This guide is intended as a way to help new players learn how to play the game. The tutorial as it is is very bare-bones, so this guide aims to teach some basics and to provide an experience more like a modern tutorial - giving some early guidance and then letting you apply what you've learned.

If you either haven't played the game yet, or you tried to get through the first tower and had some difficulty, this guide is for you! No prior knowledge is required.

LAWatson, the creator of I Wanna Lockpick, has produced a video tutorial for new players. It is not related to or affiliated with this one, but it is aimed at the same audience for the same purpose.

If you would prefer a video format to a text and images guide, check LAWatson's "How To Play" video out!

Tactical Nexus is an optimization puzzle presented as an RPG. There are no random factors. Everything is deterministic: if you do the same thing, you will always get the same outcome.

Each level is called a "tower", since they are presented as floors that you go up and down. Your primary goal is to reach one of the ending points of the tower, called "Clear Tiles". Your secondary goal is to maximize the score you have when you do so (though you can use the same tile more than once to score better in the same run). The further you go into the tower, the better score you will get.

In your way are locked doors, enemies, and other obstacles. Acquiring and spending resources is where the puzzle part of the game comes into play. You will need keys to get through doors, and both HP and stats to overcome enemies. Everything is essentially some sort of trade: exchanging a key for the items behind a locked door, perhaps. Or fighting an enemy, losing HP but gaining an item, experience, and progress.

Sounds simple, right? And yet the sheer number of possible combinations of moves in this game is so large that it's impossible to brute force it. If you want to make progress you'll have to learn how to play by learning how to evaluate your goals and possible moves yourself. And this guide is here to help teach you that.

So let's play the first tower, Tactical Tutorial, together! Start Tactical Nexus and enter the "Tactical Tutorial" tower.

At the start of the tower you will see something like this.

This is the first floor of the tower. At the opposite end of the floor from where you (the purple fox) start is a staircase leading up. Our first goal is to get to that staircase.

How do we do that? In front of it there is a yellow door. And fortunately, next to that, is a yellow key. So all we have to do is get to the key and then open the door. Easy!

There are enemies in our way, however, so we will have to fight them. But we don't have to fight ALL of them. And in fact, we shouldn't, because some of them are notably stronger than the others. In fact, if you fought the purple Fighter enemies right away with your starting stats, they would kill you! So here is Important Lesson #1:


There are many reasons to leave enemies behind for later, but first and foremost is that if you come back later when you are stronger, they will cost less HP to fight, and the rewards will be better. Ideally, they don't cost ANY HP to fight - either because you deal so much damage that they die in one hit, or because you have so much defense that they cannot damage you. However, this is rare to see when you are just starting out. You will typically be taking some damage, so let's try to minimize it.

Now that we have established that we want to get through the floor with minimal pain, let's see what we're up against. We can do this very easily by pressing and holding the spacebar. You will see this:


This is, admittedly, a lot of numbers. So for now, let's only look at the rightmost column. This shows how much damage we will take if we fight an enemy.

Right away we can see that we do not want to fight the Fighters (purple cats) or the Rangers (blue birds), as their damage is more than our current HP, 1000. As is the case in almost all video games, dying is bad. Instead we want to fight either the Junior Rangers (green birds) or Junior Fighters (blue cats). And of those two, the Junior Fighters are better, as they deal only 220 damage compared to the Junior Ranger's 800 damage.

"But hold on, we have to fight either a Fighter or a Ranger to get to the stairs!", you say. That's correct. So we not only have to get to the other side of the floor, but we will have to grow stronger along the way so that we can take on one of those enemies and not die. We can do this by:

• Gaining HP, to withstand more damage, or
  
• Gaining ATK, so that enemies hit us fewer times, or
  
• Gaining DEF, so that enemies' hits hurt us less.

This is where items come in. The red circles are ATK-increasing items, the blue ones are DEF-increasing items, and the colorful mason jars are potions that give us HP. And there are some right in front of us between us and the first enemy! So let's start by picking up the Power Gem and the Life Potion.

The Power Gem increases our ATK by +2, from 50 to 52. The Life Gem increases our HP from 1000 to 3000. Even though it already looked like we were full, it turns out that our HP has no maximum! The life bar in the top right is merely there to show how you are doing relative to the highest amount of HP you had at any point in the tower. You do not have a 'maximum HP' like in most games. Keep this in mind!

We are now in front of the Junior Fighter. There is a hint tile here that explains the combat system: You hit the enemy for (your ATK - enemy's DEF) damage. Then, the enemy hits you back for (enemy's ATK - your DEF) damage. This continues over and over and over until one of you dies, whether that takes 3 hits or 3000.

When you are facing an enemy, you will see this window show up in the bottom-right of the screen, telling you about the enemy. He has 120 HP. Our ATK is 52, his DEF is 25, so we deal 27 damage per hit. It will take us 5 hits to kill him - as shown by the "27x5" above his HP: 27, 54, 81, 108, 135. He will hit us back for 55 damage per hit (since we have 0 DEF). Because we always attack first, he only gets 4 hits in (the 5th hit kills him), so we will take 55 x 4 = 220 damage.

If only we had 3 more ATK, we could kill him in 4 hits: 30, 60, 90, 120. This is what the "To reduce turns" at the bottom means: you can reduce the number of times you have to hit the enemy if you have the indicated amount of ATK. And when you kill the enemy in fewer hits, they hit you less times, so you take less damage.

However, we cannot get that extra 3 ATK right now, so just fight the Junior Fighter by moving into him. Combat is automatic, so you don't have to do anything.

We win, as we already knew we would, though it did cost us 220 HP. He also dropped a Guard Piece, which will increase our DEF by 1.

We have no reason not to grab it immediately, along with all the other stat-up items we can reach from here. We now have 58 ATK and 7 DEF.

Let's take another look at the enemy stats now that we've improved our own.


All of the damage numbers went down! Thanks to the ATK and DEF we gained, the Fighters now only cost us 1751 HP instead of 3410, mostly because we reduced the number of turns we have to fight them for from 31 to 17. However, the Junior Rangers still take 5 turns to kill, so their damage was only decreased by the DEF we gained, going down from 800 to 772.

The reason for this is simple: the fewer turns it takes to kill an enemy, the more ATK you need to reduce the turn count further. To one-shot an enemy, you need enough ATK to deal at least their entire HP pool in damage in one hit. To two-shot them, you only need to deal half their HP in damage. Three-shotting needs 1/3 of their HP, four-shotting needs 1/4, and so on.

At this point we have 3 options: We can go up, down, or across the middle. However, up and down both have Fighters, and while we could fight one and win, it would cost us over half of our current health. Ouch! Compare this to the Junior Fighter in the middle row, who would cost only 144 of our 2780 health. Seems like an obvious choice, right?

So, let's take the blue potion, kill the Junior Fighter, and then pick up the Heavenly Potion behind him. The Heavenly Potion is particularly delicious - it not only gives us 3000 HP, but also +3 ATK and +3 DEF.

"Shouldn't I pick up the other two blue potions?", you might ask. After all, our max HP is uncapped. They're right there, and we can pick them up without any further cost to ourselves. But we should leave them on the floor for now, and here's why:

HP in Tactical Nexus is best thought of as a currency that you spend in order to acquire resources and make progress. The only hit point that matters is the last one. As long as you have enough to survive a fight, it doesn't matter if you have 1 HP or 1 million HP left afterwards. Nothing stops us from coming back for those potions later when we need them.

And, if we pick them up later, they will be worth more than they are now. Sure, we could grab them now for 800 HP each. But if we come back later, they could be worth double, triple, or even more. So since our current HP has no bearing on combat (unlike ATK and DEF), we might as well just leave them there for later so we can get more out of them. The Heavenly Potion we picked up should last us for a while.

"But what if we went one of the other directions, and picked up the Heavenly Potion later?" you might ask. It's worth 3000 HP, after all. Doubling an 800 HP blue potion is nice and all, but doubling a 3000 HP heavenly potion? That sounds even better! And you certainly could do that. You would be spending about 1500 extra HP on fighting the Fighter, plus whatever extra damage you take by missing out on the extra 3 ATK+DEF, in the hopes of getting more HP later, if you survive.


This right here is the core of what makes Tactical Nexus such an engaging puzzle game. These kinds of trade-offs and what-ifs are everywhere. It's why routing is so difficult, because having (or not having) that 3 ATK could make all the difference somewhere down the road. In time, you will learn for yourself how to make these judgement calls. For now, since our stats are so low, let's take the potion.

The next Junior Fighter in our way is no problem at all, and he also opens the way to 2 Power Gems.

With 65 ATK we now take out Junior Fighters in 3 hits and take only 86 damage in return. They are so weak that we might as well just kill the other Junior Fighters too! There are only HP items behind them though, so as with the blue potions, we can leave them here until we need them later.

But what's this? When we killed the second one, we heard a chime, and a new part of the UI appeared! We gained enough experience from killing enemies to level up, and now we are offered a level-up bonus. We can pick any one of these rewards we like: +5 ATK, +10 DEF, 3 yellow keys, 2 blue keys, or 1 red key.

But... which to pick? We don't even know what's on the next floor, let alone the rest of the tower! ...but what if we did?

We could save our game here, go upstairs, and then load the game, but Tactical Nexus has a fully functional undo/redo system, so it's even easier than that!

1. Kill the Fighter.
2. Pick up the yellow key.
3. Move into the yellow door and confirm that you want to open it.
4. Go upstairs.


There's what 2F looks like! There are new enemies, new items, and a new color of door. This information will let us make a more informed decision, so let's rewind by holding Ctrl+Z until we are back to before the point where we killed the Fighter in front of the yellow key. If you undo too far, press Ctrl+Y to redo.

We have successfully scouted ahead and gained valuable information. If you forgot what the floor looks like you can press the F key to enter floor-view mode, then press the Up key to look at the second floor again, and then press F to exit floor-view mode when you're done.

Now, 2F has a pair of yellow doors, and a pair of blue doors. With a yellow key level we could open both of the yellow doors and still have an extra key left over for later. The Power Potions and Guard Potions increase ATK/DEF by 3 in addition to giving a small amount of HP; it's a very small value and the stats are far more important, so let's focus on those. The upper yellow-door cache gives us 10 DEF, and the bottom yellow-door cache gives us 10 ATK. 10 ATK and 10 DEF seems a lot better than getting only 5 ATK or 10 DEF alone, doesn't it?

What about the blue doors? The cards give 5 of their stat, so these two caches together give us 9 ATK, 19 DEF and 5000 HP (plus whatever the stat potions give us). Again, this is much better than 5 ATK or 10 DEF.

The only other factor to take into account is that the yellow doors are reachable ever so slightly sooner.


So, what do you think? Should we take yellow keys or blue keys? The blue doors will give us more stats, but also force us to pick up more HP earlier than we really need to, and we have to fight more enemies to get to them.

I will leave it up to you to decide and try for yourself. Both options will work, and you can always try undoing later and trying the other path to compare them. When you have made your choice, either press E to take the 3 yellow keys for your level-up bonus, press R to take the 2 blue keys, or click on the icon for the bonus you want. You will see that we are now level 2, and we need 30 XP to get to level 3 (we only needed 10 to get to level 2).

With that decided...

We have two options to finish this floor: either go through the Fighter, or one of the Rangers.

Yet as it stands, the Fighter will deal less damage to us, thanks to all the stats we got. In addition, killing the Fighter lets us leave more potions on the floor for later. It would be nice if we had just 2 more ATK, but we have no more readily reachable stats.

"But what if we got the ATK potion at the bottom?" you might ask.

That would reduce the turn count by 1, yes. But to get it we have to fight either a Junior Ranger (558 damage) or another Fighter. Reducing the turns by 1 only saves us 96 HP. Spending 558 HP to save 96 is not a smart move, so let's just accept that this is the strongest we can be right now, and go upstairs. Kill the fighter, take the key, and open the door - for real this time.

There's no way to avoid the Heavenly Potion in front of the stairs, so we might as well just pick it up immediately.

Let's take another look at this floor now. What is our goal this time? There is another staircase on the opposite side of the room. There are no locked doors blocking it this time, only enemies, notably a new foe: an Elder Fighter (green cat). At present they would deal a staggering 25,273 damage, killing us multiple times over, even if we were to go back and pick up all the HP potions on 1F. Ouch!

Why so much damage? Well, take a look at the enemy stats screen for this floor...


This time, look at the column of blue numbers. The larger numbers are the enemy's DEF stats. The Elder Fighter has 65 DEF. With 68 ATK, we are only able to hit them for chip damage. Meanwhile, they'll hit us back for 127 damage each time. We have to hit them 200 times, so they'll hit us back 199 times. So we must find a way to get stronger.

Fortunately, there's lots of stats on this floor we can go for first. Closest to the stairs there are two Junior Fighters who are absolute jokes at this point, hitting us for only 74 damage. Which order do we do them in? It doesn't matter much, but going down and killing the bottom one first to get the DEF potion will make us take less damage on the other... but it's a whole 6 damage. This is a 'micro-optimization', and while it does help, it's such a small effect that it barely matters. In this case it's a simple matter of free HP but you shouldn't worry about this level of optimization in general.

In any case, kill both Junior Fighters and take their stat potions, leaving the blue potions on the ground. When you pick up the ATK potion, you can hold Space if you like to see the effect immediately: the Elder Fighter's damage drops by over half to 12,078. That's still a lot, but it's far more approachable. ATK has an extremely strong effect at first but you get diminishing returns. However, when we're still getting massive rewards like this, we absolutely should boost our ATK as much as we can!

Here is a graph to demonstrate the effect. The red line shows how damage decreases as we gain more ATK. The blue line shows how damage decreases as we increase DEF instead. The ATK line is very steep initially and then flattens out. At low stats, ATK is way better. Eventually, DEF overtakes it, but for us at this point, we're much better off focusing on ATK.

Once again, we have 3 paths: Up, middle, and down. All of them feature a Junior Ranger and a Life Potion. If you took yellow keys for your first level-up bonus, you will want to go down the middle path to get access to both yellow doors immediately. If you took blue keys, then you probably want to go down to get the lower blue door cache ASAP.

After looting the caches you chose, the Elder Fighter is now down to somewhere around 3000 damage. That's almost reasonable! In fact, now that we can kill them, we should just plow straight through and go scout out 3F so we know what's coming up: Kill the Fighter, then the Elder Fighter, and take the stairs to 3F.


Hmm... very interesting. We have red doors and violet doors now. And three instances of a very important item: golden feathers. There's one very close by behind a red door. We don't have any red keys though, and the Great Fighter in front of that door would deal tens of thousands of points of damage to us, so let's not worry about that - Ctrl+Z to undo back to after looting the yellow door caches.

There are still some easily reached stats here on 2F. We can go up through the Fighter or down through the Ranger. Both of them are annoyingly close to a TRT: +1 for the Fighter and +2 for the Ranger. Yet the Fighter only deals about 70 damage per hit, while the Ranger deals 300-ish damage per hit to us right now, so the Ranger's TRT is worth more. Therefore, it's better for us to go up, and delay the Ranger for longer. So kill the Fighter at the top middle, and take the Power Gem to their right.

We could go down through that Ranger for the other Power Gem, but if we instead go left to the upper-left area, there's a power gem, four guard pieces, a heavenly potion, and a power potion. As tempting as it is to leave the heavenly potion there for later, we really need every stat point we can get our hands on. So kill the Fighter, and take all of those goodies.

THEN we can go down to the bottom middle, through the Ranger, and get the other power gem. We also gain another level when we do this. You'll notice that while the key rewards are unchanged, we are now offered +6 ATK or +12 DEF instead of +5/+10. These will continue to increase with each additional level we gain. So the question you always need to ask is: if I buy keys, will I be getting more out of whatever doors I open than I would get by just taking a stat level? Sometimes this is an easy and obvious question to answer, and sometimes it's very difficult.

For right now, we could take a blue key level for the other doors here (or a yellow key level if you took blues first), but since we know there's a very good red key door on 3F that we want to open, let's take a red key level by pressing the T key or clicking on its icon. Only getting 1 key doesn't seem like a good trade, but the reward in this case is very much worth it.

In any case, let's carry on: kill the Fighter, then take the stat-up items, heavenly potion, and guard potion. At this point we have exhausted all the readily-accessible stat caches on 2F...

"What's up with that red bird in the bottom left? He's stacked!" you might say. Or perhaps you already noticed when looking at the enemy stats. The Legendary Ranger there is way out of our league right now. We've barely crossed 100 ATK but he has 360 DEF - so much that we can't even scratch him! If we tried to fight him, the game wouldn't let us because it considers that an invalid attack - we can only initiate a fight if we are going to deal nonzero damage to the opponent. It's a pity too, because behind him is a Life Crown, which increases the value of all HP gained from items. Remember how I said that potions would be worth more if we came back to them later? Those crowns are why. But the one behind the Legendary Ranger is out of our reach for the time being.

Anyway, that's it for 2F. But hey, what about 1F? Fighters aren't much of a threat to us any more. Go back down to 1F and take them out to get their items, then return to 2F.

NOW we have nothing else can reasonably get. So instead, we will simply move on to 3F. Kill the Fighter, then the Elder Fighter, who now does somewhere around 1000 damage, a far more reasonable number than the 5 digits' worth of damage they were predicted for at the start of the floor. Behind them is a Drop of Dream Ocean, which gives us a whopping 9999 HP in addition to 5 ATK and 5 DEF - we can't avoid it, so we have to just grab it now.

It's almost time to take the training wheels off, but don't worry, I'm not throwing you in the deep end just yet.

On 3F we immediately have some free stats in the form of some power potions and power gems. There's no reason not to take them immediately, so eat them all for a delicious +13 ATK (and some HP).

Then, we should immediately go for that feather closest to the stairs, using the red key we bought with our level-up. We have to fight an Elder Fighter and then a Great Fighter, and the Great Fighter deals somewhere around 5000 damage to us. That's a lot more palatable since we just got 9999 from the Drop of Dream Ocean, and there's a Heavenly Potion right behind them that gives us a partial rebate.

More importantly though, it gets us our first multiplier item. After picking up the feather, all EXP we earn from kills gets an extra +30% (rounded down to the nearest whole number). If we pick up another feather, it will stack, giving us +60%, then +90%, +120%, and so on. More EXP means we get more levels, and sooner. This gives us more keys or stats, making us stronger, and making the enemies hurt us less. Golden feathers (and the equivalent multiplier for HP, the life crowns) are some of the most important items in the game, and are often worth fighting powerful enemies or spending valuable keys on because they increase the value of everything that comes after them.

You'll gain another level off of the Great Fighter, but I will let you decide what to do with it. Eventually you will want to stop buying keys and start buying stats, and it's hard to know when to do that on your first time through a tower, so make your best guess.

There are some very nasty enemies on this floor, including a General Fighter in the bottom-right who has even more DEF than the Legendary Ranger from the previous floor! But remember how scary the Elder Fighter looked at first? In time, even these guys will be manageable or even trivial if you stay focused.

But let's apply what we've learned so far:

1. What is the goal of this floor? The stairs in the middle right, which are guarded by a Great Fighter.
2. What are some reasonable things we can do along the way? The bottom middle has some ATK items behind Rangers and Elder Fighters. There are other ATK caches behind Great Rangers that may or may not be reasonable. In the upper-left, there is a Heavenly Potion and a Power Potion behind some Elder Fighters.
3. What is coming up? You can immediately plow through the Great Fighter to get to the stairs and go check out 4F and 5F to find out for yourself, letting you spend your levels more wisely.

Try and get to 4F on your own from here. When you get there, read the next section.

4F is great. No enemies, just some really nice items behind doors. If you scouted here from 3F early (and you should have) then you ought to be able to open some of these. Not the bottom-right, sadly, since we can't gain violet keys from levels and we haven't found any of those yet, but the other three are quite doable.

This floor also has your first Clear Tile. Step on it and... well, you're probably not going to get a medal, especially if you've been leaving HP items on the floor like you should have. But that's okay because we're not done yet! Besides, this is only the "Clear 1" tile.


The hint tile in this room shows how scores are calculated on different tiles. The one we're on is the check-mark tile. But if we finish the rest of the tower, we'll get to a star tile, which is better.

"But I already stepped on a Clear space, so isn't my score recorded?" Yes, and that's okay! If we come back with a better score and step on any clear tile again, our new best score will be updated. Clear tiles aren't a single-use affair! Any time you step on one - even the same one more than once - your new score is calculated. If it beats your previous best, your new high score is recorded. If it doesn't beat your previous best, then nothing happens.

Okay, so why will the Clear 2 space be better? Well, here's how scoring works:

Three things contribute to your score: your HP, your ATK, and your DEF. Your HP is simple: every point of HP you have at the time you step on the clear tile gives you 1 point.

ATK and DEF are a little more complicated, but not much. Each point of either gives you score equal to your current level (at the time you step on the tile) multiplied by... something.

That "something" is determined by the type of tile you are on, and for this "Clear 1" tile, it's only 1. So at level 5 for example, each point of ATK gives you 5 points. You will see easily by comparing the three numbers on the summary at the top of the screen that your HP easily dominates your score and is the primary factor.

However, if you are able to reach the "Clear 2" tile with a star pattern, then that 'something' is now 5. If you were somehow able to teleport there right now and were still at level 5 then each point of ATK would be worth 25 points (5 x 5) instead of just 5.

And while we won't be reaching the "Clear 3" space today with the crown icon, if you could, then instead of 5 the extra factor is 10, so at level 5 each point of ATK would be worth 50 points.

However, for all three tiles, HP is just added to your score as-is. So as your stats and your level increase, they can eventually eclipse your HP's contribution to your score when you finish on a higher tier clear tile.

Some notable things that do NOT improve your score:

• Unspent keys. Use 'em!
  
• The maximum HP you ever had. Only your current HP matters!
  
• EXP that was not enough to reach a level. You ideally want to just barely get the last level you earn in a tower.
  
• Multipliers. Only the things that multipliers boost can help you; the multiplier itself doesn't improve your score at all.

In any case, once you've looted this floor as much as you like, you can move on.

When you ascend from 4F to check out what's on 5F, you'll find a rather notable obstacle in your path: a Master Ranger that you cannot get around and must fight.

"When should I fight him?" you might ask. It is up to your judgement. Look at his TRT, and check how many reasonable caches of ATK stat-ups remain. When it doesn't seem like you're going to reduce his damage any time soon, or if doing so would cost too much HP to be worth it, then go ahead and fight him. Your reward is a lovely +35 ATK as well as access to the rest of 5F.

Your goal here is obvious enough. Getting six keys rather than just 1 is a bigger problem, but there are several keys on 2F and 3F just lying on the floor, and you can take more key levels if you need to. Figure out which keys you can pick up, and which you will need to buy.

Look in the top-right corner of 5F. There's the first violet key! These are extremely valuable since we can't just buy them. It is absolutely worth getting, but then the question is, what will you spend it on? Look at the previous floors for violet doors and see which door is worth the most, then make your decision.

Don't forget to go check back on earlier floors now and then and see if there are things you passed by earlier that are reasonable now - enemies that are cheap or free to fight, items that would be worth getting that weren't before, and so on.

6F opens with a simple demonstration of the even rarer platinum keys. Open the platinum door for more stat-up items and access to the rest of the floor, more or less.

You should be able to handle this one on your own. Look at the various rewards available, and what it will cost to get them. There's another violet key in the bottom-right corner. Where can you use it?

You have a very formidable foe in your way here: the Final Ranger. He is extremely mean, and will probably be the last thing you fight. As for when you fight him... you should be able to figure it out. Remember to think about what's available and what it would cost to get more resources. If you have to take HP potions from earlier floors to survive his fight, do so, but try to leave as many as possible for as long as you can.

At some point it will no longer be worth your time to buy key levels. So now the question is, ATK or DEF? In this tower, DEF levels are worth double what they normally are. However, our overall stats are very low, so ATK will serve us better by hitting more TRTs, in particular the Final Ranger's; he has so much ATK of his own that every turn we shave off the inevitable fight with him saves us a ton of HP, far more than we would save with DEF levels.

For now - both in this tower and for others - you will almost always want to focus on ATK. One day, if you keep playing the game and getting stronger, you will want to focus more on DEF, because it requires much less DEF than ATK to win a fight without taking any damage. But the rewards from ATK are immensely better at low stat values, so focus on ATK for now, and start taking ATK levels when keys aren't worth it any more.

If you make it to 7F, well done! If not, think about what might have gone wrong. Were there any fights that maybe weren't worth it, looking back? You can always undo or load an earlier save and try something else.

The Clear 2 tile has a Life Crown on it so you should grab that immediately. This is the last crown you're going to get in this run, which means at this point we have maximized the value of all possible HP potions, and we can go back and get them.

Your goal should be to get at least 650,000 points to reach the silver medal threshold. That sounds like a lot, but after you go and pick up all the potions on the floor with all the HP crowns the tower has to offer, and then go and clean up any remaining enemies that are reasonable to fight, and spend any leftover keys you have, it should be a very reasonable goal.

Remember that this Clear 2 tile gives you LV*5 points for every point of ATK or DEF you have, 5x as much as the Clear 1 tile. So if you gain any more levels at this point, it might well be worth taking the DEF levels instead, as they give you twice as many stat points.

Also remember that XP by itself doesn't give you any score, so you should only kill enemies if their drops or the items behind them give you enough score to be worth it. In particular, some of the Legendary and Star fighters on 6F might well be still alive at the end of the tower just because they hurt too much to be worth fighting. Remember, you don't have to kill every enemy!

If you've done all of this and still can't get a silver medal, then try to think about what went awry. Were there potions you took that you could have left on the floor? Enemies you killed that maybe weren't worth it? Could you have gotten any feathers or crowns earlier than you did? Maybe take fewer key levels? This is a very short tower so don't be afraid to rewind, or even reset and start over.

Once you have the silver medal, congratulations are in order. Your Tactical Nexus journey is just beginning. But there's more to this tower than we've seen...

In addition to the silver medal, you will have received 2 "Sunstones", little orange and yellow medals. You got these because you beat the tower "Pure" - that is, without spending any medals... since you didn't have any to spend in the first place! Consider it a free bonus. For each 'tier' of medal you earn Pure you get a bonus sunstone; 1 for a pure bronze, 2 for a pure silver, 3 for a pure gold, etc, so because we got a pure silver we get 2 sunstones.

The medals are more than just bragging rights. They actually do something! Press the M key or click on the medal icon under your key counts to go to the Medal Room. This is a room where you can spend medals to buy items, and it's available at the start of a run, allowing you to start a tower with higher base stats - or as the game puts it, to "Become Super-LV1". Those crowns and feathers were pretty good, right? Imagine having some at the start of the tower! This is how the game's meta-progression works: the more you play and the more rewards you get from towers, the stronger you are at the start of a tower. This lets you get better scores for more and better rewards, rinse and repeat.

But... all we have is 1 very lonely silver medal. We can't buy anything of note yet. Some day in the future you can come back here with more medals from other towers and buy all kinds of good stuff.

"Is the medal gone forever if I spend it?" NO! Once you earn a medal or sunstones they are yours to keep. Nothing in-game will ever take them away from you. Every time you start a new run from now on, you will have that silver medal and all of your sunstones. If you come back and get a better medal later, then the silver medal will be replaced with that better medal on all future runs. Your starting sunstones will be the sum of all sunstones you've earned from all towers.

"Do I have to play the tower again to get my medal back?" NO! You get the medal back automatically every time you start a new tower. The only reason to play the tower again is to get a better score, and a better medal.

"Is there any reason I shouldn't spend medals?" Yes, actually. Remember how we got those 2 sunstones for beating the tower "Pure"? If you spend a medal, then your run is "Impure", which just means you won't get those bonus sunstones. You can still earn better medals though (and you have to do Impure runs eventually to get the highest-tier medals).

But what's that in the top-right? Stairs! The medal room has multiple floors too.

What are these cup things? These are "sunwishers", and they're where you can spend sunstones. Remember the thing about medals making a tower Impure? That doesn't apply to sunstones. Those can and should always be spent. Sure, a whole +2 ATK at the start of the tower doesn't sound like much, but the more sunstones you earn the stronger your starting stats will be. Plus there were times in the tower where we were definitely only 1 or 2 ATK short of a TRT. If we'd had that extra +2 ATK we would have killed those enemies more efficiently, and saved more HP.

You'll also see some late-game stuff here. We won't be touching moon doors, sun doors, or that Clown enemy for a long time yet, but think of it as a teaser for something you can come back to if you keep playing the game long enough.

In the bottom left is a new enemy type, a Burgeoner. No, I don't know what that means either. But you should be able to fight him at this point. He doesn't drop any items, but he IS worth some nice XP.

"Won't that make my run impure?" Nope! You can kill as many enemies in the medal room as you like. The only thing that makes your run impure is opening a medal door.

Going up the stairs again, you'll see more items, including some really high-tier stuff that you can't get to. And... another set of stairs? The hint tile in front says that "Strongers are waiting", which... well, make of that what you will, but essentially it means that we haven't seen all there is to see. Unfortunately, that staircase up is behind several medal doors, some of which require diamond medals, and our one silver medal is not going to get us through there.

So, some day, when we have enough medals, we can come back here and find out what lies beyond those stairs. Until then, it is a mystery...

If you really want to challenge yourself, try playing the tower again and going for a gold medal this time! It's possible! Here's some advice for a second run:

• You can spend those 2 sunstones you got at the sunwishers as soon as you start the tower. I'd recommend NOT spending the silver medal (so that you'll get another bonus sunstone if you do get the gold medal), but hey, I'm just some words in a Steam guide, you can do whatever you want and I can't stop you.
  
• You can use the floor-view mode to view the entire tower! Yes, once you have revealed a floor, it is PERMANENTLY visible to you, even on a new run. Scouting ahead is extremely valuable. Later in the game it will be more common for your first attempt to be unable to finish, but the information you gain will let you make more informed decisions so you can get further next time.
  
• If you weren't doing this already, you can kill a Ranger for XP but leave the potion he drops on the ground for later. Ideally you want to do this when you have all the feathers, but as with most things you should use your judgement for when it's worth it.
  
• You can fight the Burgeoner in the medal room whenever you think is a good time. Just remember that he doesn't drop any items or have any reachable items behind him, so he's only worth it for XP, which means you want him to be as painless a fight as possible, and he's most worth it once you have most (or even better, all) of the feathers.
  
• Now that you know all of the keys and doors in the tower you can make better choices about what key levels to buy. Because stats gained from levels go up but keys don't, you'll want to front-load your key levels to maximize the stats you get later (if you weren't doing this already).
  
• Now that you know where all of the crowns and feathers are, you can prioritize them and plan ahead better to get them as soon as is reasonably possible.

But if you think you've had enough of this tower for now, then your next step is to move on to Tactical Tower NEW. It has new enemy types, new items, and is much longer. You can spend those 2 sunstones of yours in its medal room as well to give yourself a small starting boost. Apply what you've learned here and you should be able to get at least a silver medal from it as well.

After NEW is D, and then K, though K is quite rough for new players. If you have trouble on it you can skip it and try Mini instead - nothing says you have to play the towers in order! And when you feel like it you can come back to try and improve your scores. Eventually you'll be able to get to those mysterious stairs in the Tactical Tutorial medal room, or find out what the deal is with the dead-end in NEW's basement, and you can start earning diamond medals. The final boss of the base game is "Pop Tactical Lord", a very long and hard tower with the potential to earn a moon medal...

...but for now let's keep our sights a little more realistic, shall we? Try and get a medal - any medal - on as many towers as you can, preferably pure so that you can get extra sunstones. Then try and improve those medals. Eventually you'll need to start doing impure runs to get platinum and diamond medals (except on Mini, where you can get a pure platinum). Take it at your own pace.

You can also read my other guide, "Stuff a new player might not know", to learn more about certain features of the game. Some of them we covered here, and some of them are for more advanced content later on in the game that you won't see for a while.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3220155223

And if you want to ask questions, you can join the Tactical Nexus Discord server!
discord (DOT) gg (FORESLASH) zEMVzXkETs
(Link obscured to prevent bots from scraping it)

I hope that this guide is helpful to new players. Don't be afraid to leave a comment if something seems unclear or needs clarification!

I'd like to thank the Tactical Nexus Discord for being generally awesome and helpful. In particular, I'd like to thank JumbocactaurX27 for helping draft this guide.

Also, thanks to LAWatson for giving me permission to link his video guide from this one.