As of April, 24th, we welcome ChainZ Arena to Wombat’s spectacular family of games! This post will help you get ahead in the game right off the bat. Let’s get you ready for battles!
# What is ChainZ Arena?
ChainZ Arena calls itself an “Idle Mining RPG”, which basically means three things:
- Your heroes vary and advance depending on their class, stats and etc. (the RPG part)
- You don’t have to be online all the time; you basically make progress in the game without being super active (the Idle part)
- You can earn cryptocurrencies (EOS, ETH or TRX) by playing the game (the Mining part)
Despite being a newcomer, ChainZ Arena is already one of the more complex games in the space and will likely have high replay value.
Also, ChainZ Arena has offered some of the biggest prize pools in the space, both during the private and public beta phases, as well as at the start of the game (50k USDT worth of prizes upon launch).
If you want to read up on some basics, please find the [official ChainZ Arena guide](https://medium.com/@ChainZArena/the-guide-to-chainz-arena-5baa5510c715). As it has been out for a week, I won't be covering all of the details in there.
# How to play
ChainZ is a web-based game and runs well on both mobile and desktop, so go to the Explorer in Wombat and simply open ChainZ Arena.
In the beginning, you choose the faction you want to belong to — EOS, ETH or TRX. So far, it’s not entirely clear what kind of impact does belonging to one of the three factions has and which faction-based mechanics are already, or yet to be implemented. It’s already known, however, that there will be some kind of faction-based competitions.
Other than that, if you want to buy anything in the game, you will have to deposit EOS, ETH or TRX into your ChainZ wallet; you'll be able to withdraw it back to your own wallet at any time, but only to a wallet of the faction that you've chosen. So as a Wombat user, you'll want to choose EOS.
Your heroes are the main playable characters; you will need to level them up and have them participate in three different types of activities: Battle, Challenge and Arena. We’ll get to these three in a bit.
In the daily game business, there's a bunch of different in-game currencies / materials that you'll have to collect (and obviously spend): Gold coins, Dragon coins and Hero coins. As Dragon and Gold coins aren't really mentioned anywhere, they are hard to talk about, so here we are:
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Hero coins are only used within Chainopoly and the respective store, so you'll be able to tell them apart easily.
# Heroes
As written above, your Heroes are the stars of the game. You need to advance your heroes to make actual progress in the game.
Heroes are represented as cards. There's a whole lot of different heroes and in addition, some heroes can come in different representations, belonging to a different element (Earth, Water, Wood, Fire) and each hero belonging to a class (Ranger, Tank, Archer, Assassin, Mage). You'll easily spot the class and element by looking at your list of heroes, or any hero's details:
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There's a bunch of ways to make your heroes better and stronger:
- Upgrade
- Equip
- Skills
- Evolve
Before we get into the details and before you start spending precious resources on your heroes, it is important for you to know that there are different “rarities” of heroes. That means, you better be upgrading the ones with high potential. This is almost impossible to know in the very beginning, and these rarities aren’t easily visible for players - the cards have differently colored frames! The easiest you can see this is in the Index:
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The difference is in how far you can upgrade the heroes' so-called Star Levels, and therefore what maximum strength they can reach. The heroes you see in the screenshort above can all reach star level 5, which is the highest, and therefore can be upgraded to a maximum level of 350. I understand if this is pretty confusing at first, so whenever you start evolving or upgrading your hero, make sure to check back on this view and see whether your heroes are really worth it (click the middle of the three buttons in the upper left corner in the Heroes view to find this).
## Upgrading
Upgrading is the most basic mechanic - the higher the level of a hero, the stronger it is. Upgrading only costs Gold coins and Dragon coins, so make sure you always collect as many of those as you can.
Ideally, you upgrade your strongest heroes rather evenly, as the cost per level upgrade goes up quite quickly in the higher levels.
The maximum level of each hero is determined by its star level, which brings us to making your characters Evolve.
## Evolve
In order to evolve a hero, you’ll need to “feed” other heroes into it, which will consume the other heroes. The higher the star level you want to evolve into, the higher the requirements are. Always check the Evolve screen for those.
Star levels start with golden stars (1-5 stars), then white stars (1-5 stars), and then the number 1 up to 5 as seen on the All Heroes Index above. This means that you can evolve your best heroes up to 12 times (you can only evolve heroes with star level 3 or higher), but believe me, this is gonna be rough.
## Skills
Upon reaching certain level thresholds, your heroes can learn special skills. To learn skills, you'll have to find and spend Spell Books.
## Equipment
In addition to all the aspects above which make your heroes permanently stronger, you can also equip up to 6 items (two more later in the game). You'll find these items in the Battles and Challenges, and you can tinker around with these items a lot (they can be upgraded in a series of improving characteristics by merging weaker ones into stronger ones), but as a general rule of thumb - make sure that your strongest heroes have the highest-grade equipment, and upgrade equipment as soon as you have enough weak ones.
## Summon heroes
You might wonder how you even get hold of such heroes? Well, you summon them!
You can summon heroes for free by spending scrolls (the “lame” version), or by spending a fixed amount of crypto (again, EOS, ETH or TRX) — the better version. You’ll get a random hero per summoning. The free ones give you heroes with star level 1–3 whereas the paid ones give you up to 5 golden star levels (so still fairly low, but much, much better).
You can summon heroes from the Town Hall screen. Don't worry about having "too many" heroes - you can always decompose your weak heroes in the Altar (see Town Hall) and you'll need the higher-grade ones to evolve your strong heroes anyway!
# Battle
Now let's get to the actual game modes. We'll start with Battles.
This is the basically why the game is an idle game. If you've ever played games like AFK Arena, you'll notice the parallels: your heroes are constantly "fighting" opposing forces and finding loot. You can claim these loot boxes anytime, but if you wait for too long, the box will be full and the rewards that you'll find in there won't increase or improve anymore.
The boxes can contain all kinds of different things like equipments, scrolls for summoning, SOUL tokens or Skill Books, but they will for sure give you a bunch of Dragon and Gold coins. You can't however, find new heroes in those boxes.
As long as you're online, make sure to open these boxes regularly.
## Mining Hammers
You can purchase mining hammers to make your idle process much more efficient. Those hammers are only available for crypto payments and will boost your production:
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The effect of a hammer only lasts a few hours (between 1 and 12 hours) and you can queue another hammer so that you don't need to check back too often. This is also why the higher-grade hammers are more expensive per hour than the cheaper ones; you simply can relax for longer.
If you've applied a hammer, you also get a chance of finding more advanced loot boxes. They don't come very often, but are totally worth it.
Btw: if you want to change the formation of your heroes in Battle, you'll have to change the front line in your Challenge setup. So far, I couldn't find your Battle formation to make any difference, but you never know.
# Challenges
The challenges are kind of the story mode of ChainZ Arena. You select your formation of up to 6 heroes who then fight against a pre-determined formation of opponents. Once you've completed a challenge, you receive a reward and qualify for the next, typically more difficult, challenge. Every 5th challenge is typically a boss fight, which makes these challenges a lot more difficult.
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Once a challenge has started, it's fully automatic. After the first round of fighting, you'll be able to skip the animations and directly see your result.
# Arena
The Arena is the PvP game mode within ChainZ. Just like in the challenges, you have to set up a formation of up to 6 heroes to fight against other players. Your ideal formation may differ from the one for certain challenges, but overall it's likely you won't be pumping up many more heroes than your core 6.
You can match against other players up to 12 times a day. However, other players can match against you, as well. If you attack and win, you gain points and your opponent loses points based on an ELO-like point system.
Your points determine your ranking in the leaderboard. This is important as there will be regular reward payouts for the top-ranking players.
## Crystal Orb Arena
There's also a more advanced arena system called Crystal Orb Arena. Here, you have to assemble 3 lineups (teams) of up to 6 heroes each, and whoever other player you fight against does that, too. Your first team will fight against the opponents first team, etc., and the winner is being determined in a best-of-three fashion. Again, you can match up to 12 times a day.
The rewards in the Crystal Orb Arena are overall higher, but in order to be successful there, you also need more heroes trained and equipped well.
# SOUL Drops
SOUL Drops are the recurring reward scheme in ChainZ. For certain actions in the game (usually related to spending some crypto), you get SOUL coins in return, e.g.
- Advanced summoning
- Mining using a mining hammer
- Buying Heroes in the Heroes market with Hero Coins (which we won't cover in detail in this guide)
You can claim your portion of the reward pool based on your share of SOUL compared to the total amount of SOUL frozen by all players. Make sure you always freeze your SOUL whenever you get some - there's nothing else you can do with your SOUL at the moment.
The reward pool is getting filled with a portion of the game revenue upon each in-game purchase, and a portion of it is getting paid out every day:
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Your dropped crypto will be available to claim once a day. Upon claiming, they will be added to your in-game wallet and be available to spend, or to withdraw to your Wombat wallet (EOS). As you'll also receive TRX and ETH rewards through SOULDrops, you can exchange TRX and ETH for EOS so you can withdraw them.
# Wrapping it up
I know I haven't covered all the details of ChainZ in this guide because the game is pretty complex. The idea is to get you started with the game quickly, and you'll both find out the other details yourselves. We’ll be back with more advanced strategies and guides for ChainZ Arena once the game has been live for a while and we’ve all played it. We're sure ChainZ Arena will be around for a while, so get your Wombat wallets loaded and start playing!
If you want to read up how to earn EOS with the other games in Wombat, make sure to check [this guide](https://peakd.com/blockchain/@wombatapp/how-to-earn-eos-with-wombat), and [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/adoptwombat) or [join our Telegram community](https://t.me/getwombat)or [join our Telegram community](https://t.me/getwombat).
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