the PC on again. Sometimes, the windows gets restored on its own if you scroll up and down, forcing a redraw on the page. Pretty weird bug, and it never happened to me everywhere else (only on that PC). Perhaps its the same? Or just a coincidence. Most sites are bugged lol

@Kyoria what do you mean by a black box? You mean the canvas is completely black?

Again got same game freeze, caused by Great Emerald and dying enemy Extra chance is very nice, but fells too cheap and little too strong effect Some gems will need nerfs/buffs. Also, i don't think that -10% hp will help much on The Sky Warlord - It's moving too fast(high minimum speed), is flying and stun immune - no mechanic to counter that, just pure damage need - it leaked with ~60% hp with old, crazy stacking of speed buffs(-85%) @Kyoria Recently i couldn't start any difficuly when tested in Firefox, but updating Firefox solved the problem

installed chrome as a work around for now

I'm getting a black box for classic and the seasons on firefox - anyone else? I only have the mozilla vpn (not using) and ublock (disabled) as extensions

@216 Update again: Version 1.0.11 gives slates their assigned elemental damage and colors, aligns Opal with Aquamarine's Water color, displays Extra Chance odds and pity, restores bounded Ancient Slate scaling, and gives Viper diminishing returns toward 50%. Ordinary enemy health now rises gradually from 1× at level 30 to 1.5× at level 50. The level 200 and 300 bosses receive a limited 10% health reduction; the level 100 Splitter is unchanged.

It was intended to allow "combine special" during placing gem phase? it's like we can keep 2 gems. Opal damage is different than Aqua? Slates has black damage text. Ancient slate do amethyst dmg for sure Extra chance fells too cheap, as it not icrease each time used; I'm curious what is the chance of getting chosen gem, its nowhere written Ancient slate got really heavy nerf with removing lvl scaling completly + nearly stop kill scaling, (but i aggre its hard to balance it with both) Killing bosses 200 and 300 fells impossible without Uber Stone; after nerf it might be hard even with. Suggestion for viper aura: use diminishing returns, allowing get a bit over 40%. I don't like hardcaps. But Its just a sugestion :) Anyway with slate buffs wawes should have at least x1.5 more hp (starting around 30)

Extra chance increases the chance of all levels for the type chosen - therefore it becomes possible to get a chipped stone. It happens a lot in fact.

@216 I have applied fixes for all your feedback. Please test again.

@wgw: Sorry about that, the rollback to Classic caused the issue. I have fixed them now: Fixed in production. WGW’s account now includes: Level 95 Survival — 72,284, “No submit score button?” (restored as score ID 34655) Level 15 Survival — 1,820, “test” (existing score ID 34652 linked to account 63)

Yes, something is broken with classic. Opened Firefox and couldn't even start run (but update solved this problem) Nothing changed with crit texts - still memory leak, after 100 they are not displayed @muellesx: I had similar suggestion yesterday. Apparenly Peter do not have time today, have fun with game breaking Ancient Slate/Uber Stone ! Btw, Viper Slate is not stacking with BO and its capped at 40% bonus, so its useless

A quality of life request for season 2: Can you grey out or otherwise subdue the slate sprites so that we can see our paths?

Also just tested submitting a high score for a low level run (around level 21), without clicking off the browser tab, and it doesn't appear that the score was submitted. The most recent run listed under my account is from June 15 (level 781, "WGW It's happening again. . ."), so it looks like possibly no new high scores can be recorded for classic mode.

I think I can say that what causes the "Submit Score" button to disappear is the browser tab LOSING FOCUS. Reproducible by surrendering a run, activating any other window/tab, and the button disappears.

Peter, just wanted to note a couple of things, for when you can look at them: 1) I had a lousy run which I surrendered at level 90 or so, and wasn't able to submit a high score (logged in as WGW). I tried hitting enter in the text box, but that didn't trigger a submit, and there was no button to press. I took a screenshot, posted here: https://imgur.com/DJf0Sc0 2) An old bug appears to be back in play, in that you can't type the letter "R" in the text box to submit a high score. You can paste text with an "R" in it, but I believe that otherwise "R" keystrokes are being intercepted as "Remove rock" commands. The game is super snappy now, top to bottom, and I see the critical hit animations are back. Assuming this doesn't cause a memory leak anymore, that's great. Seems like you've optimized a lot (again, I can't read javascript, so I haven't looked at the code). Thanks again for restoring the ability to add text to high scores and all the rest!

Very well done @Peter in Season 2, thank for keep up develop the game.

@Peter few more game-breaking things: Two gems really require nerf. What happened? Used extra chance for PAq and.. got 3 ones =Uber Stone with s2 rules. first, while i like combine 3 rule, making Great Gems from 3 Flawless in s2, the legendary Uber Stone should be (IMO) reserved for extreme rare event of four same Perfects, 3 perfects might yeld some new, s2 - specyfic secret gem(s), weaker than Uber Stone (Or just nothing, olny Great, depends of You) Next, if someone lucky get that gem - it should be op, but its just TOO op. That what make Uber Stone game breaking is combination of several things, not just maximum damage, min/max dmg should stay. but: 1. high attack speed 2. high crit chance - 25% for x4 means more damage come from crits than regular hits* and x1.75 dmg increase in average 3. ability of getting kills We can't nerf point 3 directly, but nerfing points 1 and 2 will affect 3 #2 Second op ge.. slate actually: Ancient slate. This one just too crazy scales with kills. Hard to farm proper amount of kills, but once done its damage can excced enemy's max hp in fact, it attacks very slow, so with many enemies it likely won't solo game like Uber Stone with 1000 kills does Was fun too see those 2 op gems race for kills - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - *that doesn't mean anything serious actually, a gem with 50% for x1.01 dmg would do more total dmg form crits too

i've been in hospital for a bit, so i've a lot to catch up on hahah. very excited to test out the new updates and see what's going on

@216 ah true, its written in season 2 details

@CarlHR: Think again about what that % means... 33.75% is correct which means an EE can have 236.25 cd with all buffs -85% was insanely op - last night got buffs and 15 flying enemies were hardly passing c3. lvl 200 boss was impossible to beat anyway xd @JonathanA: In practice reset at lvl 1 is like a repick...the olny frustrating this is reset lag in seasons, so i dont mind if there was an option to force malachite or other gem. But controversial may be option to force normal gem, which with aided start is impossible( but not in s2) About your new comment question: slates are ghostly - but when you create slate , 4 other gems turns into rock, when creating slate form 2 slates, no rock magically appear( it would block path - you can have slate that looks like blocking path)

When creating slate, a rock should be left also so as not to break the maze, right? Appreciate the detailed testing and feedback, 216.

I forgot I had an idea in mind. Allow infinite repicking level 1. Or simply select what you want as starting gem. I know sounds like cheating but, can be useful if you want a special strategy. I guess it's only useful for my fD strategy so it doesn't have broader appeal but i leave it here anyway. I know I already said it at some point but again, the option to repick without new placement would be useful.

41.25%.. I typed so many times on console I confused the results. But it should be this.

@Peter not sure I follow this math Speed channels stack multiplicatively: 25% + 50% + 10% leaves 33.75% cooldown s = 25% s += s * 50% s += s * 10% -> 38.75% ??

I understand the dissatisfaction from the seasoned veterans, even though I'm not one of them. At the same time I think some disruption is inevitable when making changes that have been requested by [same or different people idk but probably doesn't matter]. Personally I'm really happy with the evolution of the game, but I don't disagree that keeping the old game intact would've been better for some people. Personal high score message is a good feature while I do prefer how it is now that it's automatic. Again, I'm not a hardcore fan here, I'm just casually enjoying, so I respect those people more than my own opinion. I think we are many who appreciate the development and existence of this whole game/website/community, that can never be stated enough. Pretty cool that such a simple game is going through the experience of needing several versions, similar to WoW even. I think it makes sense, maybe not a necessity but a useful approach, I'm considering doing the same with the game i'm working on. ISPRAKATAK: bro, chill haha.

is there a discord server for this?

Thanks for clarifing that, i haven't played WC3. I suggest changing color/opacity of slates to make them looks more "ghostly" - it might help to see ground path. Issues with new functions: - move slate: no previev position - extra chance: used for PE, got few chipped emeralds instead.. (ofc maxed chances, should be 0% chipped) Also, something was wrong with viper aura+ (M)BO aura, will do more testing later. (mostly) cosmetic issues/request: - please change damage text color of gems that do "elemental" damage (shouldn't it be for all special gems too?) , like it was in flash version - to indicate that color of damage actually matters. I clearly remeber that Malachite had green text "6.0-6.0" and it was affected by green damage modifiers -Displayed minimum damage is 1 (base) less than actual - i.e. Malachite is not 5.0-6.0, its just 6 as in example above. But again, its just a display issue, not actual 1 less damage - In 2021 Red Crystal got buffed to 5/6/7 , but descryption still states 4/5/6

@216: Thanks for the testing feedback. Slates do not act as walls, that was in the original design of Gem Tower Defense from Warcraft 3 I have made the following changes: 1. Separate “Make Slate” and “Combine Special” actions. 2. Move Slate and Extra Chance controls are now visible and correctly positioned. 3. Speed channels stack multiplicatively: 25% + 50% + 10% leaves 33.75% cooldown. 4. Wraith displays both its 100-range slow aura and 171-range Boost aura. 5. Season 2 rules document ghostly Slate pathing and the updated mechanics.

@Peter still i didnt get anwser for some fundamental questions: -are slated INTENDED to be "ghostly" - ground units are passing trough them - no info in s2 rules about that -where is button for move slate (extra chance also)? - it is really INTENDED to stack GO, wraith slate boost and GAq to -85% (!!) base cooldown (instead of 0.5 x 0.75 x 0.9 for example)? other(also mentioned before) issues, but not as crittical: - i mentioned before - wraith (boost) aura range not displayed correcly - just realized it has TWO auras and olny one is displayed - i got i.e. NO, NE, fS, fT, 5th no matter. I want to "combine special" 1-hit Jade, in place of NE, but instead i get slate

Yes, Peter, if you can associate the old scores with my account, that would be great! Please, and thank you. :)

@WGW Yes my apologies for making too many changes in a short period, I understand the value of having stable game. I've added the Seasons button on the tab at the top. The main default game will be "Classic". Also, I can assign your old scores to your account if you would like.

Oh-- never mind on the high score text ask, which I see now is already implemented! Thanks again!

Thank you, Peter, sincerely. As always, I understand and appreciate that this is your game, 100%, to do with what you decide! I would still like to ask, now that we have "Classic" as its own "mode", that we have a separate field for high score text. I understand and appreciate the need for account verification, and it's great that you've added this, truly. But adding a separate column for character-limited, tag-stripped text should be, I think, easy to implement without opening the site up to easy attack, or turning the high scroe list into a series of generic name entries. :) The new game mode is obviously being embraced with enthusiasm by many folks-- but some of us would really like, if possible, some of your continued attention also paid to the original game's stability and balance in "normal" mode, and even maybe some back and forth on how to accomplish that. Thank again for listening, sincerely!

@216 I have taken all your feedback into account for today's changes. The only change that haven't made is the difficult of the early levels.

actually scratch that - just started a new game and couldn't combine a bloodstar without triggering an error midwave

an update to my comment - I can upgrade a gem during a wave but not upgrade changes or buy a life.

How the hell people have a lot of gold in lower levels but still managed to lose? like wtf man how stupid are you?

I seem to be having a problem where if I upgrade gems or buy a life while a wave is happening, my game gets stuck in a reload loop. Doing Season 1 - have restarted a ton of games now. Does this run better in chrome vs firefox?

Game freeze - error (likely) related to GE poison and dying enemy That blocking actions during wawe is really, really frustrating: - why i can't save my time by clearing map form unwanted rocks before wawe ends? - why i must wait for next lvl after getting 3 rd part of special gem to combine them ( then often i forgot and need wait again..) - if someone forget to buy lives and start wawe that would leak (even with milions of gold) - upss - sometimes i click keep before...that's mean instead downgrade (habit) - upss - more... more important issues: - possible to combine special during placing gems phase (only just after gem 1-4),consuming 2 gems on board, then keep other gem - new special gem turns into rock - "Place Gem" do not appear untill click rock/gem (too frustrating to be minor) - with power of slates game fells too easy (for first 60 lvls at least) Need way more testing/balancing..

@216 I have made changes due to your feedback and relaxed the anti-cheating system to stop preventing players from actually playing.

managed to test s2 untill lvl 45, when cliked "forge" which caused "run continued in another tab" bug other issues: - being not able to remove rock during (also combine special) decrease comfort of gameplay much, also we must wait 1 wawe to combine special - downgrade mechanic(without istant keep) allow easier 1-hit combinations - fun, but intentional? too easy to make slates i think - need separate button for combine special and make slate - wanted to make jade(after downgrading flawless gem had all parts) , got slate. - wraith slate aura range not displayed correctly - substractive form of stacking too op; PO +slate give -60% cd, i was expecting 0.65 x 0.75 .Do GO + slate + GAq give -85% ?! - slates help early game much, maybe need little stronger wawes - how do i move slate? - are slates intended to be "ghosty" - ground untits are passing throgh them so they prevent to make maze

Found a way to get past lvl 2 bug: it occurs olny when action is taken before 1st gem placed - so i must place 1st gem before upgrade malachite/gem chances and i can continue. Downgrade problem: got 3 chipped diamonds(=normal in s2) - how i downgrade it to flawed ?

"gem placement could not be commited" - is forcing me to reload at lvl 2 and start again - looks like save no works But lvl 1 is enough to make sure that weakness no work too - is olny for Great gems? that doesn't make sense

@muellesx I have removed the anti-cheat from Classic and Season 2 has multiple fixes applied to it.

* Every signed-in player now sees the Pre-Season Testing checkbox on their own profile. * Opting in unlocks Season 2’s pre-launch page and server-side gameplay endpoints.

the anti-cheat measures are not worth it. I don't care if someone wants to waste their time repicking gems for days just to get an easily identifiable fake score. In the meantime, I've had to reload the game once per level, and the whole game is stuttery and less enjoyable to play. My two cents.

Yes, i can test it (some other likely want too) - i don't care about sumbiting scores before mode is balanced

@Peter no worries, I didn't get a Great Opal until well into the 300s, so I was not on track to get the top score

@216 True going from 10 to 20 is too large of a jump. I've reduced it to 5. Do you want to test Season 2 first but high scores will not be saved until Aug 1st?

Really much changes for S2, many promising ideas. But some are controversial: - instant jump form 10 to 20 enemies in lvl 101? not sure how strong Slates are but i predict some problems here... - Jades stops gold production *practically* at all at 201? - no buying lives during wawe? Also since when crash issue is fixed? my recent lvl 500 run had like 700 MB leaked memory

@_g_ Sorry I assume you were playing Classic?

The new update just killed my current run, oh well.

"I will restore the Classic to be exactly like how it was a few weeks back" - I think we need more specyfic disscusion how classic should be. It far from flash version atm. At least weakness definitelly should work i guess?

I'm also bummed out that the historic high scores have been removed. I appreciate you restoring the classic version though @Peter! I noticed the reload tab issue I was running into before has been fixed, thank you for that!

@wgw @216 Yes in hindsight I should have just left Classic untouched and incorporate the changes to a new game mode.

@carlhr Sorry there have been major changes, I just didn't want to leak too much information on how the anti-exploit mechanics works. @216 @wgw I will restore the Classic to be exactly like how it was a few weeks back but with the crash fix and I will remove the save / reload from classic as it introduces all the exploits but keep the x2 x4 speed up and I will add back the link to Classic Historic Scores.

But, as a player "[...] I don't think it's right that players are being used as beta/QA dev testers with no information about changes until they start a run [...]", I don't really care about this. We're not giving away our information, nor any sort of data. Unless this guy is using us to train some AI or mine bitcoin as we play, I don't think that's bad. It's sort of fun/challenging to play a game I don't know what to expect.

If it was not for you guys actively commenting, I'd doubt that's true.

@WGW right? Old comments have been removed; Old scores... also removed. But the home page proudly states "Welcome to Gem Tower Defense, up and running for 19 years".

@WGW: agree with most things - we should be able to submit score with comment text - link to historic/fake scores is gone (typing in url works, though) - no info about S1 rules - was very confusing at start what is relic for But in classic modes there are no new mechanics (besides lvl 250/500 bosses, just -10 lives in classic mode) And your legendary lvl 195 scores with texts were definitelly most motivating to keep trying on 196+ score in flash version!

Done with this game. I don't think it's right that players are being used as beta/QA dev testers with no information about changes until they start a run. I don't like that high score text is limited to your account name. Probably 75% of the fun of this game for me was coming up with text for the high score list. And I don't like that all the historic high scores have been wiped from the site, as if 15+ years of history never happened. I don't understand any of the new game mechanics, none of which appeal to me, and which may be different every day you start a new run. I'm glad there's still an active core of players and people commenting. I'm done. Cheers all. It was fun. Ish.

I think @G is right with bug- no new lvl 500 classic scores since week Noticed that placing gem now shows it instantly - this improved quality of gamplay, lives weren't lagging actually. Occasionally lag is bigger, though (might be internet issues). A simple semi-solution would be option to start game without saving (like playing as guest) then turn on saving at chosen moment

@216 I made a change to avoid saving when removing rocks and buying lives, which should help with the lag you're experiencing. The Season 2 changes are very large, so I agree that the first week should just be testing.

Ever since I hit level 500 on survival classic mode, I've been getting the "This run continued in another tab / Save revision changed before the high score could be recorded / No further actions will be accepted in this tab." message at the end of each level even though I only have one tab open. It's allowing me to progress one level at a time but then forces a reload at the end of each level. I'm worried that my score won't be recorded and I'm wasting my time by continuing to play this run.

There is a lag every action - sometimes its frustrating, especially you can't see the new gem while waiting. We will able to submit S2 scores right after it start? Likely some test phase with reseting scores will be needed. ------------------------------ I finished another very well-started run. GO in lvl 39 from 4 FO (thanks for fixing 4-combine bug) and first EG was already in lvl 14 or 15, then more good luck with PAs/PEs - 0 leaks untill 64. Lost 3 points due to stupid mistakes on ground lvls, but still very few total leaks

After some testing, I believe it to be my browser. Thanks though!

Is it normal with a recent update for each action to have a small delay? Almost as if the game takes a half sec to load/process? Also loving the updates and amount of activity in this game right now, been addicted on and off for SO many years myself lol. So thanks for keeping it going!

i meant displayed *minimum* damage An option to edit comment wouldn't be bad

I guess it was with Uber Stone? Nothing else can explain such good time Increased gold for actions means repicks will cost more than 25(n+1) ? it might be bad, when we will need to spend more on lives. Will we able to test it (before scores submision)? >> "Anytihng else" There are some minor issues , for example displayed damage of gems is 1 less than actual

Yes, Raine killed the Season 1 level-500 Sky Warlord. Congrats!

whoa someone made it past 500??

@216 All fixed for Season 2. Anything else? I have increased the amount of gold required for a multitude of actions. The number of enemies also increases past a certain level…

Will be full color damage table (aka WEAKNESS) finished for S2? Also some more issues/questions with the Uranium gem - names U238, U235 are reversed - enemies within range of both, Uranium and armor reduction aura sometimes losing aura for short moment (armor jump 5 ->11, harder to observe since 0.9.10 slower text update) - Is slow aura supposed to have same range (64) on both, U238 and U235? - asked yesterday about armor, but maybe should also ignore weakness, when it will be added (?) This gem was almost completly ingored in past years (speed bug), but it have some potential

@Peter If I may make a small QoL feature request, could you please change the 'x' next to the speed multiplier to be clickable? Right now you can only click 1, 2, & 4

@Peter you mean you can't login because there's no button? That's the least of the problems... I think that the mobile interface sucks... Even if I'm not going to play, I jsut toggle on the option to show the page as desktop and don't bother with the problems below: - I can't find all pages from mobile UI (instructions, updates); - I can't scroll up and down on comments section; - I can't zoom in/out while playing. This is bad, because the canvas is so tiny, it makes it impossible to select the correct tile, or click on 4x button; ------ If you want a hint of what to do next, to improve gameplay on mobile I'd encourage for you to create maze templates. Treat maze templates as, areas you can and cannot build on the maze. As an example, imagine you have this grid, and you want to target the center of the map with the touchscreen: [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] But instead, you do this: [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][ ][ ][X][ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] The interface sucks, and you just misclicked by accident; it happens. You cannot go back now, and frustration accumulates to the point of restarting the game, or rage quitting (often the latter the me). If you marked some squares of the map as templates: [T][ ][ ][ ][ ] [T][ ][ ][ ][ ] [T][T][T][ ][ ] [ ][ ][T][ ][ ] [ ][ ][T][ ][ ] Unmarked tiles cannot be selected if you attempt to build gems in them, just like attempting to build at the goals. This way, even if the UI is small, and you target the center, but accidentally miss, your possible misclicks will target: [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][X][X][ ][ ] [ ][ ][X][ ][ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] Which are part of the maze you want to build. So, that's not frustrating anymore.

Looking forward to season 2!

I've decided Season 1 will be ending July 31st and Season 2 will start August 1st. Season 2 will be introducing Slates.

This game really helps me when I start spiralling. Thank you <3

@216 that comment was from me, I just noticed it’s not possible to login from mobile. I’ll fix it tonight. I have deployed a quick fix to the lag issue introduced by the fix for the save “scumming” exploit. When Season 1 ends, I’ll deploy a new save / reload system that won’t be exploitable.

A few months ago no one would notice a thing right

Or its just like me, I often write from my phone, which Im not logged in.

I meant saving game every placed gem (big lag) , if someone got confused Just realized that last "Peter" comment is not from Peter's account (was someone trolling me ?) But just in case, i meant to restore save if it's fast/not a problem (idk how it would be possible when save failied), otherwise i will just finish it again from 333 in next days (boring 3h, but easy.. if lag will be fixed) Btw, quick question about Uranium gem - Is it intented to ingore enemy's armor or not? (currently is not, in flash version it was ignoring)

@ Peter yes, please But looks like saving every gem was horrible idea...

@216 I can recover your save, do you want me to?

Anybody else getting intense lag when placing new gems?

Last night i stopped at lvl 333 (hibernated laptop). Now finished run and "score submision failed. load save to try again" - loaded and... its lvl 332 I guess its related anti-exploit change, but i didn't notice any warnings anywhere about save fails/new version load need ( i'm checking comments/updates regulary). Sadly ~3 hours wasted

Speaking of exploits, there's one last exploit related to the save/load feature we can still do. If you aren't happy with the gem placements, you can still refresh the page and place those gems a second time, but in a different location. However, due to the way the save/load feature works, the seed might change on your first page refresh causing different gems to be picked as a result of having to sit through the wave going through the maze a second time upon reload. However, on the second refresh in a row, then it will always be the same gem order as what you got after the first refresh. Apart from that, with the exploit involving using a second tab being fixed, I think adjusting the load feature to also restore all the gems you placed before hitting refresh. As in if you place 2 out of the 5 gems then refresh the page, those 2 gems you just placed down should still be sitting there after loading up the game back up with the game waiting for you to place 3 more gems to finish up the gem placement phase.

"you open a new window, repicks, if you're not happy with the result return to the first window" this has been fixed and scores that used that technique have been penalized.

216, there's an obvious exploit - you open a new window, repicks, if you're not happy with the result return to the first window

Hmm TTJ's score also shows absurd amont of repicks - looks like a display/telemetry issue I don't think anyone would repick 7500+ times, its no needed and too boring

Did you found some gold exploit? It displays you repicked 7776 times - cost 756 milion gold. But you have olny 20 jades and time 81k 20 x 81k /0.175 x 5% x ~200 is olny ~90 milion

500 lvl https://ibb.co/NgmyKm2h

I didn't even know there was a flying boss there((( https://ibb.co/Y7sh9p72

If you continue from a paused game, the gold count only starts from that point and ignores everything before that save point.

A new approach today. To hell with the stun zones that are slowing down each wave. I ended up at time 16811 by wave 158 which seems significantly faster than normal, and can be seen on the scoreboard too by comparing to similar runs. fD start, about lvl 60 sum of EG lvls total, at this point. Leaking 4-5 air, with GO, an acceptable performance with enough jades to buy lives. Maybe it doesn't scale to later waves but I always get bored by wave 100-200 so i quit at that point. https://ibb.co/LdSYWQTS The player profiles are sick btw.

That would explain why I've never seen one lol. Not sure if I'll try for a higher score since grinding for an early GO can get pretty frustrating. Excited to see what the next season will bring

@CarlHR thank you, see you in the next season.

Gem that would be created by combining 4 same perfect gems (chance per pick ~1: 1 034 000)

What is Uber Stone? Never heard of it before

@TTJ 6 GAs and all those EGs looks impressive, but there is no slow for boss at start and many towers are without BO buff. Still i think this is a proff that Uber Stone is only way to beat this. Anyway congrats on current top score!

https://imgur.com/a/cDjpvf5 Here are my 2 attempts at lvl 500. Best I got was ~40% with a fairly optimized build (except the 2 PDs). Thanks @Peter for this game.

@tony you need to score on level 500 to get the badge. There's no need to defeat the boss on that level, though if you, you're setting a new record

@Stych9ines out of curiosity, what's the link for the archives to play the old version? It exists now? Afaik, this site's link in the archives was taken down months ago...

@216 that just happened to me, GO level 19. insane luck on 4 square opals... then i realised the tab i had open was internet archive and the 2007 version not survival S1. dammit.

Hi there, i am login through gmail, how could i have the badge?

https://imgur.com/a/8he69jE I used an old layout from when I was trying to maximize space. I could probably come up with something better but I'm still not sure it would be enough to beat the wave 500 boss.

Got the boss at wave 500 to about 50%. I'll post a screenshot of my maze when I'm home from work. Thank you Peter for updating the game, its been a blast. The 4x speed and the saving game are amazing updates.

GO in lvl 23... then i realized it's regular survival. Reached lvl 80 without buying lives, 14 total leaks before 100 (+8 in 100 ofc ). It would be very good lvl 500 s1 score with so few leaks (likely i would get ~20 more in 104-196, then 8,9,9 in 200,300,400)

About boss 500 - got very suprised that @CarlHR took 48% hp ,similary to my attempt, but i had like 60 EGs - i was much more damage focued Might be because boss 500 has defensive mechanic(saw in code) and was bad synchronized with my towers

Extra enemies are solving both problems... in theory at least (I had that idea years before as well) BUT still i fell keeping just 1 life cost for every leak is not good idea. why? -the amound of extra enemies needed to end game will be quite high, it may double time of dealing with ground -saving lives in early lvl (like 44) and getting very early GO will be crittically important Let say someone is in lvl 304 and there is 20 enemies while average 12 flyers are killed. Because run wasn't focused full on jades gold generation allows to buy about 5 lives every 4 wawes. losing 3 more lives that is possible to buy, so run is going definitelly to end, but when? -if there is olny 20 lives remaining the game over is ~328 -if gold for next 100 lives game goes past 400 -if gold for next 200 lives game may go past 500 (depends how many enemies will be in later lvls) So getting good,lucky start and early GO and accumulating lives(gold for total lives) would be even more essential than we would want to. if lives cost per leak were 2 at lvl 201+ then still worth to save lifes early , but less overpowered ,since 2 early leaks = 1 late game leak. Also if 2(or more) lives cost the amount of extra enemies can be significanly less. i think we prefer ~15 per wawe than 20-30

How beatable are we talking about? https://imgur.com/a/AdaamoW

@carlhr All good suggestions, for Season 2 I will incorporate some of your ideas. Now, if everyone is stuck on the Level 500 boss we can shorten the Season 1 to say Aug 1st... In theory the level 500 boss should be beatable...

@Peter @216 @<anyone else interested> About 216's comment below key: "2026-07-14 15:43:23", on problems #1 and #2 One way to "fix" that, is to increase the enemy count every X waves. This way, even if you have lots of EEs, they won't be able to keep track of 20 or 30 enemies all at once. At some point, there'll be leaks even on higher levels. The game only feels easier because you have more EEs than enemies on the map at some point. I imagine its quite impossible to beat this game without stun, using just gold generation, although LAJ do have stun. And, as you can increase your max health up to 50, the game can safely spawn up to 50 enemies at once, and the player won't lose if it kills just one of them, during a stun immunity wave, for example. This also solves the problem of having too much gold. You'll be forced to expend gold on heals more often at higher levels. Of course, it needs testing. Don't just drop this bomb over us lol.

I was able to take 48% of the boss health. But it was fun :) Before: https://imgur.com/a/j8nHtsf After: https://imgur.com/a/3S0NvtV Thanks @Peter for keeping the save/load feature, it took me 3 days to achieve this; I wouldn't be able to otherwise

"few days ago" - it was exacly 2 months ago... Since that time i cleared wawe 44 several times, but that is not the point. Need to get those charges after lvl 200, when there is 20-30 EEs to stun those flyers. first 40 lvls and rest ground lvls give 197 charges, so need at least 3 full clear air. Need to repick a lot, get PE whenever possible. Without GO its hard.

I asked something similar a few days ago, search for "CarlHR 2026-05-16 19:19:59" on this page.

It's impossible to complete wave 44 without lives. How do I get 200 relics before the boss?

@Peter Badge is bad idea for unlocking seasons (takes long to get and how to get ot after season end). Just dont't like the spam of lvl 10-20 scores in s1 list. Maybe issue is auto-sumbit score on lose, but i think if someone can't beat extreme/ have no survial experience - shouldn't try seasons (actually practicing in s1 is same as practicing in survival, not sure about future seasons)

@216: Let's fix that for Season 2. Sure getting the "S1 Contender" badge can be the unlocking mechanism for Season 2 but then they would no longer be season and more like a different type of level.

Yes, many Great gems are useless (ok, GE has 1 advantage - very long slow duration), jade slow to min. speed. Great gems ranking from worst to best: GD - do not hit flyers and weak (was fun with x5 crit in flash at least...) GR - totally trash (also nerfed) GS- low dps and steals kills. Range make it little usefull for boss. GE - in specyfic positions can slow well. Generally good... for downgrade and make EE GT - do something, but BS generally better for aoe. Missing the x1.2 for yellow vs amethyst weakness GA- cant hit ground but stronger than EG for flyers and high range GAq - very low range, but if well placed.. since cd was changed 500->350 it outdamage strong gems like EG and ABS with 1 flamestrike active significantly. In flash it was maybe ok, but definitelly not Great GO- *no comment needed* (usless map covered with it then it drop below GS)

Wow passed the 250 boss by sheer luck, got the relic armed right on that wave. I have no hopes of beating wave 500 though. This is me now: https://imgur.com/a/wYVUmEh @216 so GE is useless? I had luck to place it once, weeks ago, and I thought it was slowing enemies more than SYS + LAJ combined. Of course, that was seeing just the enemies walking on the map, visually; I didn't bother to check their speed stats.

@CarlHR: that 3 lowest EEs do not range flyers, when they passing c2-c3 - they would do excellent job if they were 0.5 gem higher. Why want GE slow, while other gems slow to minimum speed?

I'm feeling lucky with this run: got a GO early though its a little to the side; and a GS on the center of the map. Still attempting to get a GE for 75% slow. https://imgur.com/a/LZKivAV I got this map from someone in the comments area a few months ago, but I don't remember from whom. This map is amazing.

I just played thorugh 130 levels before finding the 4x speedup button :sob: Thanks peter for improving and maintaining this excellent game!

Oh I commented from my phone, which I wasn't logged in haha, but that's really me.

I wouldn't mind an option to upgrade a gem already on the map for 1bi gold or more.

I feel like if you don't get a great opal by wave 100 you might as well reset. I've been fishing for an early one for a little bit, hopefully I get lucky soon

@Kotic 200/200 helps with lvl 250. Looking at s1 scores i fell like there should be some unlocking requiment, for future seasons (maybe beat first 40 lvls without leaks/reach 201)

What are these relics for?

@Peter Due to general balance issues, is hard to give a specyfic season suggestion (maybe i would suggest some challenging ground wawes). By "SURVIVAL" diffuculty i assume game gets gradually harder and harder - meaning loss is inevitable, but by playing better it happens at higher lvl. GTD never was like that. Problem #1 - around lvl 120-250 (depends of many things) game stops getting harder and starts to getting easier - eventually leaks stops at all if enough well placed EEs (besides stun immune air lvls like 300) Problem #2 -the highest gold generation stategies allows to buy 7-8 lives every 4 lvls (starting from ~50) constanly. since every leak takes just 1 life , the game actually require to kill only 3 flyers and grounds (if too much jades and too low damage possible to leak ground actually) Those 2 balance problems separately(!) makes that only limiting factor is space for gems( if playing well enough ofc) However, some ppl like @WGW like playing untill the end of space, that's why i suggested other survival difficulty (not seasonal, suggested it much before s1) Btw, there are other balance(and not only) issues - i.e. some Great gems sucks

@JonathanA: If you get the warning about reducing to 2x speed, it means your computer is having a difficult time keeping the game running smoothly at a higher speed.

Ooh, slates! Daym! Now we cooking! Exciting times for Gem TD. I'm excited to see what y'all gonna bring to the future of Gem TD. I will reiterate a previous suggestion of mine, adding a damage meter, to see which towers do most damage. I find myself using that a lot in You TD. Most useful is recent damage, only considers for example the previous level. Btw yesterday I was frequently getting the warning message "reducing to x2 speed to keep gamplay accurate", I wonder what causes that and if it's normal. Usually I don't get it though. 216, thanks for the comment! Yes, it usually ends up somewhere there and I find it does the job, just misses a few EEs, but you're right, better to reserve a spot. Your comment reminds me, about damage types, it's not really well specified in the game, maybe that can be added in future seasons. I should've selected the EG before the screenshot but I think it has somewhere between level 20 and 30 at this stage. It quickly gets to level 10 already at level (wave) 20-30. I got the perfect start, level 1 fD, level 2 fA. level 3 and 4 doesn't really matter. Then you want a normal amethyst before level 8 and after that try to get red crystal. I got quite a few leaks the early air levels but then it stabilized. I sometimes roll malachite or silver or even star ruby to deal with early levels if I dont get fD right away. As always, thanks King Peter for doing a splendid job with this game, especially lately.

@216 Thinking past Season 1, I wanted to keep the changes simple for Season 1 as it is a test of the concept. Moving on to Season 2, I am seriously considering adding Slates if you remember those from the original Gem TD. What else would you recommend adding?

@JonathanA: GO looks like a little missplaced - good idea is to keep 4 good positions free for it. But respect for fD start strategy, i remeber it took me many resets to do it well. I wonder how many kills your main EG has. Malachite is strong gem though, espec in JS version with 350 cd and no green weakness modifiers (yet?)

Also, thanks to the person running this page. The game is awesome

I hit 2.9M and couldn't end the game because I ran out of space and didn't have any blocks to remove. What is that about?

Sweet, Peter! I just passed level 180 with zero leaks, I think that's the first time I got zero air leaks. God Bless Great Opal. I suppose it gets easier at these later levels though since you stack up so many EEs... https://ibb.co/q3HQvbmP

@jonathanA Added it today.

Did anything ever come out of the surrender/forfeit (in order to submit score) suggestion, is there a plan to add it?

Yes Relic is 200 not 100 anymore. So I had to disqualify 12 scores for Season 1.

Strange, relic was 200 since begining? Peter increased from 100 and removed some scores. Actually removing (and even submitting) scores that were below lvl 250 didnt make much sense since no rules difference in first 249 lvls

huh, ok. For some reason, it but me in the normal live scores section instead of the season 1 scores section even though I was playing season 1 as you can see in the screenshot I shared.

I lost to the level 500 boss, only took out about a third of the bosses health. However, my score did not show up on the season 1 score page (would have been second place after 216), and I see no option to submit my score even though I am logged in. Am I missing something? https://imgur.com/a/c34X7sR

Bosses takes way more than 50 lives, so no. 500 boss leaked with half hp -less than expected, but still i don't think there is a practical way to kill it. However some theoretical ways are - if no maze for more good spots for EGs + GAs (with crazy luck of getting many of them) then... still doubt, need to make some calculations, might be possible with many GAs with many kills on them (they have 4x less potential kills than other gems). But if luck enough for Uber Stone (also must be placed early enough to grow in power) - it would destroy that boss The 251-499 phase was quite boring for me, run was very stable - olny 1 regular air leak past 200, in 380 ( maybe i was too much sure my 30 EEs is doing well enough). Got some ground leaks by mistake of removing rock, no leaks in 350/450 But without a GO it would be challengling to get past 250. I think is generally good idea to add in high scores info (besides time, gold , ...) if run had any GO and if so, then maybe when(at which lvl) first was created.

Welp, just leaked one flyer at level 256 putting me back at 50 lives, but that kind of makes me curios. Does getting full 200 relics grant 1 life letting us get more than 50 lives, and does letting a boss leak cause you to lose 50 lives leaving you with 1 life left if we somehow managed to keep 51 lives up to level 500, or do you lose all lives regardless of total lives if the boss leaks through? Very interesting.

How nice, I just barely managed to squeak past level 250 in season 1 without a leak, and was surprised to see I somehow now have 51 lives. https://imgur.com/a/nsyb8WE

omg just found out about the updates and seasons. Looking forward to playing some more :)

Always lose at 49 lol! Love this game!

oh wait nevermind it submitted automatically in the live scores, that's neat

scgmeister ohhh fair, do i just have to reset the run then? i can't submit it?

@216 I made a change to the new relic system right after the season started. The relic buff requires 200 charges now and to make it fair I had to remove 12 high scores that had the 100 charges.

@ Peter Thanks for explaination, i killed boss 250 ( at least partially...), so i didn't know. That means lvl 500 will be effective game-ender (Uber Stone might make it possibe?). I like that lvl 500 score is about the least total leaks (single points, but still) - will try to get a good score (but need luck with early Great Opal) However, charging relic 100/100 seems trivial now - there is 187 ground wawes in first 249 lvls (also first 10 flying wawes rather do not leak without mistakes)

@stych Ya, once you run out of space, that's game over. In order to reach higher levels, you have to think carefully about what sections of the maze you want the gems on, and what sections of the maze you want to leave as rocks for the purpose of later shortening the length of the maze in order to maximize space. Also, once we have a stable run, the next thing to do would be to focus on paraibas as those take 4 levels to upgrade a gem instead of 3, which also allows for higher levels.

again sorry for commenting repeatedly, but what do i even do here? i literally can't place the last gem, which means i'm stuck here? is this run just a bust at this point? is there a way to force the round to end? https://ibb.co/CpFpmrm7

ok so sorry for double posting but i'm not really sure on how the level 500 boss is beatable. it's got such high health, can't be stunned, and ignores mazes. i think someone finding a way to not only get to that thing but beat it is going to be an achievement.

https://ibb.co/F4vRHxk5 i'm currently at this point of my run (normal not S1), i've never got this far. i'm going to tank the lvl 500 boss easily, but what happens in this game when i run out of space? it's going to happen very soon. does the game just continue running without me placing gems? do i lose? do i have to get rid of gems i've placed somehow? i'm not sure.

@216 Season 1 has different rules than the regular game. The bosses must be killed...

Was really excited by new difficuly button/countdown, but... the olny difference in S1 is easier 250 boss(?) I mentioned before that boss is very hard to KILL - but what is 10 lives cost in this game? Look at Hutchins's run - 2.4 bilion gold at lvl 973. Its enough to buy around 1930 lives total. There are 233 "fast" flying wawes (in lvls 44-972) so average air leak of 8.2 might be allowed* Surely there must be aburd amount of Jades, also he said about no paraiba - slower killing grounds=more gold. But total lives cost scales with ~x^3 of lives (8x less gold means olny 2x less lives) - reasonable amount of Jades allows to buy hundreds of lives. -Around lvl 250 amount of gold is not such crazy, but saving for 10 lives is rather no problem -Around lvl 500 ... even if it was 49 lives it shouldn't be a problem Boss 500 is impossible to kill, unless something got changed ( even with S1 thing) - its hard to kill one stun-immune flyer at 500 - The game is still more about making gold for lives rather than preventing air leaks as much as possible (ground normally doesn't leak*) - Runs stabilize around 200-300. With enough EEs possible to kill all flyers, but ~1 air leak can be ingored completly - The olny limiting factor is space for gems Unless i'm missing sometihng the S1 leaderboard will looks similar to regular leaderboard - can't see reason to any strategy difference. Regardless of balance issues i appreciate very active development! -------------------------------------------- * in very long runs some ground leaks also happens - in stun-immune lvls such as 550 or near the end of space when maze needs to be shortened drastically

oh that's interesting, i might have to open a new tab to play Season 1 ngl, my current playthrough is at time 115976 (i am nawt a speedrunner)

Added the optional Season 1 game mode, seasons will be where we can test out new game mechanics without affected the more stable non-Seasons game mode. Also, I added Badges for winner of Season 1 and the participants to reach high levels.

I just past level 500 and was surprised to see a level 500 boss instead of the normal wave of flyers. Needless to say I think it still had a good 95% of its health when it leaked through. Interestingly, the game seems to be saving my score as if I was still using 0.9.7, (same version as when I started this run) so I'm not sure if I'll continue this run much longer. Also the season 1 countdown intrigues me. That reminds me. I tried playing this game on my mobile a couple time but found it very difficult to place the gems accurately. It would more often than not be placed 1 spot off from where I actually want to place it without giving me any options to be able to move it to where I wanted it once it's down, effectively making the mobile version unplayable for me. Sure, you can drag the gem around with your finger before it gets placed, but the finger completely covers the gem making it impossible to accurately predict where the gem will be placed, and once it's down, there's no way to move that gem to fix any misplaced gem. I would love to see an option to be able to manually move a gem around slightly (max 2 spots from initial placement) after the initial placement using arrows, and before the gem selection which would then lock them in place. At lest for the mobile version if you want that version more playable.

Only because I'm going to have over 2billion gold, can we get the ability to sort the high scores by the different columns? Or maybe display the gold in a right justified column with fixed width. I need to be able to see that I have way too much gold!

Today it seems to be fixed. Meanwhile did failed attempt to kill lvl 250 boss, in Firefox (less than 0.5% hp left) . Finally got a GO around lvl 50, slightly missplaced though. Almost broke my lvl 100 time record (~4200).

oh that's a pretty fun bug, never seen a website think a pc is a phone before hahah. did you find a fix?

Hahaha amazing, the site thinks your browser is a phone; I never seen this before. Some bugs are fun to see lol.

Updated chrome today, even twice, the problem is incorrect mobile detection - very rare case probably. Tbh i think more important than this is old, minor issue with armor reduction aura (near uranium)

@216 i also play in chrome, i havent seen any of the things you're describing, when did you last update chrome?

Opened game/comments in Edge... the difference shocked me. Idk if something is wrong with chrome or with win10 (still not updated to win11), but since april comment boxes/ text formating dissapeared for me. Also game is resizing (growing up) untill reach white-backgrond width - in Edge stay in indended size. Buttons scores/comments below game that should be only for mobile are visible (in chrome). Anyone else can see similar chrome issues?

What is the qualification behind the TOP 3 Towers? For my current run it shows Flawed and Flawless Amethyst, but looking at my board, I think I've picked those gems maybe 3 total times, versus the components for the Jade tower, which I've picked 100s of times.

@216 that's a good point, i got the one of them very early on due to sheer random luck, i think about level 25? it's not my usual pick for dps to be honest, i usually go for unupgraded bloodstones since they can attack every target in their range and do decent dps. you're right though, i am missing a lot of pink dps. i'll be getting some more of those this run, thanks for the help

@Strych9ines: Only 1 Egyptian Gold? Due to pink type damage its one of best dps gem. Other color modifiers are NOT implemented (yet?) but pink vs amethyst weakness x1.75 works.

Wow, path 0.9.12 added BOSSES! The 250 boss is very hard - on my GOless run( had save at 240, not much time to prepare) it leaked with 47% hp. If i had a GO, more EGs (instead ABSs - flamestrikes are useless vs boss) and little better maze it could be possible to kill. I want few more tries, but little nerf to minimum speed might be needed. Didn't test lvl 500 boss yet, but is flying? - simply impossible then

I got to level 250 for the first time ever despite playing for over 13 years, how on earth do people beat the bosses in this game? is it a case of tanking money? this is my current setup so far and i managed to tank the boss by buying lives, but in the long run that's going to get expensive since i'm also buying 2 lives every four rounds against the flying enemies. is there anything i can improve in future runs? i know some of you hit like, level 700 often. I want to be able to minmax my runs, but i'm still kind of a noob despite how long i've played because i've never even talked to another person that plays this game, let alone looked up any guides. https://ibb.co/ycdzM92M

Level 761... 1billion gold... this is the no tourmalines run. It's very slow also.

Do it, if you want. If you don't, its ok. The game is good enough as it is. 1. Add special towers upgrades to the "Special Gems Recipe". I my head, you could achieve this by making a "gold.png" image, and adding gold as part of the recipe. 2. On the game: display the current version being used on the canvas (I mean, its on the source code anyways, so why not display it). I think this one wasn't intended as you never though people would play the game for days, weeks or months without closing the tab. I'd suggest making a 'description input' at the end of each run, so we can post comments; but the save/load feature is temporary right?

@carlhr Any changes to the site as well, what did you have in mind?

oh my god, i've been playing this game since 2013 and when it switched to web player i started playing using internet archive to play the old version. i just came back to the web version for the first time in about 5 years and it's absolutely incredible how many updates there have been. this is amazing. great work, thank you for keeping my favourite game going.

@Peter, about the "I'm open to game design changes [...]", is this only related to the game on canvas, or to the site as well?

Peter, my run crashed at level 601 or so, as I said. I don't think it can be claimed that the "performance issues have been resolved". I spent a lot of time along with 216 detailing the bugs, not to mention all the comments over the years about the game's design and balance issues, not to mention helping new players figure out how to play the game. It's interesting to me that you literally never reply to any of my comments or messages. I have no idea why.

@216 I'm open to game design changes now that performance issues have been resolved. I would suggest we think / debate what exactly would make the late game more fun and better.

Other chaos idea: subtly change the dimensions of the board. Add half a gem of width to a random side at start of game.

I saw the image for scgmeister's near perfect paraiba layout- and I'm now trying a run with ZERO paraibas. Got my GO at level 162. Only had a few mistakes. WGW: I've always imagined a "repick in place" button that re-rolls your stones in the last 5 chosen spots, this would lessen the clicks by a factor of 5 when looking for specific stones. An even crazier idea would be a drop down list where you select the stone you are searching for and the game would show the repick-in-place happen rapid-fire, while you watch your gold deplete, hoping your chosen gem appears before you run out of cash.

Surely its doable - the matter is amount of jades. The 1301 run (which is still impressive for me!) had only 30 milion gold left, so not enough for repicks without combine exploit - several more jades would be needed. Breaking lvl 1300 might be impossible now. ------- The solution that could satisfy ppl that like filling the board and those which prefer faster, but challenging games would be another (harder) difficulty, where getting to 300-400 is nearly impossible. Then on "endless" suvival mode would be "secret" (visible on lvl 400+) upgrade that cost hmm... 8-digit amount of gold and icrease PAq chance somehow. Peter might not like that idea, though

@216, I wasn't registered until after I started the run and realized that registration was required. The hope was that registering even after the run started would still magically work if the tab with the actual run "inherited" the registration info, but that must not be the case, as there is no high score for the run. It occurs to me that with this new system, the high score text will probably just be whatever your registered name is, which would prevent making it anything more specific. That would be unfortunate if so. re: whether I had enough gold to repick for only paraibas, well, there are two high scores already from TTJ and scgmeister over level 1200, which requires a careful layout and building almost entirely paraibas, so it seems doable. I haven't checked your math, but remember gold earnings keep going up as the game progresses, while repicking only goes up by 25 gold per repick. The problem is the tedium even if the RNG can be brute forced. Who wants to do that for 1,000 levels, right?

@WGW: You had to register during that run - so it would be saved to your account, even if crash. About repicks: to fill board with paraibas need about 2500 repicks, costing 78 milion gold(lvl 1300 may require even 2800+ repicks, so over 100m gold). I'm not sure if that 21 milion gold (at 600, so maybe over 100m at 1200) was safe enough to say "limitles" repicks

Well, the question of whether I'd have been able to log a high score ended up moot, because the game crashed around level 600 or so (can't remember exactly). I'd just picked the gem for the round, and before the enemies appeared, the tab displayed all white. Nothing to click on. Refreshing lost the whole game. I don't have anything else to report; I wasn't expecting the crash and wasn't keeping an eye on anything like memory use. But the last I checked it was at around 400MB. On whether it should be possible to fill out the entire board, I'm with you, scgmeister. . . in *principle*. But. . . now that the combine special bug has been fixed, playing for maximum levels/turns is 10 times more tedious than it already was because you have to repick for perfect aquamarines over and over again. Not just repicking for any decent perfect gem, but specifically for aquamarines. I'm not arguing to resurrect the combine special bug (it was unintended and confusing). But I had 21 million gold at the point of the crash, and repicks were only costing around 12,000. Functionally speaking, repicks are essentially limitless at that point anyway. Having to repick and repick mindlessly, sometimes for 10-15 minutes at a time, changes the "build nothing but paraibas" phase of the game from something you zone out and tend to periodically while doing other things, to an exercise in periodic index finger fatigue and ocasionally cursing the RNG for wasting your time. I kind of feel like I was spared 600 more levels of this by the crash!

I seem to recall I had to disable my adblock on this site before the popup for submitting scores would show up. @216, personally I actually like the ability to have those longer games after everything is stabilized, as that is the more relaxing part of the game for me, and it's hugely satisfying to be able to completely fill in the board, so long as the waves themselves don't take too long to finish. That's kind of why I proposed a potential solution to balance or give people who want to make a longer maze a better chance to able to compete score wise with those who like a more drawn out, longer run for the purpose of completely filling in the the game with gems. Then again, why not have multiple versions of the game, one which would stay the same (classic) then a different version that offers other challenges that would require us to completely change our strategy if we want to get a high score.

If i remeber well registering didn't reset run (even no refresh page was needed)

Am I not going to be able to log a high score for this run??? I didn't know there's now a requirement to register. I'm at level 578 and really not seeing much point in continuing the run for another few days if I can't log the high score score. . . The only note on the game page is "Register & Login for saving and high scores", and I don't think I'm the only one who would have missed it. If you've been playing the game for over 15 years, you don't tend to read the text on the game page anymore. *Major* bummer. I'll leave the tab open for now in case someone can answer whether this run is as pointless as I now expect!

@Peter: I have a solid run going at this point, at level 523. Assuming I don't mess something up, this should get to around level 1256. Hope I don't hit a crash. I don't know what you mean by "telemetry", though. I noticed that I wasn't prompted for high score text at level 500. https://imgur.com/a/zHwKJFG

Stunlocking single enemy by 10+ EEs is not problem (and no worth). Being not able to lose game (not intentionally) after some point is.

In my opinion, the problem with stun resistance (the ability to resist being affected by new sources of stun), in this game, is that if there are too many towers that apply stun, even if you resist stun now, it can be applied right after, thus, causing permanent stun with a less probability chance. But with many towers, stun chance can become very high for a single enemy. See the following example: "You have a dwarf, surrounded by 10 EEs. It can resist against 8 at the same time. But if it fails to resist to 2 (one now, and one right after 2s), there is now permanent stun for that poor dwarf." Here's my idea to counter 'permanent stun', and implement 'stun resistance': - Enemies can take 2s of stun without resisting it, based on EE duration. - From 3s onwards, at the start of each second with stun, enemies have 5% chance to break from stun. This is their 'stun resistance', its the enemy struggling to be free. Perhaps at each 100th wave, it gains +1%? - When they shake the stun off, they gain a 1-second-window of stun immunity, to prevent being deadlocked forever on that spot. They move, then they can be stunned again. Flying enemies should receive -5% resist stun chance (they cannot shake off the effect < level 100; they have 1% chance on level 100; 2% chance on level 200; and so on... to break stun, and once they do, oh boy...).

I really don't like an idea of playing untill end of space (mostly becasue single run takes absurd amount of time). Preventing leaks should be still main objective - If we keep wawes of 10 enemies, some form of stun resistance is nesserary, but not enough : with absurd amount of jades even if someone would start to leak all 10 flyers every flying wawe, running out of gold may last... hundreds of lvls.------ Anyway, i mentioned already several times that stun resist + extra penatly for leaks is a way to balance lvls 200+

I actually did have an idea that could make the game more interesting, or fun. Have a button that allows us to advance the level without selecting the gem, but at the cost of increasing the stun resistance by 1% each time it gets pressed. Then if someone manages to reach 1201, increase damage resistance by 1% up until level 1300 when the enemies become invincible. If done right, it could be interesting if a larger maze that focuses on higher damage can be competitive against mazes that focuses on maximizing space late game. Either that or add the option of destroying a gem, but again at the cost of increasing stun resistance. Anyway, I do have another run going that could get me a high score, but not sue how quickly I'll be able to progress due to other things I'm focusing on.

I can't. I have a life, this is the further I've ever went so far: https://imgur.com/a/pCurAAa

I believe I am very very close to tracking down the crash issue, please if someone can run one more long game level 500+ that might produce the necessary telemetry to identify the annoying memory issue. It appears to be related to how Phaser handles text. Also, I am open to suggestions on how to make the game more fun for these high levels. I never thought players would get to level 100+...

Yes, that's something I realized after entering on the +200 levels for the first time: there's a limited amount of spaces, thus a maximum level you can reach, but that's also a lie! There's no forfeit button, so you lose in an even worse way at the point. If you make a very long maze for the ground units, you have less space to place gems on the map. Each time you get "lucky" by placing a special tower in one go, you're in fact decreasing your max level by 3 or 4 points. That's also the reason why veteran players like paraibas, you turn 4 tiles in 1, allowing much further game content in terms of levels and score. Some towers are necessary though. I doubt you can go that far without LAJ for example.

Sadly, for the first time, I have run out of room! I never even realized that once you are out of room, the run is over. Is there no way to let the game run its course from here and save my score? I'd like to at least have it recorded, even though I think this maze could have gone at least another few-hundred levels! (And yes, I know I got distracted in the top left and accidentally placed a LAJ so that I essentially made the middle part of my maze useless - sad!) https://imgur.com/a/9VnIIBh

Welp, I finally ran out of room at level 1241, and watching my gold in late game slowly deplete when I had to reduce the length of the maze in order to increase space was a bit nerve wracking as to whether I could keep repicking for more paraibas, or switch to making a few more EEs. https://imgur.com/a/CVMqVNR Other than that, it seems that so long as I refresh the page when I notice the memory footprint start to get high again, I no longer had any issues with crashing. One other thing. I'll admit I used a speed addon to speed up the game, and noticed that if I tried using the addon to speed up too much, the game itself will automatically slow down to maintain the accuracy of the game (aka 4x automatically slowed down to 2x) By the end of this run I was using the addon to speed the game by 2x, while had the game itself running successfully at 4x, coming out to be 8x speed total, without having any issues. Early in the game, I tried having the addon run the game at 5x speed, and that was when the game itself wouldn't let me go above 2x speed for accuracy reasons, and I think even then it may have caused an early game crash, However the game seems to run just fine at 8x speed (2x for addon, 4x in game) so long as you occasionally reload the page if you notice the memory leak start to get bad.

To be more specific do this to replicate and confirm. First: when you select a gem, downgrade that gem before the wave ends. Second, reload the web page and load the game back up. If my hunch is correct, that gem you just downgraded will no longer be downgraded.

Ok this glitch happened to me twice now. First time I wasn't sure but the second time confirmed my suspicions. Upon reloading my game in order to reduce the memory footprint back down under 100MB, the gem I selected and downgraded to the one I wanted before reloading the game reverted back to the original gem when I loaded the in progress game back up. Since I'm no longer able to downgrade that gem back to the one I wanted, I'm stuck building something I didn't want to build during late game. As for the game itself I'm on right now, looks like I should be able to get past level 1200 (though it won't be by much if I did my math right), but that will be assuming I have enough money saved up to be able to absorb the inevitable ground leaks that will happen the more I'm forced to shorten my maze to give myself more space.

@carlhr I decided to add a simple account system, you can optionally register now for high score / saves.

Weird, because if you open both of your runs on the high scores tab, you can see the same action summary message for both '531' and '603' runs: "High-management run with 5799 logged actions across 10 action types. Most common action was remove (2892 times). Logged telemetry reached level 602 by time 153681." This means that the game knows you've been on level 602.

I had a game crash at 531 (around 900MB of memory), reloaded the game successfully bringing my version to 0.9.5, causing my level to skip to 532 after a wave went by without picking any gems, the memory footprint reduced to 81MB, and upon refreshing the high score page, I realize it just gave me 2 high scores on which will stay at 531 when the game crashed, and a second high score which is showing where my current level is at.

Maybe that's why: https://imgur.com/a/jcj0sYF This option was enabled by default, it google chat says that it prevents fingerprint tracking.

Hmm weird.

@carlHR The saving is based off your Browser's Fingerprint which can change if you switch browsers or computers. I can add an account system but then players will have to login to create an session.

I can see a cookie, possibly yours was deleted? Loading 0.9.4 save to 0.9.5 worked, just lost 1 gem pick.

"I added saving specifically to try to find the root cause of this very strange crash", you say that but you did made an update against save scumming lol Anyways, I have a problem with this. I do recall that I stopped playing yesterday to resume it later, and today the game didn't shown the dialog to continue from my previous run. Is it related to the session id (which changes over time)? Or my ip address (I also use vpn, so also changes)? Or, perhaps, because the game has been updated? I don't see any cookies on this site, so I have no idea what factor you use to identify which run is from.

I do have a run going right now which is up to about level 300 right now and I think has the potential to reach level 1200 depending on the stability of the game on my pc, though it may take me awhile to get that far so we'll see.

If someone can test to see if they can get passed the 700ish level crashes using the Save/Reload, please let me know.

Sorry for the bugs with saving, I added saving specifically to try to find the root cause of this very strange crash. My best guess is the Phaser (https://phaser.io/) version back in 0.6.2 was more stable than the latest 4.1 but that's a guess right now.

Or create a 'Save' button that when pressed, it creates the file on the server, and it forces a page refresh preventing you from opening multiple tabs with duplicated data. Once you load a game, the file disappears from the server, forcing the game data to stay on the canvas. -------------- The only trouble with this approach is that you must remember to save your run, otherwise you'll lose data.

I guess I forgot one minor detail where you could have 2 tabs open and since they share the same seed you could use one tab to fish for a gem that looks good, and if you get a good gem, you could go to the other tab and and effectively place that specific gem at the location of where you want now that you know when it will drop. In that sense, I suppose save scumming can be somewhat broken.

hmm, opened game in other tab and got different gems - somehow one game got 1 more gold proc - could it change seed?

As for what I've seen when it comes to save scumming is, it is still somewhat limited in what you can fish for in a given level. You will always get the same gems for each repick regardless of tab as the seed is going to be the same on both tabs. As a result, the usefulness for save scumming is going to be somewhat limited, meaning if you're wanting to fish for a specific gem, but you don't get it after several repicks, refreshing the page won't give you any better results. It's basically not that different than when I used to start 10 new games in separate windows as a way to save time for finding a run that gives me good luck. Personally, I fine with some level of save scumming if it means we don't lose everything in the event of a crash. Personally, I think the only reasonable way to prevent all save scumming would be to make everything server side in a way where if you make a change in the game in one tab/window, it would automatically make that same change in the other window if you happen to have more than one tab open that points to the same game save. Or if you were to refresh the page and load the game, you would come back to the exact same (workable) state as what you had when you left the game.

I have a run going which is up to level 131. Seeing a new version get released, I opened the game in a new tab to see what would happen, and a new wave started at the same level as I was originally at, effectively causing the game to skip a level in the new tab without me picking any gems. After a bit mor testing, it seems to only let you skip a level that way once. After that, the load game seems to go back one level earlier to start a wave, bringing the game back to the same state it was before refreshing the page, meaning you can still open the game in multiple windows, let the wave go, and still effectively save scum albeit with a little bit of extra waiting.

@JonathanA Yes, tested at lvl 2 to be sure

Out of curiosity, if you click "upgrade chances" after you place the first gem, are the next ones affected by the upgrade?

That's.. another exploit... You can open new tabs and play different runs from a shared starting level, from different tabs at the same time.

Also, a reminder for the future: you may need some 'backwards compatibility' with your game files, otherwise we may close the browser, open it again only to find out that the game won't reload because a new version has been released.

Save exploit found: repicking changes seed for stun RNG - is possible to close game while flying wawe (bad stun RNG) and repick more than before to try again

@scgmeister, I had the exact same thought, wondering if the game speed boost isn't possibly causing the issue. I really don't think this is a RAM leak issue-- your game should never have crashed with only 880MB of RAM in use, if RAM use was the issue. After all, you used to be able to get to much higher levels, right? And the RAM leak was far worse before this year. I got to level 781 (and could have kept going for 300 more levels), and the game was only using 250MB of RAM. Anyhow, I had planned on testing whether the game speed boost could be related (I was already reducing to 1x speed before every level ended in my last run, but that was for the wrong version of the game!) If I get a good run going, I'll check in. Getting a great opal feels more important to surviving now than it used to, at least to me.

Hmm, I'm not sure if this would do much to help with the crashes, but with the speed option, I'm wondering if keeping the game speed normal, or even slowed down slightly during gem selection, then having the game speed back up to the preferred speed after about a second or so when a wave starts?

I'm well aware ai can have a tendency to hallucinate potential fixes to issues based on sites it looks up and how I frame a question/conversation, but every once in awhile it can still successfully point to a solution we may not have thought of. (hense my suggestion on looking into how gems with an aura overlap as I don't think anyone mentioned that yet). That said, it doesn't change the fact that my recent run using 0.9.3 had a higher memory footprint than it did on 0.9.2, and it also crashed before I was even able to reach level 500 to record my score as you can see on my recent screenshot at the time of the crash.

You know that Gemini is using our comments to pinpoint the cause of errors right? If everyone writes that the bug happens because there's a giant pink elephant on the screen, that's what the AI will start telling about this bug.

This time the game crashed at level 419 or something right after selecting a gem, which is worse than the previous version, the game's memory was at 866MB which, again is higher than what it was the last time I played. I also had the performance monitor open an running during the time of the crash. which did give me an error. It stated the debugging connection was closed. reason: render process gone. Here's a screenshot of the maze when I mouse over the crashed tab: https://imgur.com/a/B77lKrH

@carl, according to the crashes I've had, the page just goes white but doesn't display any dialogue box (error) letting us know what's going on. The tab basically just freezes to white (game canvas disappears) to where I can't even use the keyboard shortcut to tab away from the game, much less any other keyborard/mouse inputs. Hmm, I decided to post the issue into google AI to see what it says, and it mentioned something about overlapping auras possibly contributing toward memory issues. google AI also states with near certainty that this issue is not caused by an infinite loop.

Well, I ended my test run early at level 781, having learned nothing useful and not even managing to get a current high score logged, all because, somehow, maddeningly, Firefox was loading the prior version of the game, 0.9.2, not current version 0.9.3. Which means that I'm not actually testing the current game. And also that my high score was relegated to the "Historic high scores" tab, which frankly sucks considering I've been playing this run all day. But more important than not getting to log an actual current high score for a solid run, this means I can't even comment on whether the current version of the game still crashes. It might not-- at level 781 it was still only using 250MB or so of RAM, with no slowdown or glitched enemy movement at all. But this was also v 0.9.2 I'm playing, which did crash for people. @216 has a current high score in v 0.9.3 at level 267, but that's long, long before the game would have crashed if it's still prone to crashing. So I've learned nothing, and can share nothing useful, and didn't even get a high score out of it. This game. . . I'll probably try another run tomorrow. But for those who might experience the same issue, I guess make sure you're playing the current version of the game, or the same thing could happen to you! (The only way I know of to do this is to check the javascript code directly and do a text search for the version number "0.9.2" or "0.9.3".)

Okay. To everyone here that had experienced this bug or crash. What happens exactly? 1. Does the browser simply closes instantly with no warnings or hints? 2. Or does the following steps happen in this order a) The page goes white / grayed b) (Optional) A dialog may show up, saying "Page not responding. Close/Wait" c) After a while (it can be less than a second, or more), the page just closes. ---------------------- If its option 1: memory leak. If its option 2: infinite loop, which is basically starves UI.

@216: I think you're right that the crashes are not related to any memory leak at this point. I'm currently at level 605, and the game is still only using about 250MB of RAM. I got the great opal around level 120, and I went from leaking a minimum of 4 enemies every air level (and sometimes as many as 8) with just a perfect opal, to leaking NOTHING. That's terribly unbalanced, as far as I'm concerned, for a tower with pretty low odds on getting to build it. It's nice being able to play "normally" for a change, since there's no reason to play for maximizing turns by building nothing but paraibas if the game is going to crash somewhere around level 700. Flooded the map with Egyptian Golds, Ancient Bloodstones, and Enchanted Emeralds. Was able to actually build attack towers in the middle of the maze. Screenshot at level 605 (since I don't know when the game is going to crash): https://imgur.com/a/3jvqDAt And as @G said, running this at 4x speed practically makes it a different game. It actually affects what gems I pick and how often I repick when I don't have to wait 8 to 10 minutes between turns! I've been spoiled now. I will report back on when the game crashes.

CarlHR: I've tasted 4x speed. I can never go back.

Well then, in the worst case, rollback to 0.6.2 lol

About crashes: I dont think that memory leak is a direct reason. i tested in 2021 that nova/flamestrikes cause minor leak, resulting few GB in super high lvls ... but ppl in 0.6.2 were reaching 1200+ without that kind of crash (game simply was using more RAM)

Builing many EGs (1276 DPS) in the midddle is the right thing, also need multiple stun zones around.----- Other high (single-target) DPS towers: GAq (1870), GA (1534), ABS (760 + 500 per flamestrike active), uber stone(21k :)... but definitelly no paraiba (642 + 50). note: in flash version EE had decent DPS too due to x1.5 modifier for green vs amethyst. -----Exluding obvious uber stone, the highest dps gem is ... ABS if very long stunned target ( ~2.5 average flamestrike), Great Aqua otherwise. (calculation were for 4 armor, all buff towers: GO, BO, SYS and x1.75 amethyst modifier) ------- I dont get reson to play now with as few as 3 EGs (or ABSs) in high lvls, it must be really slow even at x4

Been waiting for the game to stabilize before diving in headfirst again, but I'm curious at what point my browser will crash due to whatever is causing the crashes everyone is getting. I suspect that, as with the memory leak in the initial javascript version of GTD, it will depend a lot on your PC specs. I'll report back if I can get a decent run going-- not getting a great opal early on feels (so far, to me) like even more of a handicap now than it used to be, so I may not be able to sustain a good enough run to play till a crash. And I don't think I have the dedication to keep trying run after run to get a good one going, knowing that it will crash. @JonathanA: I'm intrigued by whatever puzzle game you've developed there! As for high damage towers, unless something has changed recently, the most powerful towers are Egyptian Gold, Bloodstone, and Paraiba, with great amethysts and great aquamarines also being strong. None of the other great gems were worth building, at least in the old versions of the game. Maybe the great sapphire, because it covers such a huge area of the map, but it's otherwise not a strong attack tower. Great opals are of course the single most important tower in the whole game, but not for attack power, for their cooldown buff (50% vs 35% for a perfect opal.)

@JonathanA Lately I have been going for 3 Egyptian Gold, 3 Ancient Blood Stone, 1-4 Mystic Black Opal, 1 Great Opal, 1 Rose Quartz Crystal, 10-20 Lucky Asian Jade, and 50+ Enchanted Emeralds, with the rest being Paraibas. Currently the game is bugged and will crash before you can get to the 1000s though, so it's not as important to maximize Paraibas right now.

https://imgur.com/screenshot-DapA1eZ I made four stun zones (so far but i usually quit the game around this level...) to stun lock and i'm about to put all future EEs at the bottom as anti leak. I know yall have already figured out this game approaching level 1000, i'm just trying to understand the game from a lower level perspective. I put the gold in the middle as a nuke but i wonder which is the highest damage tower. i saw from a recent screenshot of scgmeister however i believe that really EE is the only important thing which makes sense, just fill the map with it, and eventually pariba to not run out of space. perhaps EE is too powerful, and could nerf air to make other towers more useful. Leaking at least 5 air every level. (but plenty of jade mitigates that problem of course.) Btw you can see in the screenshot i'm playing a puzzle game between the waves, that i made myself, let me know if anyone is interested xD I might make it available for download at some point. happy sunny sunday from ecuador!

hi friends - hope everyone is having a great sunday wherever you are in the world.

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