9Cclopedia

How to play

Welcome to your journey in Nine Chronicles!

 

This guide will help you better understand how everything works inside the game, allowing you to progress quickly and efficiently and have more fun! It will not cover every single aspect, so we encourage you to read the FAQ to understand the core game mechanics if you haven’t already.

First of all, install the game and follow the in-game tutorial to get a feel for everything.

The initial quests of crafting items, upgrading them, fighting stages, and leveling up will give you a general overview of the game, while this guide aims to cover the rest.

Table of contents

It’s not a game that you can rush in a few days…

Actually, you can never quite finish this game since you can keep on upgrading your gear, new harder levels will keep on being created and there will always be someone better coming for you in the arena.

Gameplay

Nine Chronicles is an idle MMORPG. You will play as a warrior and aim to increase your combat level by customizing your items to overcome stages with increasing difficulty.

 

In Nine Chronicles, all the fights are auto-played: you impact the outcome of the fight by changing your item setup and selecting potential buffs (in the form of food or crystal buffs). While this might sound simple, keep in mind that every single in-game action is actually a transaction on the Nine Chronicles blockchain. So, with this very ambitious design in mind, it would not be possible to have real-time combat.

To fight the main story in the campaign mode you need energy — 5 for each battle, with a maximum of 120. You can refill it once the Prosperity Meter fills up — that would be around 6 hours — and any progress there shows a block mined successfully by the network.

 

After each successful stage fight you gain experience and resources for crafting, and you can potentially unlock new recipes.

 

Since the items are the most important aspect of your character development, let’s talk more about them.

ALL about the items

Crafting

To craft an item, you first need to defeat the stage that unlocks its recipe. Afterward, you need to gather the required materials — the game suggests some stages to get these materials in the crafting interface.

You can also buy the missing materials with Crystals – that is the secondary in-game currency, but we will talk more about them later.

 

The last step is to wait for the craft to be done. The crafting timers increase as the item’s strength goes up. The number of stars of an item also influences the duration of the craft.

You can use hourglasses to instantly finish a craft. Hourglasses can be obtained from events, quests, and they also are a staking reward. The ones acquired via staking are also tradeable.

 

Items from World 1 to 6 can be crafted as Basic or Premium. Premium items are way stronger but also more expensive to craft. Items from world 7 follow a different pattern — you get to pick your stats from multiple options.

UNDERSTANDING ITEMS

All items have a basic stat (the big bold one at the top) and some secondary stats — each secondary stat is represented by a golden star on the item icon. A stat can roll 2 secondary stats of the same type, so it can have 3 stars but only 2 secondary stats detailed in it.

 

The purple stars represent spells. Spells can be buffs, debuffs, or offensive abilities.

 

One important aspect: if a secondary stat is the same as the main stat, it’s added up to the big bold number at the top. So, for example, this sword has a total of 2849 Attack and not 2849 + 975.

 

Those items that roll all the possible bonuses during crafting are called “Great success” items and they are, of course, the strongest version possible.

A world 6 "Great Success" sword

Supercraft

Each craft you make gives you crafting hammers that fill your Supercraft bar. When it’s full, you get to craft one item that has a guaranteed spell, costs no materials (only a fee in crystals) and it’s ready in just 20 blocks. Pretty neat!

Stats Explanation

Attack (ATK) = This is how much damage a character deals to an opponent. Higher ATK means more damage relative to opponent’s DEF. ATK also adds up to your spell damage.

Defense (DEF) = This is how much damage a character can subtract from an opponent’s attack. Higher DEF means less damage taken relative to the opponent’s ATK. You can reduce the enemy attacks to 1. Defense also reduces the spell damage you receive.

 

HIT = Attack Accuracy. The higher a character’s HIT stat is, the higher their chances of making a successful attack.

If you start noticing that your character is missing a lot against opponents of the same level, consider increasing your HIT stat.

You can never have 100% to hit, no matter how big this stat is. Being at a lower level than your enemy increases your chance to miss significantly. If you want to fully understand how hit works, you can check this article.

Health (HP) = A character’s life value. When it goes to 0, a character perishes. Players should consider optimizing their HP and DEF values for further survivability.

 

CRIT = Critical Rate, or Critical Hit Chance. This is expressed as a percentage, where 100% CRIT means a character will always be dealing a critical strike whenever they make a successful attack. For the moment, we don’t have any equipment that increase crit chance; only items like tuna or almond can do so (single-use food / consumable). Critical hits deal an extra +50% damage.

 

Speed = SPD. The higher a character’s speed stat is, the more attacks they can make in succession relative to their opponent’s own SPD. There is a limit, as each action by a character fills every other character’s action bar by about 1/6, so the fastest player can never have more than 7 actions in a row versus a low speed opponent.

CHARACTER POWER ("CP")

This is the formula:

HP*0.7 + ATK*10.5 + DEF*10.5 + SPD*300 + HIT*2.3 = Total CP

Spells increase the item CP by 15%.

Spells

As we mentioned above, the purple star on the items is a spell.

World 1 to 6 spells

They can be divided into 2 categories

 

Offensive abilities. They do damage.

On the swords: you have Double Attacks with a 3-round cooldown, and Blow Attacks, which deliver 1 single stronger attack but have a 5-round cooldown and a smaller chance to trigger. So the Double attacks are clearly better, and they also come on the premium items that can also roll more of the other stats. They all hit one single target (except for certain legacy swords).

On the rings: you have Blow Attacks on the basic items and various different names on the premiums. The blows deliver 1 single big attack and the premium ones do many small hits. They both hit all the enemies.

Important aspect: if you equip two items with the exact same spell name, they will share the same cooldown, so they don’t add up great.

 

Buffs

In the other slots, you can get spell buffs — they increase the total respective stat on your character. Keep in mind that they don’t get stronger when you upgrade the item.

World 7 spells

 

They are way more varied. You get buffs, debuffs, damaging spells, and thorns, all based on various stats. They also vary in power and they get stronger when the item is upgraded.

We recommend reading their descriptions when you get there, as explaining them in detail is beyond this guide’s scope.

Runes

The runes are, in a way, extra equipment. You obtain the fragments needed to craft them by participating in world boss events.

They are very good tools to optimize your character, especially the spells.

Some runes can only be used in limited game modes.

The Combo system

Every consecutive successful normal attack that you do deals more damage. This means that it’s optimal to not miss any attacks; however, as we mentioned before, that’s hard to do since hit chance is capped at 90%.

To get combos you need to do successful consecutive hits. That means that as long as you are not missing, your combo is increasing.

Each combo increases your damage and your chance to do a critical strike (that gives +50% damage).

How many combos you can do before going back to the start and what bonus they give is limited by your character level.

Combos and character level

New characters get 2 combos.

At level 10, the 3rd combo is unlocked and it increases the crit chance for 0, 10, 35 and the damage is multiplied by 1, 2 and 3. So the 3rd combo will do triple damage with a bonus 35% chance to crit.

At level 100, players get the 4th combo that deals 4 times the normal damage with a bonus 45% chance to crit.

Combo 5 is unlocked after character level 250. It deals 5 times the normal damage with a bonus 55% chance to crit.

 

Click the infographic to see all the info above in a more visual way. 

Some combo facts

  • The spells that you cast do not break your combo and they don’t increase it either. You continue where you left off after the spell.
  • The hits you receive do not influence your combos with anything.
  • Combos do not work if you only do 1 damage versus the enemy – that happens if you have less attack than their defense.

Best stats for the campaign

Many, many variants work, but there are a few tips you can follow to progress faster.

 

Defense is probably the most impactful stat in the campaign — you can get the monster to only do 1 damage to you, so that makes things quite easy. The defense spell from the chests adds up a lot to your overall defense. The best counter to defense are the spells – defense reduces spell damage too, but they have way higher damage potential, so you will get hurt by them anyway.

 

Keep in mind that battles result in a loss if, after 150 attacks, you are not able to clear the stage, so you also need some decent offensive abilities.

Attack is the foundation of your character’s abilities, making it the second most important stat. But don’t go all in at the expense of other stats: without hit you will just miss too much (you also miss more if you have a lower character level than your enemy), preventing you from executing combos, and without speed you will not hit often enough to kill your enemies.

 

It’s a pretty good idea to have at least one spell ring – a strong spell can 1-shot entire waves of small enemies. The bleed rune can replace or complement the ring spells since it also damages all the enemies.

Best stats for the arena

The arena is quite different from the campaign. It’s probably a better idea to focus on the campaign until you reach the last world and don’t get any special gear for the arena. But we will give you some general pointers anyway 🙂

 

You can take off all that juicy defense you gathered for the campaign. The damage formula is different because your enemies now do combos, and defense doesn’t scale against them. So you just need a good amount of health (btw, HP gets doubled in the arena mode) and just focus on the holy trinity of killing your enemy – hit, atk, spd.

 

 

Hit and Speed work in comparison with the enemy stats so you get the advantage of picking enemies that have those lower.

 

The battles are usually very very short, so it’s considered best practice to take off all your buff and debuff spells.

 

The generally accepted best rune spell is again bleed — it has the advantage that it can’t miss after you apply it, it ignores defense, and it also works amazingly against enemies that are fast since it damages them every time they attack you.

Can’t pass a level?

Keep in mind that your chance to hit is greatly reduced versus higher-level enemies, so have patience, repeat the level and level up! It’s perfect if you can also get 2 stars to get the materials too.

 

First thing is to keep on trying! The battles are quite random: you can miss 3 times in a row or you can crit 3 times in a row with the same setup. As long as you are getting the first 2 stars and still getting experience, there is nothing to lose in repeating a level.

If this fails, it’s time to upgrade your gear or to buy better one.

If you cannot afford any gear upgrades, you can craft yourself some food (single-use buff) with the ingredients gained from the arena.

 

For very hard levels with big bosses, tuna cans (crit) are very often the best choice, but try to use food to compensate for what your gear is lacking.

Item upgrading

You can make your items stronger by consuming other items of the same slot. Many players call the consumed items “fodder”. Each item gives some experience when consumed, and the stronger the items is, the more it gives.

After reaching the +4 level, upgrading also costs NCG. That means that it’s usually cheaper and more effective to buy the next item instead of going past +3.

Keep in mind that you can use higher tier equipment to upgrade lower ones, and in the lower stages that’s actually a good strategy. For example, the cheapest blue sword can be used to upgrade a gladiator wind sword (green), and it gives more experience than using any other green sword.

 

Upgrade levels 4, 7, and 10 cost NCG in addition to the experience, so it’s better to avoid leveling up gear over +3 unless you are sure it’s worth it.

How to earn Nine Chronicles Gold

Participate in the events

For now, the main event is the Arena. It pays NCG only during the competitive seasons — they are announced in advance, and the top players get most of the rewards, but everyone who joins earns something.

 

Staking

If you purchase or earn at least 50 NCG, it can be staked in game and give weekly bonuses. These bonuses can be sold or used to help you progress. There are many levels, and every extra bit of ncg staked gives more bonuses.

Get involved in the community

If you can bring valuable contributions, you can get NCG rewards for it!

Some examples: join the content creator program or if you have programming skills and some ideas, you can apply for a grant.

Trade

Sell what you craft for NCG in the in-game market.

Do the onboarding activities

The onboarding website rewards daily playing and there are some additional tasks you can complete for more NCG.

Crystals

The second 9C currency

They can be gained by destroying items (aka grinding) and have multiple uses, like:

 

  • Buying missing ingredients for crafting;
  • Buying single-use stage buffs;
  • Unlocking worlds and recipes;
  • Paying a crystal fee to enter the paid arena seasons and the world boss events.

 

They are not tradable but you can buy and sell items that yield a good amount of crystals.

What items to buy?

You now have a pretty good idea of how stats work so it should be fairly easy to pick your items from the market. It can be a huge boost to buy things you can’t craft — they might be more than 2 times stronger.

 

And so many of them are just 1 NCG and already upgraded. You can use this basic database to see when the next items become available to plan your progress.

Elemental advantage

The game features a simple elemental advantage design.

 

It only applies to Swords and Chests, it goes in only one direction, and it gives a 20% damage bonus.

 

The offensive spells from the rings also benefit from the damage bonus.

 

This design applies to all the game modes, PVP included. For example, a player using a fire sword (or a fire monster) will deal 20% more damage to another player using a wind chest or against a wind monster. And it will do normal damage against the rest of the elements.

Multiple characters

The NCG coins are shared on the account but each char has its own energy and inventory. There is no direct way of transferring items but you can use the market and a friend to sell what you want to transfer to him and then buy it back on your other char (you pay two times the market fee for it).

So if you got the time there is nothing to lose in using all the 3 slots right now, you just gain more resources and potentially more coins. A common strategy is to just make one or two secondary characters with minimum (or zero) investment to just craft basic fodder and sell it on the market.