Craftheim: Lumberjack Island is a unique home-building simulation title from Azur Games, that’s available on both iOS and Android. Just like the company’s other mobile games, Craftheim: Lumberjack Island offers simple and straightforward mechanics, making it very easy for just about everyone to pick up and enjoy. As a casual game, Craftheim: Lumberjack Island ensures that players will always make progress with their adventure, regardless of how much time they can afford to spend on the game.
The game hardly has much of a tutorial session and, by design, it does not really need to provide any. You can control your lumberjack by swiping anywhere on the screen and hacking away at the trees and rocks come naturally. Resources are automatically consumed on structures needing them if you move close enough and everything else can easily be interacted with a touch of the screen. With workers and pets to help you with your objective, you can also earn resources idly.
You have total liberty on how to make progress in terms of upgrading your home and the rest of your structures as well as expanding your island in Craftheim: Lumberjack Island. However, if you are raring for expansions and progression rates unlike any other, then you have come to the right place. Our Craftheim: Lumberjack Island guide comes with tips, tricks and strategies to grow your island fast and efficiently!
1. Personal Upgrades Are The Most Important
In a gist, what happens in Craftheim: Lumberjack Island basically revolves around you, having to chop down trees, mine rocks, and gather other available resources on the island. These resources are then sold off for coins, and coins stand as the most valuable resource as you need them to purchase upgrade your home, your lumberjack, as well as build and upgrade various facilities in the island.
Although you can fully cut down a tree or empty out any resource spot in just a few seconds, you will never run out of resources to gather as trees and every other resource respawn in just a few seconds after they are gone. Upgrading your home serves as the key to unlock more areas in the island and newer areas unlocked will either have a new resource or gain you more loot of the same resources that you can gather.
Every coin you spend counts an investment as upgrades entail improvements relating to efficiency in gathering resources. In essence, the more coins you earn and invest in anything, the faster it will become for you to earn back the same amount of coins. There are numerous options as to where you can invest those coins with your house being the first as well as the numerous buildings that come along with each new area.
Although there are no right or wrong ways to invest coins, we recommend prioritizing upgrades that directly improve your lumberjack’s performance. Just in front of the arena to the right side of your home, is an upgrade booth that can increase your lumberjack’s movement speed or increase the lot you get with each swing of your weapon. Both upgrade types cost minimal coins for starters and are very much well worth it in the long run.
Just like all other upgrades, you can expect upgrade costs to go higher with each new upgrade level reached. However, with a starting cost of just a coin or a measly amount of it, you are sure to be able to afford several upgrades before costs go beyond what you can afford for the moment.
As much as personal upgrades are concerned, both will be beneficial only if you play manually. Both the speed and loot upgrades here apply to your lumberjack only and has no bearing whatsoever on idle earnings you generate.
2. More Minions Mean More Idle Income
Although gathering resources and purchasing upgrades in Craftheim: Lumberjack Island is made easy enough for you to do all on your own, it is further made easier with the minion feature that help you gather resources of every kind. One of the basic structures you can unlock within each area on the island is a minion hut, which houses little miners that tirelessly help you with the lumbering work.
Compare to the amount of resources you can gather at a time, each little mini-me in your employ will naturally perform a little less for starters. However, the amount of resources they can gather as well as their numbers can grow with upgrades you perform on their specific huts. Note that the little miners will only target specific resources in their respective areas, which is why some areas with multiple resources have different mining huts to build and upgrade.
As each minion will tirelessly gather resources independently and without fail, it naturally follows that having a new one will exponentially improve your resource yield, even to a point that will surpass even your personal outputs. At some point, having a sufficient number of minions helping you with gathering resources will make it feasible for you to stop gathering resources yourself, or at the very least be able to focus on specific resources you need more of.
Just like all available upgrade options, you can expect each higher level one to cost more than the previous one. Costs also vary from one area to the next, which means that latter areas will already have high upgrade costs to begin with. However, newer areas come with resource spots that produce more items with each acquisition, balancing out costs of upgrades with total yield over time.
Although your little minions will only continue to gather resources and never sell them for coins, having each of them around effectively contributes to your coin earnings. While you may initially be able to earn more out of your own effort at the early part of your adventure, your minions will sooner or later be your top source of income considering that they will continue to work even if you are offline and away from the game.
3. Adopt Pets As Soon As You Find Them
In addition to a practically limitless number of mini miners to employ and help your lumberjack, Craftheim: Lumberjack Island also provides you with a number of adoptable pets that further increase your capabilities.
Almost each new area you uncover, especially early in your adventure, will come with an easily noticeable creature that you can approach and adopt. Adopting a pet does not come with any costs and only has benefits. You need to only play a short ad to successfully adopt the animal and continue to receive their benefits moving forward.
Pets have different effects such as boosting your movement speed or increasing the number of items you get from chopping and mining. Even if you can get those same benefits from upgrades you purchase for your lumberjack and your minions, these ones are basically free and will stack with your other upgrades. Additionally, having a group of pets follow you around is cool to experience as well.
As adopting pets have practically no cost, it is best to search for them as soon as a new area has become available. In any case, new areas unlocked are not that huge and it will only take a few seconds to approach and adopt each one, playing the short video ad included. The sooner you get the boosts from this pets, the better your performance will be moving forward.
4. Balance Costs Around Home And Building Upgrades
The remote island home you inhabit certainly is a small one at the start of your journey but as you upgrade your home one level after another, it will continue to extend and extend as new areas are uncovered.
Of course, unlocking the entire island may take a while considering the exponential increase of costs attributable to your home. While you can choose to prioritize home upgrades over everything else to continue expanding your islands, however, it will be far from efficient in the long run.
The cost of upgrading your home is a lot more expensive than any other upgrade in Craftheim: Lumberjack Island and at some point, it will take a lot of grueling grind to be able to take it to the next level, even with the help of some minions working round the clock. Bigger gaps between the current amount of coins you have relative to the needed amount of the upgrade should determine your next investment move.
There are basically shops and minion huts on each area and while shops only need to be built, minion huts can be continuously upgraded to improve your efficiency. We recommend balancing out investments across the minion huts you unlocked to ensure that efficiency across all areas will be achieved. Balancing out basically means choosing to spend coins on the least expensive upgrade option available.
Suppose you only have 200 coins and in need of 10,000 coins to afford the next upgrade. If you have only about 5 minions helping you gather resources to sell, then it could still take a lot of time for you to be able to save up coins for the upgrade. However, if you choose to upgrade a minion hut as soon as you can afford to, given that those upgrades cost around just hundreds, then you will have more minions to gather resources, and more resources to obtain with each passing second moving forward.
In essence, the strategy we recommend in Craftheim: Lumberjack Island, works much like the ones best for idle clicker business games. Considering that your upgrade investments give you more in return each passing second, it is always best to empty out your earnings on them.
The catch, as it would seem, is that the more you spend with other upgrades, the less you will be able to save for the home upgrade, which you are targeting in the first place. However, there are opportunities for you to more efficiently have the means to afford the expensive home upgrade if you follow this strategy.
As we mentioned earlier, Craftheim: Lumberjack Island lets you earn resources idly even if you are offline and away from the game. There are no caps or limits as to how much resources your mini minions can continuously gather, ensuring that progression will not be hindered even if you rest for quite some time. With this, a relatively long period of time offline can accumulate resources that can easily be convertible to coins once you come back, potentially enabling you to afford the costs of the home upgrade.
5. Engage In The Arena
It may take you a while to notice that your island home in Craftheim: Lumberjack Island proves to be entirely peaceful at all times. There are no enemies of any kind that you must engage and you will have all the time to continue gathering resources without any interruptions at all.
At some point, you may want to indulge in a bit of action to break the monotony of grinding for materials and test your skills instead in slaying monsters of sorts with your harvesting tool. Craftheim: Lumberjack Island offers a place just to satiate your thirst for a more action-oriented adventure, separate from your island. There is an arena you can challenge at any time and you can warp to it using the arena portal just behind the upgrades vendor near your home.
The arena, despite being a separate adventure on its own, still holds gameplay mechanics that are as simple and straightforward as the tasks you usually engage in. Your objective is to survive and clear waves of monsters to proceed to the next level. Although the reward of 50 coins per level cleared seems insignificant, note that your minions will continue to gather resources for you while you are inside the arena.
Taking on groups of monsters in the arena may appear overwhelming at first considering that your mini minions will not be around to help you battle them. However, a unique and exciting feature that comes with arena levels lets you set up traps at designated areas. You will only need a handful of resources to build traps and, in case you do not have any at the time, you can gather from the arena levels as well.
Traps you can set using resources can burn enemies or pierce them with metal spikes. Regardless of the type, the idea is that enemies that pass through each trap will receive damage, killing them in some instances or at the very least weakening them to make it easier for you to eliminate them.
The monsters, while having different visual characteristics and with some having more HP than others, all have the same behavior. They will always walk towards you wherever you are and can only damage you if they get close enough. In this sense, the basic strategy is to simply place traps between their spawn point and yourself and have each of them take as much damage from the traps before reaching you.
One issue to consider here is that the auto attack that your lumberjack does is far from perfect. You may have noticed that even back in your island home, the auto attacks trigger on a certain distance from trees or rocks without necessarily making contact with its target.
In the arena, a hack that misses its target can be critical as it can lead to a monster to get close enough to hit you, most especially if there is more than one of them. As such, make it a habit to be wary of how your auto attacks work and be ready to move if your first slash misses the monster.
6. Take Advantage Of Ad Boosts
Although you can continue to earn resources in Craftheim: Lumberjack Island idly, through the help of your mini minions, it is undeniable that there is more fun and excitement involved if you partake in gathering resources yourself. This is of course in tandem with you exchanging them for coins and purchasing upgrades wherever they are needed.
Spending more time to actually take care of your island home leads to faster progression across the board and beyond the increased efficiency of gathering resources yourself as well as boosting productivity sooner following regular upgrade purchases, Craftheim: Lumberjack Island provides numerous ad boosts to help significantly increase your performance.
Video ads in mobile games may have been around already for quite some time and yet there are still players not used to their presence. Admittedly enough, though, ads that pop up randomly while you are playing can be a nuisance at times yet it is still important to understand why they exist.
While some free games can largely or entirely rely on micro transactions to sustain the continued existence of the app, some casual games are more dependent on the existence of ads for their continued availability and development.
While there are ads that pop up involuntarily in Craftheim: Lumberjack Island, these are the types that you can readily skip. The rest are self-initiated and form part of the ad boost campaign where choosing to play a 15 to 30-second video ad will earn you benefits that tremendously help progress your adventure. We already mentioned the adoptable pets that has its own set of benefits and the costume shop has skins for your lumberjack and tool that you can also unlock through playing short ads.
One of the best ad boosts in our opinion is the offline reward booster. Whenever you take a break from the game, coins will be generated and you can readily claim them as soon as you log back in. by playing a short ad in the welcome screen, you can obtain twice as many coins instantly. Another huge boost to take advantage of comes when it is time to sell your materials at shops to earn some coins.
The exchange rate for items are aptly fair enough, to be honest, but if you play an ad here, you can get twice as many coins for the trade as well. Strategically, you would want to amass as many resources as you can at one time before exchanging them so you will end up gaining a huge double boost with less ads to watch.
There is also a neat boost you can activate at the bottom of the screen. This boost will give you a super axe, which immediately eliminates a tree or rock that you hack into, and a 2x loot boost that lasts for a minute. There are plenty of power ups to find randomly as you cut down trees and break down boulders as well.
Upgrades that increase cost will occasionally present you with an option to purchase them for free at the cheap cost of playing an ad. In these instances, the value of the ad boost practically increases the higher the level of the upgrade that you purchase.
7. You Can Play Offline
Despite the numerous benefits to earn from ad boosts in Craftheim: Lumberjack Island, some players simply prefer to play without any kind of intrusion or distraction. Craftheim: Lumberjack Island allows players to completely enjoy the free game without having to see any of the ads and all you need to do is simply turn of your Wi-Fi or mobile data while playing the game.
You actually do not even need to close the program down and restart it before switching to offline mode. Note, however, that whenever you play offline, you will neither be able to enjoy any of the ad boosts nor obtain items that can only be redeemed thru playing video ads. In any case, you can always just flip the Wi-Fi or mobile data switch and wait for the ad boosts to activate if you need them.
And that sums up our tips, tricks and strategies for Craftheim: Lumberjack Island. We hope that the tips we shared will help you unlock everything there is to have on your remote island home. If you happen to uncover something more than what we have already discussed, or simply want to share your experiences with this adventure, feel free to do so through the comment section!