As the Fallen ravage the land of Aethric, people find themselves suffering under not just the destruction, but its ancillary effects. Even for those away from death and murder find themselves scraping by with their lives. After all, when everyone is out fighting, nobody is there to listen to the local bard tell their stories, and none will buy wares from a merchant unless their products have anything to do with the act of fighting.
As a new member of the Order of the Unfelled, you start with the humble task of killing 5 Rats and eventually go around the land of Aethric helping people with their troubles and ridding the world of monsters, bandits, and the Fallen. And perhaps, you can carve out a life for yourself and others as you start a town.
Or you could ignore the Order’s orders completely, go on a gigantic bloodthirsty monster-murder spree, or help the people on your own without the Order’s say-so, and explore the world your way. At least, after they introduce you to a man named Gofannon so you can build your town! Just remember, the Order of the Unfallen does pay you if you do their work, and you’ll need all the money you can get to pay for and enable your violent tendencies. Such is life in the land of Aethric!
Hero of Aethric is a very old-fashioned sandbox turn-based RPG, with a fairly minimal but inoffensive story so as not to get in the way of your exploration and freedom. It is very, very easy to get lost in the land of Aethric, but that’s also one of its best qualities: It is a game of exploration which rewards you for taking risks, exploring obscure corners of the map, and picking fights even with those you probably should not pick a fight with, if only so you learn more about how to kill them, and what you get for killing them.
The main quest is there to point you in the right direction, but even then it tends to omit small yet important details like where to get the materials you need to finish the aforementioned quest! It is all to make the player see the world, and it encourages players to do so by making it so the map opens up based on your character level instead of your story progression.
You can be rolling around in 5 or even 6-star gear and fighting bosses in dangerous midgame zones by the time you remember to finish your 2-star story quest for babies if you grind hard enough! We hope this guide points you in the right direction too, so here we go!
GENERAL TIPS
Hero of Aethric’s nature enables a healthy amount of confusion and exploration. Finding out new things about the world is part of the game’s charm, though it’s easy to get lost since the game expects you to figure out where to get stuff yourself even during story quests. Here are some tips to lessen the confusion.
Explore!
You are normally given quests via the daily quests and the current story NPC you’re talking to. In certain places on the map though, you might notice some random NPCs with a (!) icon on their head. Those are either quest objectives for an existing quest in which case you stick a sword in their eye, or they’re an NPC who will pay you to do work for them!
They’re often found either around the world map, spawn randomly in towns, or can be found in Points of Interest (named places that are not towns or pathways) on the world map. They often give unique gear when you do their quests, a helpful boost on your way to the main quest.
Check Your Map For Suspicious Terrain Features
While Waygates are only overtly marked on the map once you find them, they ARE drawn on the map since they are still terrain features: If you see any weird small squares on the World Map, it is most likely a Waygate.
In fact, you would do well to inspect any suspicious-looking structures in the game: Anything like docks in the middle of nowhere next to an ominous purposeless obelisk (The entrance to the Secret island of Onogoro, which is a town with 3 Trader buildings!), various Coliseum-looking structures which signify PVP arenas, everything on the World map that might catch your eye might be there for a reason. And if not, at least it’s pretty set dressing.
Marking NPCs With Tasty Tavern Gossip
So you went exploring and found those NPCs giving you quests. You completed said quests, but now you don’t remember where they are, or they left when you came back to their haunt. The town of Vinland has you covered.
More specifically, the Rose’s Rest inn which is located in the southwest part of town. It has three tabs: The basic Jobs tab which is much like the one from the first town’s bulletin board, a useful Inn tab which recovers your HP and Mana, and the Tavern tab, where you can pay a paltry sum of 1000 gold to get gossip, which in this game means quest NPC locations.
Not only will they tell you where they are, but they will also mark your compass, which puts an arrow on your screen telling you where the NPCs were last seen by the tavern keeper, which the writer assumes to be Rose.
This makes it much easier to get quest rewards once you finish their tasks. Note that you won’t get all the information for all the NPCs at once and that 1000 gold is good for 3 NPCs at a time. Later on, you might find other towns with their own inns able to do the same thing.
Upgrade Multiple Pieces Of Gear When Possible
The Blacksmith can take a whole real-life hour to upgrade gear to level 2, and it only takes longer the more you upgrade that piece of gear. That being said, the Blacksmith can upgrade multiple pieces of gear at once, and none of the equipment gets stuck in a queue, with all their timers ticking down at the same time. This means it is very time efficient to upgrade several pieces of gear at once.
Of course, it may help to keep a spare set around, and if you lack that you may prefer to upgrade one piece at a time if you plan to play while upgrading. That being said, if you plan to log off, then upgrading many items at once is a good plan so you wake up to freshly hammered gear.
The Resume Journey Button is Your Best Friend, And So Is The Map
Are you frustrated by your screen only scrolling a certain distance from your character? Do you need to walk a very long distance but don’t want to tap the screen repeatedly? If so, look at the bottom right of your screen: There’s a Map button there, and you can use it to order your character to walk across any part of the map not covered or blocked off by the black fog of evil.
The best part? Your character stops for nothing, and if you tap on enemies while you walk, you can still fight them and your character will automatically resume walking to the target location once you kill the enemy. And if you accidentally tap on your screen and your character gets distracted because of it? A helpful little “Resume Journey” button pops out on the left side of your screen, which tells your character to go back to the last ordered travel location you poked on your map.
THE GRIND
In most old-fashioned RPGs, level grinding is a fact of life. One is always looking for more efficient ways to make cash, and Hero of Aethric is no different in this regard. Here are some tips related to spending and getting money and material in preparation for combat.
Go Fishing
Eventually, you’ll find a little fishing hut in the water past Loton town. There, they sell fishing lines, starting with the low-tier Piece of String. Fishing is a good way to find rare objects such as Adornment gems and equipment, and even finding Rubbish is useful since Rubbish drops Stone when you kill it, important for building structures in Origin Town.
Yes, even floating debris tries to kill you in this game, albeit not very effectively. You don’t need to time your shots with your fishing line: Just tap twice and wait for the fish to come to the fishing line. The higher the power, the further the line goes. At worst, you may need to rethrow the line if the fish swims in a bad pattern, though you’ll need to do it fast if you notice.
Herbalism and Potion Mixing
Once you arrive in Avalon Town, you’ll notice it has quite a few more buildings compared to most other towns you’ve seen before in one to three-star zones. One such building is the Herbalist’s shop.
The Herbalist allows you to mix potions and materials together to make newer potions. One thing you ought to mass produce by this time, especially if you’re very reliant on magic spells and mana-chugging abilities, are Large Elixirs.
Just like buying Large Potions vs Small Potions, crafting Large Elixirs is inefficient in sheer HP and Mana recovery, since you need two Large HP Potions and two Large Mana Potions to craft a single Elixir, a total worth 500 HP and Mana as opposed to the 250 of each a Large Elixir gives you.
Remember though that just like the switch from Small Potions to Large Potions, the tradeoff is the ability to get more per turn: Using Elixirs means you don’t have to spend two whole turns recovering HP then Mana to attack, just chug one Elixir and fry them!
Do Your Dailies
Every day, you will get a set of quests based on your current level, which offers hefty rewards. Always take time to finish them so you can take advantage of the Gold and especially the Orns reward.
Related to the next tip, each quest also has a star level, which tells you where to look for the enemies it wants you to violently delete from existence. You can check the star level of a location by opening your map and simply tapping on any part of the ground.
Match Quest Star Levels with Area Star Levels (And When in Doubt, Kill Kill Kill!)
So you finally got to the quest where you have to kill the Goblin Lord. You scour the entire map available to you, seeing enemies far above your level and multiple bosses roaming the lands, but find no sign of any Goblin Lord. You even walk all the way to the Goblin Fortress only to realize it’s a high-level dungeon far too big for your tiny little magic stick to fight! You didn’t have to walk all that far.
Quests have a star level, and so do areas on the map. As an example, the Goblin Lord fight is a no-star quest, so the boss is meant to spawn in and around the starter area of Loton Woods. So where the heck is he? “All” you have to do is beat up all the local bosses until the Goblin Lord appears because they’re clogging up the area’s boss spawn limit.
This goes for any boss or monster you’re hunting for with your quests: Check the star level of the quest, then look in the Map for an area with the same star level. Once you get there, kill everything in sight until your target spawns!
Mug Your Own Class
You’re not the only one with character classes. The easiest way to get equipment in the game is to look for enemies that would make sense to carry them: Goblins, bandits, and people who look like they want your money and kneecaps are probably carrying Rogue equipment. Knights, barbarians, and anything that looks like they want to bury an axe in your skull often carries Warrior gear. Sorcerers, magicians, and any nerd that carries a staff and looks like they want to rearrange your laws of physics are likely carrying Mage equipment.
Of course, monsters drop items too especially later on, and while they can sometimes drop equipment for all classes, it’s harder to know which monster drops what, while mugging your own character class is still a very obvious solution to any equipment shortfall and much more reliable. This even works for PVP, as players in the Arena also have drops based on their class, but they’ll never drop whatever it is they’re actually wearing.
Arenas Are A Quick EXP Farm
One of the fastest ways to gain EXP is to go through Arenas, which can be found around the map and are the closest thing the game has to PVP. In the Arena, you will fight player-made characters under AI control. Players give as much EXP as bosses, and you have an advantage as long as you go up against a foe of equal level: Unlike the AI-controlled enemy player character, you get full control of your own character and are (hopefully!) less prone to stupid mistakes like wasting turns buffing yourself with the same buff repeatedly without attacking.
Arena enemies also drop equipment, though not what the player is actually carrying. Just remember, you can’t use potions here, though you get a free HP and Mana refill at the start of every PVP fight.
Gauntlet Keys Drop from 3 Star or Stronger Bosses
Eventually, you get a story quest that involves going into a Dungeon or Gauntlet and beating it. The quest giver only gives you a single key to unlock the gauntlet. Then you die, and now you have no key and are stuck!
How do you get more keys you ask? Turns out, the quest giver is in a pretty poor spot to give such a quest since he lives in a 2-star zone south of the starting area. Those keys drop from certain bosses of 3 stars and above. In particular, the first ones to look for are the large, red Demon Knights in Lythryn Woods.
The game tells you none of this, so we’re telling you now: Go north to find 3-star bosses and beat them to death so you get more keys. Not only will you get more attempts to finish the quest, but beating those bosses is actually easier than beating those gauntlets, and killing those bosses gives you a chunky amount of EXP. Hopefully, in your quest to find more keys, you get enough power to kill those gauntlets too.
The Athantian Money And Minigames Ritual: Diluted Mnemonics
Once you make it to the town of Athantia, walk all the way to the southeastern side of that town. There will be a shrine there you can visit, the Athantia Temple. Commence the ritual, and you will get an item called Diluted Mnemonics which enables you to go on a quest for Shattered Memories once used. These quests will spawn 5 Memories around a fairly wide area (It can span across a whole star level’s worth of space, with zero regards for obstacles and pathways!) and you have to find them.
They will appear as weird structures that don’t seem to belong in the area, usually with bright ghostly blue glows incorporated in their design. If you tap them, you will be brought to a minigame which can be anything from mining rocks by tapping on the screen like a madman, all the way to stuff like adjusting magical wavelengths or ciphers to get the reward, or even battles.
The reward for even a single Memory can hit several thousands of Orn and hundreds of thousands of Gold and EXP, and the last Memory gets you an Amity, a double-edged sword of a bonus you can equip in a dedicated Amity slot. The ritual has a 24-hour cooldown, so do it once a day and you should have no problem racking up gold, barring some of the higher-tier purchases for both gear and Origin Town.
Night And Day
If you look at the upper right corner of your screen, you’ll notice a picture of the sky. You might have also noticed that sometimes, it would rain or go dark as you walk. The game has a night and day cycle, along with a weather cycle. This isn’t just cosmetic: Certain monsters only appear at certain times of day, with the obvious candidates being Undead enemies, Vampires, and anything else of the sort appearing at night.
Blacksmith Upgrade Quests? Upgrade Cheap Gear For Easy Gains
Sometimes, you will get quests that require you to upgrade a certain amount of equipment as an objective. You could grind and upgrade your gear which takes a while… Or you could keep a few pieces of low-tier, cheap-to-upgrade equipment and simply hammer those for the sake of finishing the quest.
Usually, the cost of upgrading cheap, low-tier gear is far outweighed by the reward, especially if you have many of those quests active at once since they will all get updated at the same time. If you have something like the Deadwood Staff which is incredibly cheap to upgrade considering its tier (A 5-star staff that only requires extremely common bargain bin Wood!), all the better for you if you happen to be using it at the moment!
Auto-Dismantle
You can set your game to auto-dismantle worthless drops from the Options menu. This is useful so you can grind for Blacksmith materials without having to dismantle useless gear yourself, thus saving tons of time. Make sure to update this every time you unlock a new tier. You have the option to dismantle items based on star level and quality
COMBAT TIPS
Hero of Aethric’s classic RPG turn-based combat system is basic and ancient, but it’s a time-tested formula that, mixed with good game balance, allows for a good amount of strategic planning. Do you buff yourself and debuff the enemy in preparation for a long battle? Do you immediately zap them with a powerful magic spell before they do the same to you because both of you have wimpy HP and overwhelming firepower?
Do you set up a Ward so you don’t get nuked in the first turn? Do you know both your own and your foe’s elemental weaknesses? Do you fight like our writer, stacking Sleep, Lightning-based paralysis, blinding attacks, and stuns while praying frantically that the enemy is rendered unable to fight several turns in a row? All these questions and more will run through your head as you fight ever stronger enemies.
Potion Stockpile
Eventually, you’ll start making enough gold from fights that it becomes fairly easy to grind for basic items, with your main monetary worry being the improvement of Origin Town. This means you have no excuse to run out of potions! Always spend money to buy some Healing Potions, and if you’re a mage of any sort, Mana Potions too.
And don’t hesitate to buy the bigger, more expensive potions. While the bigger potions are less efficient in the HP-per-gold department, remember that you’re chugging all that HP or Mana in a single turn: You usually don’t want to spend two turns healing 200 HP with small potions when you can do 250 HP in one turn with a bigger potion, then use the second turn to stab the enemy in the face. Even if it does cost 5 times as much gold per unit of HP.
You Have Two Hands!
Did you know you can dual-wield normal weapons, not just dedicated off-hand weapons? Any weapon marked as Dual Wield can be dual-wielded, and equipping a weapon in your off-hand usually replaces the Guard command with whatever command that weapon gives you.
Daggers let you parry, Shields give you an HP shield that reduces damage taken by a percentage, and at least for our magic-slinging writer, carrying two staves gives them Dual Blast, essentially a replacement for the basic attack that uses the Magic stat instead of the Attack stat to deal damage, without spending a drop of mana.
It also lets you bonk the enemy twice with the normal attack if you carry an off-hand weapon of any sort. Finally, you get the full stat benefit of equipping your second weapon: Two staves will make magic spells hit much, much harder than just one, and physical attacks will also hit harder with an extra murder stick in your other hand. You also get a lot more options for your second weapon later on once you unlock more advanced hybrid classes like the Spellsword, which can seriously affect how you build your character.
Debuff Shenanigans
Debuffs, learn to love them! You can do a lot of damage to the enemy by using debuffs, especially those that prevent the enemy from fighting back effectively such as Stun, Paralysis, and Blindness. Mage bosses especially love doing this to you. That being said, if you do find yourself suffering from Stun or other such action-inhibiting debuffs, you still have the option of using defensive moves rather than trying to attack, failing, and leaving yourself open.
Most such debuffs only stop you from using spells or offensive moves, so if you have a Shield, you can put it up to negate the damage while waiting for the stun to wear off, or chug your small potions. Or try to attack anyway, since sometimes the disables don’t take effect! Later on, you also get spells and abilities that dispel certain debuffs, which can be a lifesaver against the more annoyingly sorcerous bosses. If it’s unclear what a newly discovered debuff does, you can look it up in your Codex’ Status tab.
Enemy Elemental Weaknesses
Not all enemies have elemental weaknesses, but when they do, they get hit twice as hard by them. If you see an enemy that may have a very obvious weakness (Like say, undead anything being weak to holy attacks, sea creatures being weak against lightning, ice critters melting at the sight of fire, etc.) give it a test and see what happens.
Matching elemental weaknesses of monsters can drastically shorten what would otherwise be a grueling battle, so if you’re hunting for certain foes, equip yourself accordingly with the right skill and spell loadouts. That being said…
Always Have A Non-Elemental Attack
We don’t mean Physical attacks either, since there are some enemies immune to that. We mean attacks that don’t have an element designation at all, such as the Bolt and Drain spell series. Some enemies have immunity to all sorts of spells or physical blows (Any ghost type enemy is darn near immune to everything except Holy magic, and even then it can still miss!), and these can be a useful fallback in case you don’t know or have anything the enemy might be weak against.
No-element attacks also find a lot of use in late-game PVP according to players, since a lot of them stack up on elemental immunity to avoid getting fried, frozen, or fritzed by Mage-type classes and their high magical power!
GETTING STRONGER
While combat tactics are good and all, you won’t get far if you don’t have the brute muscle, quick dexterity, or magical firepower to execute those tactics effectively. There are many ways to get stronger in Hero of Aethric, just like any good old RPG that knows what it’s doing.
Leveling Up
The simplest way to get stronger is to level up by completing quests and killing everything in sight. As you level up, your stats improve, and you gain access to Specializations and higher star level Classes, which we will discuss later. Bosses give out the most EXP, but the PVP Arena is the fastest way to level up since players give out a lot of EXP when defeated and you can find them all in one place, rather than having to hunt for bosses.
That being said, you usually need to hunt for bosses anyway to gain Arena access, since bosses of any sort drop Arena Tokens. This gives you the incentive to bully even weak, low-level bosses, so you can have Arena access and faster level grinding.
The Blacksmith
The Blacksmith is the best reason you have to dismantle old, off-class, or extra gear. The Blacksmith consumes materials and money to upgrade your equipment, though they take a whole hour to do so even for a level one upgrade and it only gets longer the more you upgrade something. This becomes more important a bit later in the game once progress slows down a bit since you will likely find a weapon to stick to which would need upgrading a few times anyway.
Especially if you get one with a high-quality modifier like Legendary or Ornate. That being said, don’t hesitate to upgrade lower star weapons either: They’re usually cheap to upgrade compared to the better stuff, so they might make a good budget option if you get lucky and one drops with a good quality modifier, or if the item drop fairy has been rather unkind and you’re not getting any fancy new gear for that one slot of yours that is sorely under-equipped. The best part of all this? You can rename upgraded gear for free!
The Alchemist
Should you find yourself in the elven town of Lythryn, you might notice on your map a structure in a secluded part north. That’s the local Elven Alchemist, and that’s where you go after you’ve powered up your gear as far as the Blacksmith can take it.
Not only can they power up items that are either already leveled up or have Quality Modifiers, but they can also Masterforge Level 10 items. Enchantment allows you to imbue an element to a weapon with a quality modifier or a level higher than 1, using their respective elemental stones.
Jewels and Adornment
Later on, you’ll notice circles appear on your weapons when you upgrade them, starting with 3-star weapons. The first time this becomes relevant is when you make it to the town of Lythryn. There is a Jeweler in the southern part of town who sells and can socket various gems into your weapons, in a process the game calls Adornment.
This allows you to give your weapons additional effects usually in the form of various direct stat improvements. Don’t worry too much about socketing gear you think might become obsolete later too: While you can only adorn equipment through a Jeweler, you can ask a Blacksmith to violently un-adorn your gear with his hammer via their Smelting function, which keeps both weapon and Adornment intact.
Followers
Getting a follower is an immense boost in your combat ability, if only because it allows you to deal damage even when stunned! Followers often come with both a basic attack and a skill that consumes no mana, but you can’t control them. Instead, their moves each have a stat that determines how often they prioritize a skill or action. If the Follower has a low basic attack priority but a high skill priority, that means it’s a skill spammer.
Eventually, you will be able to buy stronger followers, with their power determined by star level. That being said, make sure you read the skills of a Follower thoroughly so you know what you’re getting into. You’ll either have to walk to far-away cities in more dangerous areas or upgrade Origin Town’s Beastiary to unlock better Followers. Followers can also do things beyond fighting, as there are quite a few Followers like the Living Armor who can give you a Ward shield or generally give you buffs and healing instead of attacking the enemy.
And don’t worry about replacing your Followers either: Followers you have already bought will go back to Origin Town if you buy a new one, where you can access them from your Home. Bring the right Follower for the task you want.
Specializations and Class Upgrades
So those Orns you’ve been earning, those little dark grey coins that seem useless since you can’t buy much of anything with them? Turns out you need them for class upgrades, not stuff! As you level up, you will unlock classes and specializations for classes, but you have to equip them manually: You won’t get a quest notifying you of their availability!
New classes are unlocked earlier and give you a general buff and unlock new skills for your current class line but cost Orns to unlock. Later on, hybridized Classes become available such as the Spellsword, which lets you equip gear meant for Warriors and Mages at once and gives you a bevy of defensive magic and non-elemental attack spells to go with all the elemental nuker spells you’ve accumulated as a Mage, Archimage and Sorcerer.
And specializations are essentially a subclass under the main class you pick, and are unlocked later but for a bit cheaper than new classes. They usually come with various stat buffs, along with some skills that help round out a class’ role.
Also, while changing classes is restricted based on your first class, you can pick any unlocked Specialization for any class, which allows crazy shenanigans like Rogue Clerics who attack with knives and subterfuge, but also carry tons of goody-two-shoes healing spells and holy magic. Mixing the right class with the right specialization will determine your abilities and how you go about dealing with problems.
Origin Town, And Shop Spamming
A less direct way to get stronger is by upgrading Origin Town. You can set up structures in the Origin Town and they will sell you things like weapons and Followers on rotation and provide services like Blacksmithing, depending on the structures you’ve built. The town starts out much weaker than other towns, only able to sell low-level gear and weak Followers.
That being said, it has one advantage no other town has: You can teleport to it from anywhere across the map. One of the more common things players do for their Origin Towns is to give it loads of Shops: Shops are cheap to build and upgrade, requiring only Wood and Gold, and each Shop will sell different wares beyond the standard ones such as Large Health Potions. This means you increase the chance that you have at least one Shop selling one good thing you’re looking for, especially if you upgrade them heavily.
Talk in Chat!
Hero of Aethric has one of the most helpful player bases you can find in any online RPG, and it doesn’t hurt to ask other players what to do if you get yourself lost. Especially since it is very easy to get lost in the game in the first place.
Early game quests such as the Blacksmith construction quest (“Common” Stone is a fairly obscure drop that only becomes reliably found once you reach 4-star zones!) and the first Dungeon run quest (The first Dungeon keys you can grind are dropped by the very specific Demon Knight boss, with later bosses able to drop them too) can drive less patient players nuts since the game doesn’t exactly tell them where to find what they need.
At the very least, take some time to lurk in chat if you’re too shy to talk: You might find an interesting conversation with vital information coming from other players who have the same problems you have. Just make sure you can tell apart some of the nonsense that may get sent your way by some of the more comedic players. If you can join their Discord server, all the better!
And this ends our Hero of Aethric beginner’s guide. We hope this helps you on your adventure. If you have tips of your own to share, you can put them in the comments below for everyone to read!