Seems that they let anyone be a hero these days. All it takes is a weapon and some courage, and off you go. You could even say that heroes are a dime a dozen. Hero Making Tycoon aims to destroy those puny numbers. Your gacha game has 60 heroes? We have billions.
In Hero Making Tycoon, you’ll be tasked with leading your army of potato men (I kid you not) in their bid to defeat the monsters that constantly terrorize the potato villages. To that end, you’ll need to raise an army, equip them with weapons, and send them off to fight. That’s it. What did you expect? They’re potatoes. If, however, you can overlook the improbability of creating a potato army, you can get Hero Making Tycoon on the Google Play Store or the App Store.
Hero Making Tycoon is an idle game, so it’s very easy to pick up and play. If, however, you’d like a quick breakdown of the game’s mechanics or want to go through the checklist of how to make your potatoes last just a bit longer to get that boss kill, you’re in the right place.
In this beginner’s guide to Hero Making Tycoon, we’ll be going over:
- The gameplay basics – raising your army of potatoes, their different classes, the basic structures, fighting monsters, their inevitable death, and so on.
- Intermediate strengthening mechanics, such as rolling in the gacha, managers, pets, research, and so on.
- Resource management. Knowing how to get each resource in Hero Making Tycoon will greatly streamline your factory.
Gameplay Basics
The core gameplay loop of Hero Making Tycoon is simple: potato grows, potato gets weapons, potato fights until it dies. But seeing as this is a beginner’s guide, let’s go over the basics – when things get bad, you can always fall back on your foundations.
Quick Tips:
- Potatoes are grown in your village. You can upgrade your village to reduce the growth timer of potatoes and allow more to be grown simultaneously.
- You can also buy more village plots in certain stages. The more upgraded village plots you have, the steadier your stream of heroes will be.
- When potatoes are fully grown, they’ll head towards a free weapons factory to arm themselves.
- The more weapon factories you have available, the faster you’ll be able to raise an army.
- Each factory creates a specific class of hero.
- If all weapons factories are full when a potato goes there, they’ll leave and vanish. Go lighter on the village upgrades or try and increase the speed of your factories’ processing.
- Once a potato is armed, it will step forward to fight monsters until it dies – whether that’s because it’s out of health or it timed out. Your task is to provide streamlined production so that you always have warriors ready to
diefight for you. - Your objective is to fight monsters in each stage until you can fight the boss of that stage. Defeating a boss gives you access to a new stage; clearing all the stages in one area grants access to the next area.
The Village
The village is where you grow your potatoes. The life of a potato must be pretty harsh – they grow for around 5 seconds, get pulled out of the ground, are given a weapon, and are sent to die. But that’s not our problem.
The village can be upgraded to reduce the growth time of each potato. Faster potatoes mean you’ll be able to replenish your frontlines sooner. More importantly, you can buy additional channels via village upgrades – each extra channel means that one more potato can grow at the same time. A good balance of both speed and channels is necessary to maintain the offensive.
Finally, you can buy more village plots depending on the level you’re on. A secondary village plot means twice the potatoes, so be sure to buy the land as soon as you can!
Weapon Factories
Your potatoes are born warriors. As soon as they emerge from the ground, they’ll make their way to your various weapon factories to get their equipment.
Initially, you’ll only have the Warrior factory up and running. Your potatoes will run here to grab swords before running into the wild blue yonder. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock more weapon factories for Archers, Mages, Assassins, and Gunners. Unlocking these new factories is very important as each factory can only accommodate a certain number of potatoes at once; if there are too many potatoes waiting in line, any new potatoes will wander away!
If this happens, this means that your input is much too fast for the factories’ output. Ease up on upgrading your villages and try to invest in higher processing speed for weapon factories. We’ll go over how to do that later.
To Battle!
Heroes fresh out of the weapon factory will immediately charge forward to join their comrades on the battlefield.
Combat is how you make most of your gold in Hero Making Tycoon. Each enemy felled by your army earns you some gold and contributes to your AFK gains. Potatoes will fight until they drop, whether that’s because they run out of health or time – most potatoes only last 30 seconds before they drop dead.
Your objective in Hero Making Tycoon is not only to make a profitable hero factory but also to push toward the red dragon’s lair. To that end, you’ll need to defeat every monster in a stage to challenge the level’s boss.
Each level’s boss is a formidable foe with health exponentially higher than its minions. You also only have 20 seconds to defeat a boss, so be sure to have your heroes fully upgraded before challenging these enemies. Fortunately, losing a boss battle isn’t the end as you can always elect to re-challenge the boss by tapping the appropriate button.
After you’ve cleared all an area’s stages, the next area becomes available to you. Always move up whenever you can as later areas have more weapon factory slots, village plots, and profit!
Stronger Spuds
Because your heroes are so expendable, there’s only one stat you need to concern yourself with: attack power. You’ll need to be on the fry-cutting edge of things to ensure that your potatoes have the necessary strength to peel through billions, trillions, or even decillions of HP. But while these numbers are admittedly large, so too are the ways to get stronger. Here’s a quick rundown on how to strengthen your heroes.
Quick Tips:
- The most basic way to strengthen potatoes is by upgrading their factory. Each factory has both attack power and critical hit rate bonuses for its respective class.
- You can equip items to heroes. The equipment gacha is the fastest way to get equipment.
- It’s important to keep rolling in the equipment gacha to raise your gacha level. Higher gacha levels unlock rarer item drops from the gacha pool.
- Duplicates of a piece of equipment can be fused to increase that item’s level. Note that high rarity tends to beat levels.
- Equipment that isn’t being used will continue to give a passive attack buff to heroes of its class. Be sure to upgrade even your common items as every little bit helps!
- Skills are powerful passive abilities that can vastly improve your combat performance.
- Like gear, skills can be pulled from a gacha. Fuse identical skills to level them up.
- Pets provide a significant power boost due to their stats and skills.
- There are 3 different egg types in the stable. Keep tabs on your free eggs and always hatch them.
- Identical pets can be fused for a chance to get a pet of a higher tier. This has a horrible success rate, but you will always keep the higher-level pet you attempted to fuse.
- Higher-tier pets have exponentially better stats and skills.
- Eggs and failed fusions drop experience potions, which can be used to strengthen pets.
- All pets in the top slots will be deployed in battle. You can unlock more slots by clearing levels and using Pet Keys, which you can get from some missions.
- If a pet falls in battle, it will respawn from the pet stable after a while.
- The research lab unlocks passive boosts for all your heroes. Always be researching something!
- Managers can be assigned to a factory. This provides that factory with increased performance, such as a higher attack bonus for heroes or faster operations.
- Managers can be leveled up using batteries. Level caps can be broken by fusing duplicates.
- You can unlock new types of potatoes by playing the game and completing certain tasks. The higher a potato’s rarity, the higher its base attack.
- Any potatoes you’ve unlocked have a random chance to be spawned instead of a basic potato man.
- You can upgrade potato types by using Soul Stones. This not only improves that potato’s attack power but also provides a passive buff to all potato types.
- There are three powerful ad buffs in the game – increased income, increased attack power, and faster factory processing. While watching an ad to activate them can be annoying, they’re incredibly potent pushing tools; if you’re stuck, pop these buffs and watch the numbers fly.
- The more you activate ad buffs, the more powerful they become.
- Watching ads also provides a permanent passive buff to all your potatoes, depending on how many ads you’ve watched.
Factory Boosts
The most straightforward way to make your heroes stronger is by upgrading your factories. Each factory has upgrades for both attack power and critical hit rate for its respective hero class.
Note that these upgrades are exclusive, meaning that you need to upgrade attack and crit rate individually per factory. Because upgrading via this method gets expensive very quickly, it may be wise to focus on a few factories at once, especially in conjunction with the equipment system.
Equipment
Here’s where the game gets complicated. Each class of hero has equipment slots – the first of which is a weapon. By default, your heroes are equipped with the most basic of equipment, but you can change that via the game’s gacha system.
You can pull for weapons via the game’s gacha system either by watching ads or paying in gems. As a new player, you’ll likely have a ton of gems lying around just from doing your beginner missions, so go ahead and roll for some weapons.
Continuously rolling for weapons is also important as it raises the level of your gacha. Each time you pull, your gacha level increases; at higher levels, it unlocks drops for higher-rarity items. Your gacha level is indicated below each gacha banner in the shop.
Note that gacha levels are exclusive to their own gacha – your equipment gacha level is different from your skill gacha level!
Equipment can also be upgraded by fusing it with duplicates of itself. Upgrading equipment increases its level, and consequently, its stats.
Do note that levels aren’t a substitute for rarity – an unleveled high-rarity piece of equipment will very likely have stats that dwarf upgraded common gear!
Finally, note that stashed equipment will continue to give a passive attack buff to heroes of its respective class. Thus, while you won’t be equipping your low-rarity swords, bows, and staves for stages, there’s still a lot of merit in keeping them upgraded and topped up.
Skills
Skills are powerful passive abilities that can vastly improve your combat performance. Nothing like a 1 billion damage lightning bolt to whittle down that boss, eh?
Like equipment, you’ll need to pull for skills in its dedicated gacha. Also just like equipment, you’ll need to pull duplicates of skills to level them up. They’re well worth the effort and cost though, so try to keep your skill slots filled. You unlock more skill slots as you clear more stages.
Unfortunately, the skill gacha is different from the equipment gacha, so you’ll need to build up a separate pool of skill gacha experience.
Pets
Pets are powerful allies that will help your potato heroes in battle. They are unlocked after you make some progress through the game. Once you’ve unlocked pets, you can access their stable to the left of the battlefield.
At the stable, you can manage your current pets, fuse the ones you have, and improve your roster.
Summoning pets is easy – just tap on one of the three eggs at the bottom of the screen. Each of these eggs costs a different currency: the first one is free (which technically costs time), the second costs 200 gems to open, while the third costs a massive 2000 gems. As the free eggs constantly regenerate over time, it’s wise to keep tabs on your stable and hatch eggs whenever the opportunity arises.
Each egg will either give you a new pet or some experience potions. But with only 10 available slots, you’ll need to make room for more hatching. To make space, you need to fuse your pets. To do that, drag two identical pets on top of one another. I should warn you – the chance of a successful fusion is abysmally low, but once in a while you’ll get lucky…
If the fusion is successful, you’ll evolve your pet. Evolved pets are much, much more powerful than the previous tier due to their higher stats and better skills. However, there are multiple tiers of evolution, and due to the horrendous fusion success rates, you’ll burn through a ton of eggs before getting a legendary or god-given pet (if you even get it at all). Still, there’s not much more that can be done with pets, so fuse them whenever you’ve got eggs to burn. Note that even if a fusion fails, you’ll keep the pet with the higher level among the two – so go ahead and fuse your active pets.
Eggs and failed fusions will yield some experience potions. These can be fed to your existing pets to boost their level, and thus their strength. You’re going to have a lot of these lying around, so don’t be stingy with them.
Finally, you can assign which pets you want to bring into battle via your pet menu. Drag the pets you want to the top of the screen. You can have as many active pets as you have slots, and you get more slots by leveling up and using Pet Keys (which come from missions, among other things). Once that’s set up, your pets will spawn to join your potatoes in battle, and if they fall, they’ll respawn after a short amount of time!
Research
As you play, you’ll eventually unlock the research lab.
At the research lab, you can develop several passive buffs for your heroes. Attack power, crit rate, and so on – if you can think of it, the lab’s probably got it. Remember: never leave your lab idle!
The lab requires Amethyst to conduct research. We’ll tackle resource management in the next section.
Managers
What’s a capitalist factory without a manager?
Managers are assistants that you can assign to each of your weapon factories. While they’re there, managers will boost the efficiency of that factory by not only increasing the attack power of manufactured heroes but also via passive skills such as faster operation!
Like most things, you’ll need to strengthen your managers. To unlock new skills and raise the base attack bonus of your managers, you’ll need batteries, which you get from the Tower Challenge (more on that in the next section). However, to break a manager’s level cap, you need to fuse duplicates of that manager. Fortunately, getting more managers is easy: head to the shop and look for the Manager Card section. You get one free chest every so often and can open 5 more via ads, or you can buy more advanced chests (and thus get way better managers) by spending gems. Your call.
New Potatoes
Your basic potato men will serve you well, but they could be better. That’s where new heroes come in.
Hero Making Tycoon offers several heroes for you to choose from aside from the default potato man. When a new hero is unlocked, there’s a chance it will spawn instead of a basic potato when the game plants new heroes for you. Each hero has a different base attack power (with rarer heroes having exponentially more than lower-rarity ones) so I strongly suggest trying to nab an SS or SSS-tier hero. On a side note, you can earn Princess from the beginner quests, so that’s a good start.
Much like your equipment and skills, your heroes can be fused to improve their base attack bonus. As you can’t pull duplicates of heroes, you’ll need to strengthen them via Soul Stones instead – those rainbow-colored gems that you’ve hopefully been collecting. Note that upgrading a certain potato type doesn’t just affect it – each upgrade also contributes a small buff toward all potatoes!
Temporary Buffs and Ads
Finally, you can strengthen your heroes by watching ads. Hey, the devs have to earn money somehow.
There are three buff ads you can watch. “Soaring Earnings” doubles your gold income, “Attack Skyrocketing” doubles your attack, and “Factory Acceleration” boosts how quickly your weapon factories work. Each of these buffs can be activated by watching an ad. These buffs are incredibly potent; if you find yourself against a wall, activate all these buffs and watch your potatoes sweep stages like nothing.
The more times you watch an ad for a specific buff, the stronger that buff becomes. On top of that, your heroes also receive permanent bonuses depending on how many ads you’ve watched in total. Go for it!
Securing Resources
Now that you know how to strengthen your potato army, the question remains: where exactly do you get the resources you need to perform all these processes? And while we’ve already covered some of the basics, such as earning gold, you may want a closer look at how to earn certain materials.
Quick Tips:
- You can refer to the table below if you’re just looking for where to get certain items.
- The game accumulates AFK gains for you. The further you are in the game, the more AFK gains you gather. Bear in mind that by default, the game can only gather 2 hours’ worth of AFK gains.
- Explore other game modes to get resources, such as trials and expeditions.
- Note that you need to manually claim your batteries from the Tower Challenge. They will not appear in your AFK gains.
- Use the game’s many free resource generators, such as tarot, spin the wheel, the loot goblin, and the witch’s house.
The Cheat Sheet
If you’ve already got a solid understanding of the many strengthening methods and just need to know where to get the resources, you can refer to this table:
| Resource | What is it for? | Where do I get more of it? |
| Gold | Constructing and upgrading facilities. | Killing monsters, AFK gains, Trials, Treasure Hunt, random events, and more. |
| Gems | Buying stuff from the cash shop – equipment, managers, etc. | Completing missions (top right of the screen), login prize, daily quests, achievements, Trials, Treasure Hunt. Check the top panel of the screen – any time there’s a notification bubble, there are probably gems up for grabs. |
| Amethysts | Pays for research. | AFK gains, Treasure Hunt. |
| Pet Keys | Allows more pets to aid in battle. | Missions, daily quests. |
| Equipment | Improves hero damage significantly. | Rolling in the equipment gacha, Trials, Treasure Hunt, AFK gains. Rarer equipment is pretty much confined to the gacha. |
| Skills/Skill Shards | Lets you assign new passive skills and levels up existing skills. | Rolling in the skill gacha. |
| Batteries | Leveling up managers. | Tower Challenge. |
| Soul Shards | Improving base stats of heroes. | Trial, Treasure Hunt. |
| Food/Iron | Improves Treasure Hunt performance. | Treasure Hunt. |
AFK Gains
Hero Making Tycoon does have AFK gains. Even while the game is closed, your heroes will fight monsters and earn gold, amethysts, and equipment. The further along you are, the higher your AFK gain rate – so always push as high as you can when you do play the game.
However, note that you can only have up to 2 hours worth of AFK gains unless you buy a specific package from the shop. Stingy, I know.
Trials, Expeditions, Challenges
Hero Making Tycoon also has different modes for gathering tons of resources quickly, and utilizing these will be key in earning enough materials to keep your army up and running.
Trials are special battlefields where you start with a pre-deployed army of every possible hero class you can create, as well as your pets and skills. Just like in a boss fight, your task is to defeat your foes before the timer runs out. Your prize for all this varies, depending on the type of trial you entered. Coins, Soul Stones, gems, equipment, and more are up for grabs, so be sure to visit this section daily!
Entry to trials is limited by tickets. You get 2 tickets for each trial type free every day, and you can watch 2 ads for 2 more attempts.
Expeditions
There’s a ton of resources just waiting to be plucked from expeditions. Expeditions can take various forms, but as a new player, you’ll most likely just be dealing with the Treasure Hunt and the Tower Challenge.
The Treasure Hunt is a sort of minigame. Every 3 hours, resource crates will spawn for every player. You then have to assign a hero to pull those resource crates back to your base. Watch out though – other players can invade your stash and make away with your loot. On the other hand, you can do the same to them!
The speed at which a hero drags the crate back to your base is determined by its strength, which can be improved by food – which you also get from the Treasure Hunt. To upgrade strength, tap on the “Hero” button on the lower right while in your treasure cave.
Strength can also be used to contest a crate. If another player’s potato is pulling a crate, you can assign your own potato to that crate to pull it the other way. This leads to a contest of strength between the two – with the stronger potato winning out. Do note that when strength is equal, this tends to favor the defender.
You can also assign more heroes at once to either help pull a single crate or to pull separate crates in different caves. The number of potatoes pulling at once is determined by your cap, which can be increased by tapping the “Station” button in your cave then spending iron, which coincidentally also comes from Treasure Hunts. Note that each potato can only exist once despite the cap – even if you have a cap of 3, you can only deploy the basic potato man to one task at a time. To help you with that, you can get a temporary (weak) helper for 20 minutes by watching an ad.
You can also refresh your cave multiple times per day – the first 3 refreshes can be done for “free” by watching ads, while the rest require gems. Watch out though: people are extremely vigilant here. As soon as you refresh, get ready to fight for your goods!
The Tower Challenge is simpler – it’s a series of one-off battles that net you a bunch of resources for clearing them. More importantly, this is where batteries for upgrading your managers come from. The higher you are in the tower, the more batteries you get over time. Note that these batteries must be claimed from the tower screen – they will not show up in your AFK gains. Batteries will also accumulate for up to 2 hours, after which any batteries just disappear into the void.
Random Events
Finally, there are also events that you can play to get some more resources:
- Pay attention to the bottom right of your first village as sometimes a goblin will spawn there. Rapidly tap the goblin to shake it down for gold!
- A house will occasionally pop up in the same area as the goblin. Tap on it then select which chest you’d like to receive. The game seems rigged to always give you the least valuable chest, though you can watch an ad to claim all the prizes.
- There are a bunch of activities in the right-hand panel, such as the card and the wheel. These are minigames that you can play for prizes, most notably gold and gems. Ads are almost always tied to these (such as rerolling the wheel or restarting your tarot run) but remember: ads increase your hero power!
The Up-And-Coming Starch
The road to lasting peace is long, but not impossible. If a potato can overcome fearsome monsters and diabolical foes with some equipment, some preparation, and some knowledge, so can you.
Ands this ends our guide for Hero Making Tycoon, and I hope I was able to help you set a course for your future adventures and streamline your early game growth. If you’d like to share any tips or tricks of your own or have any suggestions on how to improve this guide, feel free to drop us a line in the comment box!