Your first month in Clash of Critters: a starter playbook

Every campaign chapter has 80 stages, and every tenth one is a boss. Zobos walk down the lanes toward the bottom of the screen; if a single one gets through, or the timer runs out, the stage is lost.

• The board grows. Chapters 1–3 give you three columns and room for nine Tatari. From chapter 4 on it widens to five columns and fifteen Tatari, and that is when placement starts to matter.
• Elements decide most fights. The cycle is Water → Fire → Grass → Rock → Lightning → Water. Hitting the element you beat does double damage; hitting the one that beats you does half. While you drag a Tatari onto the board, a green or red thumb tells you which case you're in.
• Scout before you place. Tap the Zobo head icon to see what the wave contains, its elements and how dense it is, then put your counters in the lanes where those Zobos arrive.
• Quick Deploy is a draft, not an answer. It opens after stage 2-79 and fills the board with your strongest units. Treat it as a starting point and fix the lanes it gets wrong.
• Auto-Battle stops at bosses. You can leave normal stages running in the background, but boss stages have to be played by hand.
• Read the defeat screen. After a loss the battle report shows which Tatari fell. That tells you the weak lane, which is usually more useful than adding levels and trying again.

Tatadex holds 350 cleared lineups for chapters 4 to 8. A few patterns show up almost everywhere:

• All fifteen slots are used, and all five elements are on the board in 337 of those 350 clears. Coverage beats stacking your favourite element.
• Sturdy units stand in front. Stalkerix, Pyrohound, Electroar, Cobbledon and Turtuff sit in the first two rows far more often than anywhere else. Stalkerix is a Grass tank with a continuous slashing area attack; Turtuff spins a piercing shell and shields itself.
• Damage dealers stay back. Frostpaw, Ignisnap, Sparkdoe, Frugatoad and Cluckeroo mostly live in the last two rows, where they fire from safety. Frostpaw's ice slows what it hits, and Sparkdoe's lance pierces and paralyses.
• Almost everyone brings a healer. 322 of the 350 lineups include Cheerlet, Cheerling or Cluckeroo. Cheerlet usually sits in the middle rows so its dance heals and buffs the units around it.

The most common names in those clears are Stalkerix (266 lineups), Frostpaw (265), Cheerlet (238), Electroar (236), Sparkdoe (232) and Ignisnap (229). If you own any of them, they are safe places to put your early resources. For a fuller ranking, see the tier list.

As a rough guide to pace, the median player level on our cleared lineups is about 104 in chapter 5, 126 in chapter 6, 144 in chapter 7 and 160 in chapter 8. Below that, expect some walls.

The campaign is your best long-term investment, for reasons that aren't obvious at the start:

• Story stars raise the experience you get from the pinball machine. Every time a pinball lands on a star, it pays out more if you've earned more stars in the campaign. Stalling on a chapter quietly slows everything else.
• Boss stages pay well. Each boss clear gives a boss star, at least 30 pinballs, plus a shovel for expanding your Camp, and sometimes a .
• Boss stars unlock features. The first one unlocks pinball multipliers, later ones add Pinball Trees (up to eight in total), and the eighth unlocks feeding. Rushing the campaign opens the rest of the game sooner.

When you hit a wall, don't keep retrying the same lineup. Type the stage code into the campaign lineup search or browse a chapter page such as chapter 5, 6, 7 or 8 to see what other teams cleared it with. Later on, from chapter 26, Zobo waves and bosses come back on a seven-chapter cycle, so a lineup that cleared chapter 26 is worth trying on chapter 33.

Pinballs drive almost everything: candy to level your account, new Tatari and duplicates, and the items each event needs. New players tend to burn them as soon as they arrive. Don't.

1. Hold them until events open. Your first event usually unlocks after four or five days. Fire at x1 at most until then, and aim to have well over 10,000 banked when it starts. Spend early and you miss event items, Gold Rush cans, and the extra experience that more story stars would have given you.
2. A full tree is acceptable. Letting your Pinball Trees sit full for a few days loses a little. Arriving at your first event with an empty bank loses far more.
3. Match the multiplier to your stock. Without the x2 candy bonus, stay on x5 or x10. With x2 candy, around x20 suits a bank of 2,000–3,000, and x60 is the ceiling when you hold more than 5,000. Note that x60 itself only unlocks once you hold at least 4,800 pinballs.

Events rotate every few days, each with 150 reward tiers. The event cycle guide explains how to carry pinballs over from one event to the next.

Your Tatari level with your account, so individual power comes from evolution and feeding.

• Duplicates add stars. Each copy you catch raises that Tatari's star level. At set star counts it qualifies for an evolution trial; clear the trial and it moves up a tier. let you pick which Tatari gets the stars.
• Only purple Tatari reach T4. Purple units have four evolution stages, blue ones only two, so long-term plans should centre on purples.
• Narrow your roster. Spreading duplicates and food across every new catch leaves you with a wide, weak box. Pick a core per element and build those.

For which units deserve a T4 first, see the evolution roadmap.

Food is the bottleneck you'll feel longest, and almost all of it comes from the Boss Challenge.

• Play it every day. The boss resets daily and rotates through five: Frankenfish, Pop Star, Road Bully, Tipsy Zobo and Dean Zobo. Each one has its own element, so bring counters. A missed day is food you never get back. Our Boss Challenge page has lineups for each.
• Feed with a plan. Each Tatari can only eat 15 times a day. Any unit headed for T3 needs 340 experience of food and no more. Cookies and +5/+10 items are fine for that; anything past the mark is waste.
• Pick one T4 per element. Once an element has all six of its T3s, choose which of them becomes its T4, then give that one its daily meals until rank B.
• Cook cookies into bento. Bento comes with a buff built in, so it's the better use.
• Never spend gold food for Grass, Fire or Lightning casually. Late in the game, running out of it is what stops T4 progress.

The food and bento guide covers the details.

Horde is rough for a new account, but it hands out capsules, experience and pinballs, so show up anyway.

• Enter every round at least once. Repelling the camp pays 60 pinballs, which adds up fast.
• Assemble a complete squad of strong T2s first, and only then move to T3. T4 is not worth rushing for Horde because T4 Auras don't work there.
• Don't build your account around Horde. Its units get buffed and nerfed each season, so a Horde-only investment can lose value overnight.

The full Horde guide goes deeper.

What Fox most wants free-to-play players to remember: don't spend pinballs before events open. Watching the pinball tree fill up and stop is frustrating, but saving them for events and Gold Rush makes every pinball worth much more.

The second is pushing the story. Story stars make every star hit on the pinball machine give more experience, so being stuck costs you progress everywhere else. When stuck, look up a team first instead of retrying the same one.

1. Collect your Pinball Trees, and bank the pinballs unless an event is running.
2. Play the Boss Challenge.
3. Use your 15 feedings on the units you've committed to.
4. Push the campaign until you stall, then look up the stage.
5. Join the Horde round.
6. Check the gift code page for free rewards.

If you only remember two things: don't fire pinballs before events open, and don't let the campaign stall. Everything else in the game gets easier when those two are going well.