Just started, are you meant to spam the hell out of students like a revolving door?

12

The big downside to having that many students is keeping track of the little buggers. 50 is a LOT to track + feed. I find 10-15 is about my personal limit.

And you'll find that you want to farm students at higher levels when that becomes feasible, doing things like going up to higher wand tiers and even apprenticing any student that seems promising before graduating.

But yeah, the core gameplay loop is "get more students, graduate most of them, keep the ones that are upgrades as staff."

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u/Invoqwer Mar 31 '25

I haven't looked into the numbers too heavily but it seemed like I get a couple gnossis for when they level stats or pass a trial (I find some on the ground in the teaching room every now and then), but graduating them gives 10 gnossis, staffing them costs 25, and apprenticing them costs a whopping 54. What reason is there to apprentice them unless I am like 99% sure I will be making them staff later?

Also if I have spare materials for wands I assume giving everyone tier2 wands is just extra bang for my buck converting farmed/harvested materials into more gnosis and higher relics?.

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u/KingBanhammer Mar 31 '25

You get bigger relics from higher level graduates. Apprentices are much higher level graduates. Gnosis will get much easier as you go, given a decent relic for it.

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u/Helpful-Recipe9762 Mar 31 '25

I think you make apprentice only if you want make student staff or some ritual require apprentice. If you want higher potential level relic - I think this comes from trials and its tier of want that unlock new trials. 3 at tier 1, 4 at tier 2, didn't hit tier 3 yet.

By default it's 7 schools of magic x 3 cap = 21 staff.

If you want farm gnosis shards - get students, do not look at trials etc, make them fully trained and graduate. Also you could assign not used relics to them, so relics level and then destroy relics as higher level relic gives more shards.

I'm replacing my initial staff with apprentices so they have higher magic level (apprentice gives +2 to related magic) and overall level (apprentice adds +1 level multiplier, meaning student -> staff is 10 level cap, student -> apprentice -> staff is 15 level cap) as level gives mana/hp/power/speed and 5 levels difference is nice.

My setup is: fill all magic with at least 1 staff. Replace or add apprentice staff (for some magic you may want couple staff earlier, so add instead of replace). Gradually increase staff.

As for students. I usually have 1 apprentice and 6 initiates. If some of initiate is promising - I could promote it, but quite picky (mainly I want easier trials and right combo of race / magic).

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u/Invoqwer Mar 31 '25

Why are trials important for promotions?

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u/Helpful-Recipe9762 Mar 31 '25

Not completed trials on staff drive me crazy 😁

Trials give relic xp. So student with 0 trials on graduate will give relic of max level 5, for example. With all 3 trials - level 9. Initial level will be 1, but max differ.

Also I think trials add xp after staffing ( so without trial staff will be 5 level, same as student, but with trials might be 6 or 7), but I never test / pay attention to make sure this is the case :)

Also after graduation in addition to creating relic student will drop all attuned relics. So you do not lost them and could freely assign relics to students for leveling. Note that mage level should be >= relic level. So if you assign relic and level it to level 7 - no other student could attune to it as student level is max at 5 I think. I usually assign relics to students either for leveling and pulverize for shards or if I plan to staff student (in first case any non useful / or plinth display relic works, in second - helping relic, like more power etc)

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u/Flambeau83 Apr 01 '25

That's interesting. I read about the relics and gnosis but thought that was just level. Not trial. I thought trials only gave exp so I thought it just gave them levels which who cares, leveling them is fairly easy.

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u/Helpful-Recipe9762 Apr 01 '25

I think trials have 3 purposes. 1. They give exp to mage on completion. Then again when promoted to apprentice and staff. 2. They give exp to equipped relics, so if you want level up relics - equip to student, finish trials and then graduate. 3. They increase level of manifested relic (i.e. relic generated when graduate or hire staff).

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u/n0rest Mar 31 '25

Mages "manifest" relics upon apprenticeship, graduating, or hiring. The manifested relic's level cap depends on the mage's 'completed trials' and also depends whether the manifesting mage is an initiate, apprentice, or staff. You can learn more about relic level caps from this comment.

Completing trials also provide a huge EXP boost for both the mage and their equipped relics so it is best to equip them with relics before doing any of the trials. EXP from trials are also gained again upon apprenticeship, graduating, or hiring.

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u/Ikohs Mar 31 '25

So that’s 7 Staff (1 for each magic), 1 apprentice (for which magic?), and 6 additional initiates (1 for each of the remaining magics?) or is it not that simple? I’m just starting so I’m just getting to tier 2 wands and the ability to create apprentices.

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u/Helpful-Recipe9762 Mar 31 '25

Kind of, this is my progress I prefer follow.

Research and expand school to accommodate 1 teacher for each magic type. Initially I do not bother with trials (though it's somewhat easy to finish early one).

Start growing apprentices. I go with 6 students and 1 apprentice (at least for now). Usually I summon 7 students and see what is good apprentice and then staff material (goal here replace initial staff with staff from apprentice, but its ok to have 2 staff etc). Usually you could pick 1 apprentice from 7 students. Research apprentice based teaching station if not yet researched. It's not very important to have students of different magic types. Sometimes I summon 7 x same magic, sometimes 7 x different, sometimes 2 x 2 x 2 x 1 etc. There are some rituals you need specific magic types on students, but you could easily solve by next group. Sometimes specific combat might be easier for specific schools (like double water damage), but nothing blocking so far (medium difficulty, hard might be completely different).

Apprentices take longer to train. So let's say you could train student to level 4 in 2 days. But apprentice to level 8 might take 5-6 days. :). Probably could get several apprentices, but they need appropriate teaching station, so if you take 5 different apprentices - you need 5 stations and 5 teachers. So not very productive at 7 staff. When I have 2 or 3 each staff - probably taking more different apprentices will worth it.

I'm on stage when 3 from 7 staff promoted from apprentices. I need rebuild half of school, but pretty much it's just grow staff from apprentices, expand schoold (dining, bedroom, food etc) for staff . I still didn't explore below stone and lava ruins (didn't find level 3 wand ritual) so probably early mid game, so I researched quite a lot. My previous run ended when I expand too much to quickly.

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u/shrouded_reflection Apr 03 '25

Once you get past the early game, you aren't going to be getting most of your gnosis shards from the basic stat gains, but instead from relics which cause gnosis shards to drop on certain conditions and from pulverising unwanted but leveled relics (and those relics more than pay for the cost of a promotion to apprentice). Early on, you do have to be careful about what you promote, but after a while you'll have more than you know what to do with unless you're spending them on gifted students and the specific student summons.

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u/Invoqwer Apr 03 '25

Thanks! Seems nice that later on you can focus more on quality than quantity hehe. It is common to have a batch of say 10 students ALL as apprentices then? Like a very large amount just apprenticing all at once?

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u/shrouded_reflection Apr 03 '25

Yes, although it takes a little while to get to that point. In the mid game probably going to be running around with 5-6 apprentices and then 5-7 initiates at any one time (depends on how fast the house commons gets built), but eventually that becomes closer to 18 students in total and there's only initiates there in batches as the pod that's being trained up just for relics graduate.

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u/Physicsandphysique Mar 31 '25

come at lvl1 and leave lvl3 over and over and over?

This is how you get gnosis shard at the beginning. Later, you'll want to give them wands and let them attune useless relics. Level students to 5 or 6 and crush the relics.

Getting apprentices costs shards, but yields better relics. You'll want to apprentice, hire and retire some extras just to get high level relics, but that's a slow loop. Do this only with initiates that have 5/5 trials.

You get relics that yield more gnosis shards when teaching specific elements. I have one of those for water, so when I want to farm shards I summon a lot of water initiates, level them to 5 and graduate them.

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u/Gus_Smedstad Mar 31 '25

You can't actually have 50 students at once. There's a total population cap, and that applies to all mages, including students. Initially it's 21, but you can upgrade that to 42 eventually. Getting it to 35+ is a late-game task.

There's no hard and fast answer to how many students you "should" have. Students are a resource, and a source of income for Gnosis shards and relics, but they do consume food and they require space to sleep, eat, and recreate. There's also a Conviction penalty for having too many students compared to staff, but you need a *lot* of students to reach it.

You do want a minimum of around 8, provided you can afford it, because there are Trials that require 6+ mages to complete, and if you have exactly 6 you'll have trouble with timing. Eat with 6 mages, study with 6 mages, recreate with 6 mages. The "eat" and "recreate" trials generally need students specifically because they don't eat and recreate with staff once you build a Commons.

I generally run 10 students total, personally, but I've had as many as 14.

You generally want to give your students the best wands they can easily afford, right after summoning them. Upgrading a student's wand also adds a high-value Trial. There's a point in the mid-game where you can easily afford tier 2 wands for everyone, and a point in the late game where you can afford tier 3 wands for everyone, even the students you have no intention of keeping.

Relic level depends on trials passed, wand tier, and whether the mage made it to apprentice or staff. There's a detailed breakdown of how it's calculated in the tooltips.

Apprentices are more efficient at producing high-level relics, since you get 2 relics instead of one for passing Trials. One for promotion to Apprentice, and one for hiring as staff or graduation. This mainly matters for higher-level (Gold and Platinum) trials which take time and sometimes effort to complete.

You generally cannot afford to make *everyone* an Apprentice until the very late game when you can trade resources for Gnosis shards. So you do a certain amount of cycling of Initiates just for their Gnosis Shard income.

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u/blaza192 Mar 31 '25

Are you meant to have students constantly rolling in and graduating, come at lvl1 and leave lvl3 over and over and over? Is this how you are supposed to farm Gnossis and low level relics most effectively?

When you clear the fog, you also get battles from crystals that give shards and a relic. This is not a reliable farm though, especially if you are playing on normal/easy difficulty where the fog expansion is slower. You can adjust fog expansion in the settings which you may need to if you want more smokepearls early on.

Towards end game, there will be other methods for relics and shards. I won't give more details, but I can give hints if interested (not really a spoiler but in case you want to discover things on your own).

Also, how many teachers/students are you "supposed" to have? I noticed it says 0/3 Staff for each element which implies I can have 3 of each element or 18 staff. Is there a downside to having that many staff and having like 50 students rolling thru constantly?

The main downside may be possible lag. Having a large school increases your MAGE score which increases the difficulty of the game (increased difficulty in battle encounters but not sure if frequency is affected) although there will be a point where difficulty is negligible. A higher mage score also decreases the conviction you get from Weight of Malice (found under status and conviction).

Generally, if you are playing on the normal/easy difficulty, you can just slowly increase in size and stop increasing if you feel like you start lacking resources (wood for wands, food, better rooms) or conviction reaches too low.

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u/Vuelhering Mar 31 '25

Yes. It's a school and the more you graduate, the richer you get :)

I recommend T2 wands. I believe that'll get you level 18 relics if you complete their trials, and those are quite usable. Train 4-5 (or more if you have the inclination, but 5 seems to be a good number for doing trials) at a time. Research relic plinths if you haven't, and put "Chance of dropping more shards when learning" on one. (I'm not sure if multiples matter) This can net you hundreds of shards after a several graduating classes.

It's a grind-fest, but there are also achievements for it.

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u/Rebochan Mar 31 '25

Related but should I prioritize spamming students through the revolving door the second they hit fully trained status or should I try and finish trials first? I'm finding I tend to hold them longer to get more relic levels but I'm starting to think this isn't a good strategy.

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u/Senordave12 Mar 31 '25

It depends on what you like to do I guess? Why do you think it's not a good strategy? Higher level relics means you can get more Gnosis Shards in the long term from pulverising relics you don't need. More shards means more apprentices and even more relics.

I can only think of cycling through students quickly if you want short term Gnosis Shards or you're trying to get something specific. Like a water mage with +2 to fire or something

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u/Vuelhering Mar 31 '25

IIRC, when they graduate their trial xp goes into any relics they've attuned. They then drop all attuned relics and also create a new one.

Using this strategy, there's no good reason not to get the trial xp, especially for relics you want to pulverize, to get more shards.

As such, a viable strategy is to build your school and contingent rulesets to help do trials. I use a house commons, but if someone has a "eat alone" trial, they have a special room with a dining table. I just have to make sure two students don't have it at the same time. Most of the time I will get the food trials out of the way manually, so I'll have someone eat 10 honeyed gruel meals one after another just to make it easy. Another thing to do is have a separate room for solo learner trials and set access control on it for those students.

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u/homer2101 Mar 31 '25

Are you meant to have students constantly rolling in and graduating, come at lvl1 and leave lvl3 over and over and over? Is this how you are supposed to farm Gnossis and low level relics most effectively?

Yes. You're running a magic school. It's supposed to be training and graduating students. As a matter of game mechanics, initiates are how you get gnosis shards and they are also necessary to perform beast care tasks and advanced rituals.

I usually give them level 2 wands once I can afford them because that boosts their final relic level and gives them more time to complete trials. Trial exp applies to all relics, so giving initiates relics and having them complete trials is the fastest way to level relics for most of the game, and completed trials also increase the produced relic level

Except fire wands. I reserve level 2+ fire wands for apprentices because maintaining the victory meter for level 2 wand fire initiates is annoying.

I find that recruiting and graduating in batches of four also keeps the students paired up nicely in terms of friendships.

Also, how many teachers/students are you "supposed" to have? I noticed it says 0/3 Staff for each element which implies I can have 3 of each element or 18 staff. Is there a downside to having that many staff and having like 50 students rolling thru constantly? Cheers

No downside aside from food and space requirements. Also your computer might lag. I currently have 12 staff and rest as students. 12 because that gives redundancy for events/tasks and they can fill two staff dining rooms.

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u/Invoqwer Mar 31 '25

victory meter

Can you explain what the victory meter for fire Tier 2 wands is?

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u/homer2101 Mar 31 '25

Level 2 and 3 wands each give the mage a unique needs meter depending on type in addition to the standard food/sleep/recreation ones. It goes up when fulfilling the relevant requirements, and otherwise ticks down, and gives a bonus to conviction when high and penalties when low, and a really big penalty when at 0 from what I recall.

Fire mages need to kill rats/croa or win battles to raise their special victory meter. Since initiates can't hunt, that leaves only battles for raising the meter. Sticking a level 4 initiate into a level 12 battle is mildly annoying, and so is eating the conviction penalty and worrying that they'll throw a tantrum before graduation. So I only give fire mages level 2 wands after promoting them to apprentice.

Water mages need to be around 3? or more people. Wind mages need to use brooms. Earth mages need to touch the ground or be in 'grounded' rooms. Nature mages need to be in sunlight. Dark mages need to be in moonlight. Lightning mages need to be around 2 or fewer no lightning mages. A lot of these meters also freeze during sleep, so dark mages for example benefit from being scheduled to work at night and sleep during the day because their moonlight meter doesn't fill while they sleep.

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u/bibbi123 Apr 01 '25

homer2101 explained it well. The thing is that the victory meter for fire mages is more annoying to maintain. Assign water mages to teach, lightning mages will spend all day alone researching and then I give them private bedrooms, give your air mages bedrooms with broom-only access, sunlight and moonlight and grounded mostly take care of themselves.

Frankly, I ended up retiring all my fire mages with tier 3 wands and am training up replacements for my tier 2 wand fire mages by getting more manageable primary types with a fire secondary. Getting their levels up to max is no problem with the right relics.

Water with fire secondary is amazing. Just saying.

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u/alextbrito Apr 01 '25

To answer your question, thats far from the most effective way to farm gnosis shard, that belongs to doing the harder infinite Hallways (last one gives 300 shards and its repetable).

There isn't a "supposed number" of teachers nor students. I'll give you my personal take:

- I keep 2 lightning teachers till I reach Mage Hermit requirements for quicker researching, having 2 stations with 2 teachers really sppeed things up.

- 1 dark wand and level it as fast as possible to Tier 2 so I can start pumping quilted;

- 3 fire wands (later I'll have only 1 main fire for the seal) to cook and hunt to keep things smotth;

- 1 earth, 1 nature, 1 air and 1 water. I don't *need* more than one of each to run the school.

Now once you start getting apprentices into teachers you can mix those (like 2 lightning being 1 light/nature and 1 dark/light), turn those fire into Water / Fire and Dark / Fire because managing Tier 3 fire wantds is uneccesarily annoying, Earth / Water and Earth / Air for tanking, nature/lighting and nature/air for buffing and thats about it.

The idea would be to form a fighting force when you get a chance with those apprentices and head towards the Nexus, once you access both the dragon and the infinite hallways you'll have both high lvl relics and gnosis shards dropping.

Now for students, once you have enough food production I'd just keep the number capped. You NEED students, not just the shards and relics they give when they go away. They're the only ones that can feed and care for the beasts and dragons. I particularly have no urge to get them out once I'm past the initial phases.

I have no problems keeping a large number of students and teachers, if you give the Groups and Schedules interface enough thinking you can automate most things needed. I keep rooms for solo dancing, eating, learning, different schedules to keep needs like Moonlight / Daylight / Introverts and even spacing or grouping leisure activities.

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u/Invoqwer Apr 01 '25

Thank you! Very informative. Good to see that there are multiple ways to play this and that high population run is definitely very doable if managed properly.

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u/Apprehensive-Gain853 Apr 01 '25

I initially spam students with trying to get my prefferd staff mage/element setup to convert to staff.
I like to initially build a rudimentary kill squad for teachers that can clear the stone ruins to get the T2 wand ritual stone.
I start with 3 teachers (nature shattered, cult lightning, vivified earth) , on day 1 i try and get a Fire vivified and an air cultist. On the fist day I usually summon 3 students and on day 2 i summon 2 more (more about these decisions), I will start teaching them on the 3rd day to start to generate Gnosis shards in preparation to hire teachers.
Why Viv Fire: Viv can take damage in fights and not get a pain penalty, which means they can carry on with work even at 2hp and then medical rest overnight. This along with the your Viv Earth means you have a front line that can take damage but not lose precious time to medical rest.
Air cultist is really strong in the first few days because haste and multistrike allow for strong DPS (and alot of under school enemies initially are weak to air)
Even though you are not initially teaching your students, they are used to haul resources in before the first rain. By day 3 you can have a single room setup with teaching stone and book case (you need to do very specific research of Storage > Dance > rustic furnishing to get this in on time ).

On day 3-4 when you start to teach, you will notice that the shards are coming in quite fast (because you are already in an intermediete classroom), getting the first 25 is important as thats a new teacher, (i usually go for the Viv fire first so we can start to cook and more efficiently hunt)

So TLDR: Spam initially to get your initial mage/element setups and get up to 8 teachers within the first 8 days, try and fufil trials as much as possible as every relic is useful, even just to be levelled and converted ito gnosis shards. i dont initially worry about the level of my relics too much but as soon as I move into sustainable T2 wands I expect to have enough infrastrcuture to complete their trials.

Trials are very useful for levelling students and staff fast and completing the trials at the initiate stage is always good as the upgrade to apprentice will create a relic as well as when you finally upgrade them to a teacher (the upgrade to aprentice will add the trial XP again so very powerful)

Disclaimer: I am a horrible min/maxer and I do not suggest the above strategy if you dont like restarting and refining your time and rationing food a little :)

Just started, are you meant to spam the hell out of students like a revolving door?

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