The time machine warps in just in time as the world falls apart from the so-called Demon Gods’ onslaught. You hear a splat as you land in what was once called Korea, but you shrug it off. You slowly… slither? Out of your machine. You are a snail, and you are out to save the world! Mostly by stripping it dry of ancient relics and historical artifacts.
As your reliquary grows, enemies abound, trying to crack your shell open. Those that wrecked the world in the future have followers in the past, and they have a bone to pick with your invertebrate self. Too bad for them the Snailverse’s insanity applies to you as well as to them, and now these potentially demonic probably cyborg maniacs have to fight a terrible nuclear-powered mutant demon zombie angel robot dragon gastropod that can traverse an entire nation in a few hours and leave a slime trail of utter destruction in its wake. Yeah, it’s one of those kinds of games. Welcome to Super Snail!
Super Snail is an idle game by QC PLAY where most of the actual gameplay is preparing to go on an adventure. Managing your Relics, falling into various superstitions about them, managing your spending, and raising your ATK stat as high as snailly possible is the name of the game.
In your adventure to rid the world of the Demon Gods and their Apostles, you’re to hoard Relics and craft Gear, worry about your Glue supply, make a clone army, and hunt for obscure secrets. Albeit incredibly slowly, as being the world’s fastest snail is a very narrow superlative.
RELICS FOUND AT HOME
In your home base are several relics, many of which can be spotted by a keen eye, but one of which is hidden in such an obnoxious manner that the devs decided to make it very powerful as a reward for whatever player is silly enough to first notice it, then actually try to persist in grabbing it.
Find the Rainbow Tadpole in the Pond
At some point, a rainbow-colored Tadpole will randomly spawn inside your Pond. Tap it once it does, and you get the Golden Tadpole, a relic that when activated will let your Pond generate White Tadpoles, the premium currency of the game.
Golden Toilet Paper in the Computer Room
A starter relic with a decent combat passive, the Golden Toilet Paper can be found in the upper left corner of the computer room. While the stats it gives when equipped into the Compass are pretty pathetic, its passive is a straight +100 to HP, maxing out at 300 when fully upgraded, which is a cheap affair since it’s a green-tier relic. A nice boost for your first couple of expeditions, especially since it’s permanent!.
Nuclear Fusion Battery In The Robot
So you know the robot guarding the rightmost room in your home? You can fight it, but it’s going to kick your shell across the room until you’re strong enough to beat the entirety of Koryeo handily. But, before you fight it, you can talk it into giving you a low-tier starter TECH relic to get you started on your adventures. Ask it “What are you doing here”, then “What are you guarding”, then “You’ve been here for?”, then “You run on batteries?”. Afterwards, ask it again, and it will hand you a Nuclear Fusion Battery.
Repeatedly Tap The Rock In Front Of The Garage for the Golden Finger
The Golden Finger is a powerful S-rank FTH Relic which you get by tapping the rock in front of the Arsenal (it looks like an old garage, far left of your home) repeatedly. By repeatedly, we mean it, you have to tap it so many times that you might go nuts, but you will get prompts at some point reminding you of your incredibly slow and painful progress.
While its permanent passives are non-combat related (a small but welcomed boost towards your Tadpole Pond, Fungus Farm, and Time Machine), you can equip it in your FTH Compass slot as a beating stick thanks to its high FTH stat, raising your RUSH stat by an alarming amount, especially for something you can find at the start of the game for absolutely free. Unless you count a broken phone screen and burnt time as a cost.
Scrap Can Next to The Vending Machine
Every so often, a discarded can of soda will appear on the ground next to the vending machine. There is a random chance that instead of giving you some random resource, you end up grabbing the Scrap Cans themselves as a relic… But they’re not very useful, as their stats are low and their passive requires you to buy Premium Cat Food, which can blow a hole through your tadpole supply. Still great as an easy upgrade to fill out Relic Star requirements for various upgrades.
The Jackpot Behind The Robot
So you’re rolling over Koryeo like the world’s slowest armored death machine, and now you’re ready for a rematch against the Robot. You cause him to suffer a case of rapid high-velocity self-disassembly, and now the table behind him is yours for the taking.
There is a pile of Relics there, but of particular note is an odd egg which we will discuss later, and the Unispark, a very powerful SSS tier mechanical Rubik’s Cube of a Relic. Its passive is a big fat ATK boost plus another ATK boost and RUSH boost for every 3 S and above Relics you own. On top of this, it has a very high TECH stat, and three bonuses when put in the Compass, making it a good combat Relic for your Snail.
RELIC USAGE
Relics, when activated, grant a passive buff that may or may not be combat-related. And when equipped via your Compass, will buff your combat stats directly, especially when you match them with the correct slot, ie take say an artifact with a high FTH stat and place it in your FTH slot. S and above Relics unlock dangerous battles when upgraded to 3 stars.
Check Relic Placement Icons
When inspecting a Relic, you’ll notice 3 tiny icons on the right side of its description window. This tells you where its best to deploy them: Tap the icon, and it will not only show you where to place it (Like say, in your Compass, or a certain Resource building, or a specific nation’s Museum), and what happens once you place it there.
Early on, it may be best to just cram your most fat-statted Relics into your Compass, but as your roster of S and above Relics grows over time, you’re gonna want to start putting Compass-specific Relics into your Compass for combat, and the proper relics elsewhere for maximum profitability.
The Compass
The only time non-combat AFFCT stats directly affect HARD combat stats is when you put Relics into your Compass. Each slot takes a specific non-combat stat a slotted Relic has and turns it into a specific combat stat. Early on, your best choice is to just grab whatever is your biggest, nastiest Relic and cram it into a stat-appropriate slot, but once you have a ton of S-tier Relics you’ll start taking into account Compass-specific bonuses.
Relic Auras (And Prioritizing ATK and Profit)
There are two good ways to prioritize which relics to upgrade first: Either by whichever stat you need to pass your most current enemy you are stuck with, and whether their Auras are any good. The Auras you are looking for are typically anything that raises ATK, W-Tad, and B-Tad income, other HARD stats, and everything else in that order.
It won’t necessarily be the S-tier Relics that have those, though they tend to have the best of such: Even Green-tier Relics with such properties are worth upgrading to max, as every inch of Tadpole profit and firepower counts.
Civilization Mirages
Orange Relics (Anything S tier and above) come with Civilization Mirages once you upgrade them to 3 stars. These are boss fights that usually correlate with the Relic’s story, such as the Cairo Declaration making you fight German tanks, or the Ark of the Covenant making you fight some rather Biblically inaccurate angels.
Beating these mirages gets you Mirage Gems, crystals that boost their appropriate AFFCT stat and reduce the requirements needed for Gene rituals for their associated Gene form. You can unlock Civilization Mirage battles at 150k Power, though you will need very high stats to even put a dent in some of them after you unlock those battles.
STATS AND MORE STATS
While your overall ART, FTH, FAME, CIV, and TECH are displayed next to your Snail once you inspect it, you’ll notice that it has another more familiar-looking set of stats: HP, ATK, DEF, and RUSH. Your overall FTH, ART, CIV, FAME, and TECH do not directly affect your combat stats, they do affect certain mission requirements, event requirements, and battles in an odd but powerful way. Here are a few notes and explanations about stats.
Artistry, Fame, Faith, Civilization and Tech: AFFCT Stats
Your FTH, ART, CIV, FAME, and TECH do not directly affect your combat stats unless it’s whatever is in your Compass Relics. Your overall stats are calculated from your total relic collection plus whatever other upgrades you have.
That grand total, while not directly affecting combat stats, affects many other things: You need to reach certain stat requirements to upgrade your Snail and unlock new Forms for one thing, not to mention engage in special Map events that occur during Explorations. As such, accumulating Relics is important to progressing the game, as it will often be those stats that act as a wall for you.
Weakspots To Break: The AFFCT Check
While those non-combat stats don’t directly affect your combat stats, they DO affect battles very severely: Each enemy has a single AFFCT stat they’re weak against, denoted by a symbol on top of their sprite when inspected. Tapping that icon will tell you how much of that stat you need to pass an AFFCT check, allowing your RUSH stat to be used as RUSH attacks involve your snail hitting twice per turn.
Some particularly nasty foes require a total AFFCT check accumulated from all stats, such as the Koryeo Commissioner and her lackeys. It is possible to beat an enemy without passing the AFFCT check if your combat stats (called the HARD stats) are high enough, but you will be doing it without the use of your RUSH stat, making the battle much, much harder.
HP, ATK, RUSH, and DEF: HARD Stats
HARD stats are more straightforward and without them, even beating the weak-point AFFCT or Power stat of an enemy won’t count for much. You should be familiar with them: HP is your Snail’s Health, DEF reduces the damage they take, ATK makes them hit harder, and the less familiar RUSH stat allows your Snail to attack twice per turn when passing AFFCT or Power checks, and it stacks with their ATK.
ATK is the most important stat to raise as you need to knock out Apostles in two turns to knock them out permanently and get their bonus rewards. Not to mention you have 20 turns to deplete an enemy’s HP, or else you lose anyway. ATK also stacks with a snail’s RUSH stat, making their second strike hit harder, and every other special offensive skill the snail might eventually get. That being said, all stats matter since two-shotting an Apostle is no good if the fight is a tie thanks to your glass bones and paper skin.
GENERAL TIPS
There are many things to keep track of in Super Snail, and some of them take pains not to be categorized. Here are some more general tips that may be helpful to your slow, patient adventure.
A Pig!
After beating the Robot in the rightmost room, the shield on the main table goes down and you can nab everything on it. This includes a ton of relics and a strange egg. Once you go to the garage, you will notice the doghouse now has an (!) icon on it.
Once you buy the related items from the Vending Machine (The doghouse will tell you what you need), you can hatch the egg there and get an Unknown Creature. Which is a pig. It generates… Mystery Gloop, which contains random Demon God Cells needed to upgrade your Snail. We’d tell you how to collect Mystery Gloop, but the picture provided is all the explanation you’ll never want.
Minions
Minions are unlocked once Kim Chi-yum barges into your home after a few messages from her, and you don’t get the cloning device for them until after you buy a certain explosive device from the Koryeo card shop.
Oddly enough, you don’t use them until after you finish repairing the rocket with them, whereupon you can use them for special Realm missions. This takes a lot of time since the final item to repair the rocket is found in Cathay, the third country, and by then calling you a newbie is a stretch.
Each minion comes with its own type, matching your various snail transformations such as Zombie, Demon, Angel, Mecha, and Mutant. They have upgrades from both the Cloning tanks and the Gene Evo Mod machine.
Prepare Heavily, Check Which Gear You Can Craft Before Exploring
An all-too-common headache is being unable to craft equipment because one’s snail is halfway through an Exploration trip, especially if the thing you want to make is something powerful and the bosses are currently wiping the floor with your shell.
After finishing or before going on any Exploration trip, especially one where you plan to use Speed-Ups, always buy whatever Glue you can from every shop you currently have access to, open any treasures you can to unlock Relics, and get your AFFCT stats up even the slightest bit, check the Gear station in the computer room, and craft whatever you can.
If your snail is Exploring, you cannot use your equipped gear as crafting material, and having better gear makes it more likely for you to dominate any Apostle you’re stuck with. Forgetting to upgrade your gear can be a real pain with Explorations taking 8-10 hours for countries with fully unlocked maps.
Incense? Save ’em!
If you get Incense in your inventory, save them up. Incense is an incredibly rare item that you use by pressing the big red button in the computer room to hide your weapon stash and deploy the shrine. You put the incense on the shrine and use it to zap any small animals in your computer room that would otherwise run away or react when tapped normally.
Various weird things happen when certain animals get sufficiently fried, such as the Turtle, which triggers a special event involving that turtle’s family trying to kill you. You need at least 3 incense sticks deployed on the altar all at once to properly zap either animals or the sky to get whatever strange surprises they hold in store.
EXPLORATION
Exploration is the main story mode of the game, and a particularly slow one, with trips taking upwards to 10 hours, roughly an hour for every Apostle in a single country. Hey, cut the protagonist some slack, he’s a snail traveling across a whole nation! If you think about it he’s quite speedy for a snail.
It’s a waiting game, with most of the action happening once the 10 or so hours are up. That’s when you go down the list of Apostle boss fights, spend the INTEL and CARDS you gathered, and check the map for events.
Apostle Assault: Your Hit List
The story usually goes forward every few times you not just beat, but dominate an Apostle. This means killing them in two turns, rendering them permanently out of action so you don’t have to fight them repeatedly. Each Apostle is guarded by several mooks, each of which doesn’t need to be dominated to be permanently out, so you won’t have to go through them twice unless they win.
If you lose to one Apostle on the list, then whatever Apostles are after them cannot be fought until you win on your next Exploration trips. They are the reason you must spend a lot of time preparing for an Exploration trip, as you cannot change Gear during Exploration!
Dominating them makes them drop extra rewards, but simply beating them still makes them drop Cards, and they will just hand out their cards without a fight after Domination since, you know, they’re dead. Once you dominate all the apostles in a country, their boss along with their mooks will appear in your home. If you lose, you have to wait another 10 hours to fight them!
Intelligence Gathering: The Intel Tree
INTEL is collected with every second of an Exploration trip. INTEL and therefore each INTEL Tree is specific to each area, but while some INTEL Tree upgrades only affect the specific area, others give permanent stat boosts or both. You expend INTEL to upgrade INTEL Tree nodes, which are often required to unlock new zones in a country’s Map and therefore make progress.
Certain countries come with their own special mechanics, such as Yamato having a special Ninjutsu tab that allows your snail to use special skills specifically in the Yamato area or Cathay allowing you to take party members in the form of rather easily killed Generals. These usually have something to do with your INTEL gains.
Power Isn’t Everything, Read AFFCT and HARD Stats
Your overall Power rating is a fairly unreliable way to determine your snail’s strength: It is often made fat by house upgrades, non-combat buffs from Relics, etc. You might have a high power rating but lose because it turns out all that power is pointed towards out-of-battle stuff, or have little power and win because most of that little power comes from the fact you stacked a ton of damage gear together and you’re one-shotting everyone!
Instead, keep an eye on your ATK, DEF, HP, and RUSH stats to know if your snail is combat-ready and if you beat an enemy’s AFFCT requirement. The only time Power becomes relevant in combat is in PVP where it is used much in the same way as an AFFCT check, or any enemies that have an Eye icon instead of an AFFCT stat or All AFFCT rainbow star icon, meaning Power acts as their weakness check.
Deconstruct Old Realm Gear
While some gear can be brought to all areas, the most powerful and easily crafted are usually Realm Gear, which you get from exploring a country and spending Cards there, then crafting them together. This is great! Until you realize they are only powerful in their specific zones.
A Koryeo gun won’t work too well in the Yamato realm or anywhere else that isn’t Koryeo, so once you are 100% Koryeo, it might be time to deconstruct your prized gun and get the glue back, or at least once you find something with global bonuses that have similar raw stats.
Once you unlock the Arsenal (the garage-looking building in the leftmost part of your home base) by buying the Machine manuals from the Cathay card shop, you can dismantle your Realm Gear for 100 W-tads a piece, refunding all the Glue and gear and the B-tads (albeit in a form which does not add up to spending bonuses when spent again) you spent crafting it. Now you can use all that to craft new Realm Gear, or other sorts of gear such as Instrument gear, which is useful for general use.
MINIGAMES
There are various minigames available in Super Snail, and playing them is encouraged for a bit of extra reward. Some pay much faster than others though, but remember that their rewards are limited. That being said, you can also use them as a time-waster since Explorations take so long!
2048
2048 is a game where you must slide sets of even numbers across a board, matching them together to make even larger numbers. If the board is filled, you lose. Matching higher numbers together adds to your score more than smaller numbers getting spammed.
This is a pretty slow way to get Travel Speedups since it requires quite a lot of points, and it’s one of the tougher games to crack. You have this on your computer at the start of the game, along with Solitaire.
Solitaire
Good old fashioned Solitaire, and now with a handy indicator for newbies who have no idea where to place their cards. You can only place cards in a Red-Black-Red-Black pattern with lowering card value, with the goal being to find the Aces, put them on the top 4 slots, then place every card you see there too, this time with matching colors and increasing value.
Tetromino Special
The easiest minigame, mainly because it’s the first you buy from the Vending Machine for B-Tads! Tetromino Special is a game where you place blocks on a board, attempting to make rows and columns. As you do this, you get points which thankfully accumulate even if you eventually lose.
As you get points, you get Exploration Speed Ups as rewards, until you hit a total of 7200 points where you get a relic. After that, sadly, no more grinding for Speed Ups!
Civilization Boom
Once you get the Civilization Boom minigame, you’re in for a fun time. You merge civilizations together based on color, and once a civ makes it to level 10, it switches color to plaid grey and becomes a modern city, able to merge with other modern cities.
If you get stuck, you have a limited number of demolitions to destroy individual squares, and you can get more by accumulating a sufficiently high score in a single game. Rather than merging two modern cities immediately though, try and hoard as many of them together before merging them: Once they merge, the resulting structure is too high-tech to merge with even other post-level 10 structures that look exactly the same.
And it takes 9 Level 10 structures merged to a single tile to get a Relic out of this game! As a side note, you get W-Tads for accumulating points throughout several games, a quick but limited way to grind money.
Breach Firewall
In the leftmost room, you’ll find a shelf. Look carefully inside and you’ll find a purple game cartridge. Install it on your snail’s computer and whoops, you bricked it. It was a virus! At least you get to use it to hack your own snail’s computer in a minigame!
The Breach Firewall game is a tense one, where you have to pass the virus through firewalls. Pick the firewall that matches the color of the background and you’re good. Easy right? It is until it starts speeding up and adding extra colors to worry about! You get Exploration Speedups for bricking your snail’s computer further. Whoops, we mean playing this game.
Game Promoter
Or as we like to call it, Scammer Simulator. Game Promoter is a simple game where you, a game publisher, must siphon players off other games into your own, with you and other games shown on the grid as icons with a number on them.
You have to take into account your Connection Count to see how many games you can attack, your Poaching Power (the number on your company) to determine who you can attack, and report anyone trying to do the same to you by tapping them repeatedly. Lasting one month is enough to count as a win and get you your B-Tad rewards. You get this one from a mail conversation.
Hardly Poker
It’s poker, except you don’t have to worry about your poker face. You either pick a card 1 number higher than the last guy to drop, or play a 2 or quadruple matching numbers. The goal is simple: Be the first to run out of cards.
If someone plays a black Joker card (A snail card), all players play their turns backward, and if a Red Joker is played, the value of the cards reverses. If you don’t know which cards you can drop, the Hint button will tell you, and if none can be dropped, you will skip a turn automatically.
ByeCube
ByeCube is an odd game that would remind you of Tetris, but going from down to up rather than falling up to down. Blocks appear from the bottom of the board, pushing existing blocks upward. You can slide one block at a time to try and make a full line of blocks with the help of gravity, destroying them and making space on the board. If the blocks hit the ceiling, you lose. This is a fairly fun way to earn W-Tads.
VARIOUS GACHAS
Super Snail has a ton of RNG-based mechanics in it, so it’s only natural it would have several Gachas in it. Thankfully, these are fairly forgiving, even the really slow gacha that we’re discussing next!
Souls, The Slowest Gacha In the Universe
The Soul Offering is the slowest gacha in the entire universe, or at least the slowest this writer has ever seen in their entire career, bar none! Basically, you put souls on one of four pedestals, and you wait several hours to several days for a result.
That being said, you can occasionally get offering speed-ups to get this rolling, so use those whenever you can. You can get chests from this, which when accumulated, can be opened for loot, typically Gear.
Occasionally, events will occur where you need to hoard Offering Speedups, usually followed by events where you can spam them. It might be a good idea to hold off on this gacha once the former appears, so you can use both the accumulated souls AND speedups for the latter event.
The Alchemy Furnace
At some point, Kim Chi-yum will drop an illegally acquired museum artifact into your Tadpole pond. This is your second gacha, the Alchemy Furnace. This pot is guaranteed to drop a Relic or enough frags to make or upgrade one with every roll.
You’ll need to collect its coins whenever you can to have a healthy reliquary, which in turn improves your AFFCT stats. The best part is that you get to pick which kind of Relic you get, allowing you to focus on a certain AFFCT stat that you’re lacking.
Old Snail Shell Lottery
The basic gacha but also a very important one, the Old Snail Shell in your computer room is a Lottery machine that can drop absolutely anything from B-Tads, Relics, gear, glue, and a lot of other stuff. A couple of things you’re keeping your eyes on are gear and glue as you need both to craft higher-tier gear.
After a certain number of rolls, you will get a guaranteed Purple tier drop and a guaranteed Orange tier drop. Some events require you to hoard tickets and then use them in a big gacha splurge, and the game will warn you if such an event is nearby. You’d do best to heed the warning.
Chests and Scrolls and Treasure Maps
There are various loot boxes and loot scrolls in the game you can collect, and gathering a certain amount (50 of any Treasure Map, Varying numbers for Scrolls, 100 of any small Chest, and 300 of any large Chest) lets you roll for the items inside once. You can get Treasure Maps by Exploring the appropriate Realm they represent, small Chests and Scrolls simply by playing the game, and large Chests, Scrolls and Maps by opening the smaller ones.
FORMS AND GENES AND INNARDS AND POINTY THINGS
Genetics is what makes your snail a Super Snail, able to move at (relatively) high speed across the countries and fight dangerous foes like the often heavily armed, magic-infused, terribly mutated, or just plain crazy Apostles. And bringing some cold iron to go with the muscle always helps too.
The Different Transformations
Once you max out your Origin Form’s Muscle, Devouring, Brain, Neuron, or Vision upgrades, you will unlock one of several new forms: Muscle gets you the Demon form, Devouring gets you the Zombie form, Brain gets you the Angel form, Vision gets you the Mutant form and Neuron gets you the Mecha form.
Each form specializes in giving you some form of reward for exploration, with later form upgrades providing combat bonuses. Of note is the Zombie form: While its Rush stat suffers, it drops extra Evo Chests, which lets you upgrade the other forms faster too. Those drop Demon God Cells for upgrading and unlocking those forms.
Gene Evo Mods
Once you unlock your first transformation, you’ll notice a machine in the computer room get a (!) icon. This is the Gene Evo Mod device, that allows you to upgrade each form you have unlocked. Doing so is important even if you don’t plan on using that form: Often, these upgrades come with general stat improvements that apply directly to your snail along with form-specific boosts.
They also improve minions that share the Form’s type, such as upgrades for the Pilgrim form improving Angel-type minions. Upgrading each form requires Demon God cells of the appropriate type, matching the ones you needed to unlock each form through the old Origin Form upgrades.
Organs
Organs are your snail’s innards and outards, which you can collect from the Lottery and throughout playing the game. While they give much smaller bonuses to HARD stats compared to gear, they are a collectible much like Relics so you never have to worry about managing your slots for them, and often have special abilities such as healing your Snail a certain amount per round. They can be upgraded with duplicates of themselves plus Organ Slime and B-Tads.
Gear
Gear is your main source of HARD stats, and is divided into several types: Realm Gear, Form Gear, Instrument Gear, Armor Gear, and Material Gear. Realm Gear is the only one that can be disassembled into its components after crafting, as while their stats can still be pretty high, their bonuses are only relevant to the Realm they were crafted from.
Form Gear has bonuses that only work when using certain forms, and those are usually related to increasing drop rates for certain Chests and items. Instrument Gear is what most players eye, usually being weapons that give large boosts to ATK, everyone’s favorite stat.
Armor Gear is less popular since they often have stats skewed toward bulkiness, though some like the Workout Top are well-liked since they give a chance to dodge attacks entirely. Material Gear typically lacks any bonuses other than their raw stat benefits., and is usually used as materials to upgrade the other types of Gear.
And this ends our guide for Super Snail. We hope this helps you get a head start on this fast (for a snail anyway) race. If you have your own tips to share, don’t hesitate to leav them in the comment section below!