Icarus M: Riders of Icarus Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Cheats & Strategies to Dominate Your Enemies

Icarus M is a mobile MMORPG set in the floating sky islands of Asbella, where you and thousands of other players war with the forces of darkness, fighting together hand in hand with the various mystical monsters and denizens of the world to make sure evil does not overtake the land.

Embark on an epic quest to restore the islands to their former glory, uncover secrets its past denizens left behind, and gain the strength and trust of its guardians and wildlife as you learn more about the landscape and citizens of each area.

If you’d like to kickstart your flying adventure with aplomb, please keep reading our Icarus M beginner’s guide below!

1. Playing Through The Beginning And Learning The Basics

Icarus M starts with you immediately having to assist in beating back the forces of darkness that have decided to invade your world. You arrive on the back of your familiar, weapon blazing and a starting quest immediately making itself known on the upper right portion of your screen. Tapping on the quest, and every other quest you’ll receive in the future, on your screen has your character automatically travel to where its objectives are, whether it’s people you need to talk to, places you need to go, or monsters you need to slay.

You’ll know if your character is taking care of quest objectives if the quest is glowing blue. Once it’s completed, it glows yellow. If your character needs to fly on his or her familiar to reach the location, which Icarus M will have you regularly doing due to its setting of various floating islands, the game takes care of that for you as well, and you can tap the BOOST button on the lower right part of your screen mid-flight to increase your flight speed. Tapping the quest again upon completion grants rewards and allows you to progress further into the game if the cleared quest is part of the main storyline.

As you move through the starting map of the game, Elora’s temple, don’t worry too much about the roving Dominated Guards and Archers. The game takes care of combat for you as well when you tap on a quest which needs you to defeat a certain enemy or number of enemies, automatically fighting whatever is in your vicinity. If you’d like to fight them yourself though, the button to turn it off is located on the bottom-right part of your screen, next to the “Ground Familiar” button, which you’ll learn more about later.

Clearing the tutorial and main quests in the Temple of Elora grants you access to Cocoon, Icarus M’s hubworld. Cocoon grants you access to various facilities and opens up your travel options to future maps in Icarus M though you’ll only unlock them as you progress through the main quest.

2. General Tips For Faster Progression

To sweeten and smoothen your earlygame experience, Icarus M provides Knights’ Missions, which give you incentive to progress through the tutorial by providing lots of free rewards as your level goes up, and leveling missions. Fulfill the objectives of each Knight Mission to earn helpful items like potions, enhancement materials for your weapons, armor, and familiars, and a variety of other items which will be useful to you in all stages of the game.

Like many mobile games, you also have daily and weekly missions which also provide in-game and premium currency rewards for completing them. These missions range from using specific items to defeating a set number of enemies to producing your own items as soon as you unlock Item Production in the game.

Don’t worry too much in the beginning when it comes to your equipment and familiars, as you can simply press the Auto-Equip button to outfit yourself with the best gear you have on your person, though you’ll definitely be manually equipping your own gear later on in the game. If you find yourself running low on inventory space, you can just disassemble your older equipment, which grants you various materials you can use to craft higher level equipment or strengthen what you currently have on.

Another incentive to both motivate you to become stronger and increase your leveling speed is the Achievement system. Like many games, the Achievement system here in Icarus M gives you various items upon completion of certain prerequisites, like reaching a certain level or unlocking a new map or killing a set number of enemies.

What’s slightly different about this game’s system however is it also gives you status bonuses according to how many Achievements you’ve completed. These status bonuses are awarded whenever you complete enough Achievements to level up your overall Achievement level, with each new milestone giving you Achievement EXP.

A minor footnote before moving onto Familiars: The game has on a rarity system for Familiars and Equipment among other things, where higher rarity items usually have better stats and a much higher level cap. Though it’s fine to invest in lower rarity items in the beginning, try to save a portion of your resources for future Hero, Legend, and God tier items for when you acquire them.

3. Understanding How Familiars Work

Icarus M prides itself on its Familiar-centric world, where you can capture almost every single enemy in the game with enough time and effort, and have them either accompany you in battle or serve as your means of traveling through the world in style.You can equip several familiars instead of just one; You can set one familiar to help you travel on the ground, known your Ground Familiar, one which will deploy itself when you need to fly from island to island, and one to assist you in ground combat, your Ground Combat Familiar.

For now, your ground combat familiar should take priority in terms of being leveled up, as the bonus stats it gives you from being equipped will significantly streamline your leveling process. Boosting its stats will also increase its effectiveness in combat, so that’s another plus.

With the Familiar system, rarity usually dictates the upper limit of how strong your Familiar can become. The higher the rarity, the higher its stats can go. There are several ways to boost its stats so it can reach this point ceiling:

The first way to raise a Familiar is to level it up, either via combat or feeding spare monsters to it. One particular monster you’ll want to feed to your Familiar of choice is the Fruit of Yggdrasil, which was made specifically to be eaten for outright massive amounts of experience.

Please pay close attention however to the rank of the Fruit as well as your Familiar’s rank. The higher the Fruit’s rank, the more EXP it provides, and the higher your Familiar’s rank, the more EXP it requires for each level up. To ensure you don’t waste any of your Fruits of Yggdrasil, please only feed them to your Familiar if their ranks match. That way you can maximize each Familiar’s experience gains. Generally, your Familiars have a level cap of 30.

The second way to strengthen your Familiar is via Reinforcement. Using ‘Reinforcement Stones’, you can give big chunks of status boosts to your Familiar of choice. Each attempt at Reinforcement has a chance to fail that increases according to how high your Familiar’s rank is, though the stat boosts aren’t your primary reason for the reinforcement. The main reason why you’d want to reinforce your Familiar lies with the 3rd and final way to strengthen it, which is Promoting it.

In order for your Familiar to become eligible for a Promotion, it needs to be at maximum level and at max reinforcement level. You then use Familiar Promotion stones, with the required amount increasing according to its rank, to bump it up to the next rank. Once the Promotion is complete, the Familiar’s level is reset to 1 and you’ll have to level it up and reinforce it all over again, though its overall stats will receive a significant upgrade for each iteration of this. If your Familiar is high enough in rarity, you might even manage to see it change its form eventually! Though on the topic of high rarity Familiars…

You start with 100 stamina for capturing Familiars, which gradually regenerates overtime. Regularly capturing various familiars in combat or in the overworld is in your best interest, as you can raise them if they catch your fancy or use them as materials in your Illustrated Book for various passive bonuses. Catching and slotting in specific familiars in your book will grant eventually grant you set bonuses, and you’ll get achievement bonuses for catching as many of the game’s available familiars as possible. Even defeating monsters nets you their crystals, which you can also register for a variety of stat boosts.

For capturing certain monsters eligible to become familiars, you need to craft tokens or signs via Item Production, which require you to capture some monsters in the overworld to make them. Each of these tokens or signs are grouped according to which area you can find the monsters in, and higher rarity monsters may need several lower rarity tokens as crafting materials to make them eligible for capture. Rex is a good example, as you’ll need 4 Pochi tokens as part of the recipe to make his ‘sign.’

Communion powders are purchasable from the shop, farmable from the various mobs in the overworld, and given as rewards from various achievements. You’ll need a sizable amount of them to merge into higher rarity powders, which are required to make higher rarity familiars eligible for taming.

Though taming points recover overtime, you can speed up their recovery with Taming Point Recovery Potions, which you get for completing daily quests. Make sure to save these up for when you find yourself wanting to farm for a specific high rarity Familiar’s materials, since you’ll most likely need a lot of tokens of varying rarities to get them into your roster.

4. The Spacetime Gap, An Important Daily Dungeon

After you’ve cleared part of the main quest in the Braggi Base/War Camp area, you can access the Space-Time Gap from the upper right part of the menu. This new feature grants you access to a series of instanced dungeons you can grind for valuable resources and Gold Fragments, the latter being very important for progression, though you can only access each dungeon once a day.

As a general overview, instanced dungeons are separate from your usual romps around the overworld. When you enter the Space-Time Gap, you can queue up to wait for allies to accompany you into the dungeon, or enter it immediately and go through the whole thing yourself. Each dungeon has a recommended power level, and you can’t tame any of the familiars or monsters in these dungeons. These dungeon also repeat the same sequence of monsters and the same map, so learning how to deal with each wave of monsters and memorizing boss attack patterns is vital to maximizing each run.

Clearing a Regional Dungeon gives you reinforcement stones, character experience, gold (which is different from Gold Fragments), and Equipment Relics which drop a piece of equipment of a random rarity among other things. If you’re going to tackle a Regional Dungeon alone, make sure you’re well above the recommended power level so you can clear the dungeon faster. Faster dungeon clears save time and net you better rewards as a bonus for faster clear time.

As you progress through the story, you’ll unlock Elemental Dungeons, which are similar to Regional Dungeons except each Dungeon specializes in a certain type of elemental damage. To make sure you don’t die to the elemental damage types, another feature is unlocked in conjunction with the Dungeons becoming available.

5. Soul Stones And You

Remember how clearing Regional Dungeons gives you Gold Fragments as part of its reward table? Well, a player’s Soul Stone is where your Fragments go in the early game. Upon viewing your Soul Stone, you’ll see 6 elements, each at level 1, with 6 empty nodes surrounding it. Activating a node costs gold and Gold Fragments, and provides elemental resistances according to which Element you’re in as well as a boost to a single stat. If you activate all 6 nodes, your Element level will rise, which will grant you better resistances and stat bonuses on the next activation, though it’ll also cost more gold and Gold Fragments.

The most interesting part of this feature is every single Element’s activation bonuses stack with each other, so it is in your best interests to level up each element equally until they all reach around level 4, then tailor your levels according to which Element Dungeon you’d like to focus on. You can start by focusing on your Fire and Ice Element Soulstones since they’re the first two dungeons on the Regional Dungeon List, then slowly level up your Poison, Thunder, and Light Soul Stones with resources from the aforementioned two dungeons to prepare yourself for later.

6. Miscellaneous Tips And Tricks

White Smith, who you acquainted yourself with earlier in the story, is one of the many Non-Player-Characters (NPCs) in the world of Icarus M who can give you Subquests. If an NPC has a Subquest they can give you, their portrait will pop up on your screen. These Subquests are worth doing for the additional experience, gold, and reward items they give. You don’t have to be near the NPC to turn in your quests, Main or Sub or otherwise, to receive their rewards either. Just tap them once you’ve cleared their prerequisites and their rewards will deposit themselves in your mail.

Much like Familiars, equipment can also be leveled and reinforced. Instead of Promotion though, they can instead be Awakened, granting your equipment unique bonuses if they’re eligible for it. You’ll know a piece of equipment can be awakened if it has a hexagon symbol on the upper left corner of its sprite, though it would be wise to save Awakening for higher rarity items.

Capturing new Familiars and discovering new items grants you premium currency and additional stats via the Illustrated Book and Study Book respectively. You can slot in excess items into the Study Book to get a small leg-up in combat!

Take note of your skills when you’re leveling them up. They generally gain buffs when reaching a certain level, though the Skill Point (SP) cost for bringing their levels up increases when you hit a certain threshold as well.

And there you have it! That’s the end of our beginner’s guide to Icarus M! Did we overlook anything, or do you have any other suggestions to make this guide better? Please let us know in the comment section below!