Zeptolab’s King of Thieves has been out for a few weeks now, and before it launched it was in beta for a good long while, and Internet has accumulated tips and tricks that will help you progress faster, or in a more enjoyable manner. Being a fun freemium and wonderfully charming game, King of Thieves can get frustrating at times due to its insatiable timers and all the other thieves that keep raiding your dungeon and stealing your gold and gems. Read our full review here. We have compiled a few quick tips for the beginners, so read on if you are determined to climb those leaderboards.
#1. Don’t rush
Irrespective of whether you are raiding one of the single-player dungeons or another player’s dungeon, take your time to look around. In many cases, players rush to try out different approaches to overcoming the monsters and traps, and die many times trying. The more deaths you take, the less loot you grab, so before you proceed to lock-picking, take a closer look at the dungeon – the game offers a sneak peek. Use it to your advantage because sometimes the traps are right there, next to the entrance. Despite being reflex-oriented, King of Thieves is a game of a thorough and patient planning. Unlike upgrading stuff, raiding a dungeon does not have timers, so don’t rush.
#2. Mind your gems and coins
Most of the gems you lose due to long totem rituals. For example, a simple 5-level ritual takes whopping five hours, which is more than enough to have it all stolen, unless you play 24/7. How you guard them is up to you, but once you craft an expensive gem you start realizing its worth and the amount of other gems that went into crafting it, so losing it may be quite painful. Here are a few tricks for the dedicated players. When you begin a session, start with a ritual, and since most of them last several hours, you may want to spend some of that time beefing up your security. And to do that, you will need to pass your own defenses twice, so don’t overlook this important aspect. It is better to sweat crafting and beating your own powerful defenses and being online and in your dungeon at the same time, which means nobody can raid you.
Before you log out, you may want to use a shield, but most importantly empty your gold mines.
Also, have a few keys in stock just in case somebody raids you while you were out raiding someone else, or one of the single-player dungeons. In this case you can steal your gem back quickly, although in my experience, whoever steals your gem at this moment is likely to be inside their dungeon if you choose to avenge right away.
#3. When choosing your dungeon defense
Choose flies (or are those birds?) over red guards
While the green blobs containing traps are awfully expensive, the traps you will be able to afford sooner contain the flies or red guards. While red guards, the one-eyed monsters, patrol a short and even area of your dungeon, they are unable to change the predetermined to-and-fro path even when they spot a thief. The flies are much better at stinging a perpetrator basically anywhere within their radius, and they move where they spot a thief. The flies don’t stick to a predetermined route.
Place every trap to make it individually dangerous
You know one trap gets removed if a perpetrator dies too many times when attempting at raiding your dungeon, so try to think of a trap placement where each trap works in conjunction with other traps, but also on its own, as if it were the only defense.
Upgrade your traps
Remember you can upgrade each of your traps, blades, flies and monsters, so spend some coins on that to increase their speed and dexterity. Upgrading your traps will also cost any perpetrator more health when they die.
Also mind that these upgrades will travel with you when you move to the next dungeon, which is nice on ZeptoLab’s part. It might very well be that the keys are worth upgrading the most since some players might just turn around when seeing you have more locks than they have keys.
While a trap is being upgraded, it is dysfunctional
Mind the traps and monsters upgrade times because while it lasts the trap does not work.
Don’t let yourself be intimidated if you fail to pass your own defenses right away
Don’t back off if you fail – it only means you have come up with a good trap plan, and it is worth saving. Besides, as we mentioned earlier, while you try to save your dungeon passing your defenses twice in a row, you are inside your dungeon and online, which means nobody can raid you, and your riches are safe.
#4. Get those fancy outfits
See those mushrooms and green leaves counter at the top right corner of your game’s UI? Your thief can’t smoke them, but he or she can use them to craft cool outfits. Each outfit adds extra life and power to your character, so you will have more attempts to get some essential loot when raiding a dungeon. You can see the available outfits when you are in your dungeon and when you tap on your character.
The first few outfits are okay-ish, but if you are a beginner, you should strive to get the Lucky Face one. It gives you a significant boost in your chances to get the gem. I would not spend too much resources on upgrading the previous Nimble Foot and Golden Blaze costumes.
#5. Revenge is a dish that is best served when cold
Don’t just tap to break in a dungeon of someone who stole your gem. First, study your opponent’s dungeon and see if you can handle it. Otherwise, you are just breaking in, leaving a handful of your dead skulls in there and let this other player laugh at your failure.
Also, if you don’t mind getting notifications, enable them for King of Thieves – that way you will know whenever somebody raids you and be able to avenge quickly.
#6. Use the weaker leagues to harvest awards
When you start playing, you get randomly assigned to a group of 25 players in a wooden league. The more dungeons you win, the more league points and trophies you get. You can go hard on one league tournament, but the point is then you get assigned to a stronger league, so you can intentionally lose the next tournament to get thrown back into a weaker league and grind for easy trophies again until infinity and beyond.
Organizing guilds are so far useless. The developers suggest there will be a few tweaks to the guilds system that will make them actually fun to create or join, but so far there is no communication system, or ways to have only your friends in your guild, so putting too much resources and thought into guilds is currently pointless. Wait for an update better.
#7. Sell gems you don’t need
At some point you may run out of slots for gems, so you can sell the ones you need less. When you tap, hold and drag a gem, there is a sell icon at the bottom right corner. So you can get some gold in exchange for a mined gem.
#8. Patience – totems break when you have completed a certain number of rituals
Some players get desperate when they decide they want to move to a better dungeon, but the trick is to complete a said amount of rituals and break the totem. That way you can move to the next dungeon.
On the flip side, if you only focus on raiding other players and ignore the single-player campaign, there will be nowhere to move because the other dungeons are there – on the single-player campaign field.
#9. Watch replays of the raids
Whenever you get raided, watch the replays to identify the weak link in your defenses and work on it.
#10. Collect those coins even when you don’t play
You see, King of Thieves is one of the most demanding games I have seen on mobile. It requires an unprecedented level of dedication, so if you do not wish to leave too much gold for the other thieves, log in frequently, even when you don’t have the time to play, just to empty your gold mine.
Remember your storage has a max capacity, so when it is full, either invest in trap upgrades or upgrade the storage capacity itself.
#11. Harvest the gems from the map
The single-player map where the levels are also has gem mines that sometimes produce gems. When you see a notification a new gem is ready for picking up, and it is not the one from your totem, go to the map and tap the gem icon at the bottom center of the map. It will take you to the mine where you can collect the gem.
Remember the lower level mines produce low value gems, but they do it faster than the higher end mines. Collect those cheap gems as often as you can, and keep them until you need a little extra cash, so you can sell them.
#12. The hooded ghost has missions for you
If you tap on that black hooded guy, you might occasionally find a mission, which gives you orbs and XP points when you complete it. By now you should probably know how orbs are hard to come by, so don’t ignore the missions.
#13. You can’t move to any dungeon, just the one that is next on the map
#14. Each ritual breaks a totem’s tooth
So, keep an eye on those – that is how many rituals you need to complete to break a totem and be able to move to the next dungeon.
#15. Use both hands on some of the trickiest dungeons
Sometimes it takes a drummer’s perfect sense of the rhythm and up to six fingers to overcome traps and monsters, but it is possible. Some traps are so close to the entrance the only way to beat them is to jump the moment you enter, or rather enter jumping.
#16. Use the 30 minute rule (for the hardcore players)
If it takes you more than 30 minutes to save your own traps layout, you are definitely on the right track. The Internet is abundant in dungeon layouts and traps for King of Thieves, but the bottom line is – if you invest your time into crafting a powerful defense, chances are the other thieves will leave their pale skulls in it, failing to get the loot.
Challenge yourself by placing two blades two spaces apart and putting a red one-eyed monster that travels in between them, but it has to be placed in a tight space with no way to jump around. This configuration is not so efficient when one of the traps gets disabled, but until then you will collect some skulls.
The aim of your defenses is to force the attacker to spend all their life energy while raiding your dungeon and leave empty-handed, or give up trying in the middle of it.
By the way, skulls bring you money, too. When you think of it, King of Thieves is an awfully cruel game.
#17. You can view any player’s traps layout without attacking them
You can tap on any player on the leaderboard and view their dungeon and traps layout – it is a great way to get fresh ideas from those who are successful. Remember than even the low-level dungeons may be defended by a killer combination of traps.
#18. Experiment with the moves
You know how your thief moves – it moves one direction until it faces a wall and jumps on it to change direction. However, if you make it jump while it moves on a direct line, you can slightly alter its y point when it hits the wall. Making it jump all the way when it moves directly will change the angle at which it hits the wall. It may help it jump higher against the next wall.
#19. Totem timers and thieves
When doing a ritual, you put several gems in a totem, and it starts a ritual which can be as long as five hours. It is way too long to keep an eye on your precious gems, so place the lower value ones first, and if you should be raided some minutes before the ritual ends, you can put a higher value gem to the slot where a stolen lower value one was and watch over it personally while the ritual is being completed. That way, you get a higher value gem and more points, but the timing has to be perfect. I haven’t been able to try this trick so far, though, but some pro players say it works.
#20. Rituals, Gems and Potions
This may not be obvious from the beginning, but if you place the identical set of gems, the ritual will not only give you a stronger gem, but also produce a potion. The latter you can use while raiding other dungeons to disable traps and get other boosts.
The color of the gems matters, and here is the breakdown of potions you can get from the same color gems:
- blue gems – gang of thieves
- purple – a thief ghost that jumps ahead of you and shows you the successful trajectory
- green – slow-mo
- red – potions that disable a trap
- yellow – doubles the loot
Finally, when you see a difficult trap layout, use the boosts as soon as you can – there is no pint spending all your life energy before you use that potion.
#21. Your Facebook friends can retrieve your stolen gem
If you add your Facebook friends to your game, they can try and retrieve your stolen gem, if it was of high value. Then, of course, the spinning wheel and the traps may prevent them from doing so just like they did to you.
#22. Notifications
The first time you launch the game, it offers to send you notifications. If you reject it, and then decide you want them, you will have to re-install the game. Doh. Hopefully, ZeptoLab does something to fix that.
#23. Super Jumps
The is one specific super jump you can learn to jump higher. Jump to a corner of a platform and jump off of it – this jump will be higher than normal. This may not be overly easy to perform, but you can master it.
#24. Risky, but worth a try
Some pro players use skulls to keep their gold so that nobody can steal it. They create really strong defenses, and turn off the shields to let the others raid them. Each failure leaves a skull and the players don’t collect them. Instead, they keep them in their dungeon as the money that can’t be stolen – because you can’t steal the gold which is in the skulls in someone else’s dungeon. This tactics is risky because it requires perfect defenses, but if you are up for it, give it a try.
#25. Browse the game forums
King of Thieves has a forum, where players share ideas and tricks. If you are looking for a very particular answer, scout the forums, dungeon layout and traps breakdown for the best tips.
What are your favorite tricks in the King of Thieves? Share them with us in the comments below, or join a conversation on our Forum!
