Defender Idle: New Beginning Guide

Defender Idle is available on Kongregate as a free-to-play idle game. It has a pretty bad score for a myriad of reasons, mostly relating to its launch, but it’s actually a solid idle game with a pretty big community around it, but I like it! The nice thing about Defender Idle is that progression moves swiftly and they throw a lot of mechanics at you to progress. We’re going to focus mostly on the early game, so that you can have fun unlocking all the cool features that come once you setup actual idle play.

Starting Out

Starting out you’re going to have the university, where you learn upgrades after you “surrender” or “lose.” The bulletin board which is daily quests. The school to unlock more turrets and higher levels of those turrets. The workshop, where you can upgrade your turrets as they level up. Finally the research center, where you unlock new features.

The only mode you can enter is Gate – Normal. The only tower is sentry. So input “10000” into auto advance and select 3x speed. After a few minutes you’ll start getting resources and earning coin, which you can use to open more slots. This is the manual part of the game. The automatic part comes shortly.

Spend the coin on increasing damage and range. If you don’t, you’ll get to wave 11 with 9 RP earned, not very much. If you lose, always rebirth. Make sure to increase damage and range and you’ll get somewhere.

Spend your early RP on two concepts – damage and rebirth point gain. Damage first, don’t max it out (that will come way later). You want to make sure you have enough rebirth points flowing in that you can eventually max this board out.

Now, in the research center. The first thing you want is auto rebirthing and automatic placement. At that point, when you lose, you’ll rebirth automatically and a sentry tower will be placed down. This is perfect until later in the game.

Once you’re automatically earning RP, your next focus is on getting further in the mode. Wave Skip is a priority – it’s going to let you get to the point that you lose faster so you get more RP faster. Auto RB – Wave comes at town level 4 and is good to rebirth when you reach 10000 in normal so you can farm RP faster.

Now you’ll want to work on some other upgrades. In the school you want the swamper unlocked and you want to increase your max sentry level. The rocket is good, I liked it, but everyone swears by the swamper and later on you’ll see why (it is a huge AOE that can be auto built earlier than inferno that can clear waves instantly).

You’ll want to increase the range and fire rate of your turrets in the workshop.

You’ll want to keep unlocking features in the research center. You can buy in the university with RP a skill to lower their cost, very helpful. Once you unlock the masonry, you can increase your town level which will let you unlock more features.

Dread 1 and Above

Once you hit 10,000 in normal and are on auto-farm, have most of the production buildings built and have a barracks you can start working on “dreading up.” The first thing to note is that the office is critical here. It gives you a massive damage and resource boost at the cost of gems, which can be farmed in robo or the spaceport very reliably. You’ll want to invest some points here.

To reach your first dread level, you’ll want to have an excess of RP. At least 10~50 million extra RP and a maxxed university. The reason being is that research costs double once you dread up and you get refunded everything in the research center. You’ll also want to have maxed dread damage, dread RP and probably dread drop before you do your first dread up.

When you do dread up, at this point your next focus is unlocking some of the more expensive buildings like the temple. The temple uses dreams to give you massive boosts. Those will help you run to dread 10000 very easily.

Once you’ve dreaded up the first time, you just repeat that cycle until awakening which is at dread 6. Everything in the game costs more, but you unlock 100 wave skip and a lot of other cool features.

I hope this guide helped get you started and provided you with enough information to zoom through the early game!