Game Progression

Levels 20-30

Level 20 - Unlock your Assistant to access Dailies

Once you reach base level 20 you should unlock your assistant so you can start doing dailies.  These are important as they are a source of free blue gacha slips which can provide you with very powerful headwear.

To unlock this feature click on the Dailies icon that appears at the top of the screen when you reach level 20.  You'll be shown a Deacon selection screen, a picture of various maids and butlers.  The two in the middle of the screen are lit up a bit indicating that they are unlockable.   Select either the pink haired maid or the blue haired butler and click Confirm to proceed.

Example selecting the blue haired butler assistant

Your selection is not permanent and may be changed later.  Regardless of which one you choose this will unlock both of these assistant shops to spend your Assistant Medals of Honor which you receive from dailies.  The differences between the two are:


For more on this feature and dailies read up on Assistant & Dailies. 

Level 20 - Unlock the Quest Board

A side quest will be added to your quest list called "Entrustment" which will ask you to speak to Sherry in Prontera City.  Speak to her to access the Quest Board feature.

NPC to unlock the mission board feature 

Example of board quests and the instant complete option

Quest boards provide you with up to three daily quests to earn additional exp, zeny, and various items such as butterfly wings, foods, and meteor chains.  These quests can also be completed instantly provided you have some adventure meatballs which are rewarded from various sources.

You'll want to do all three quests each day as this progresses your dailies and provides you with Assistant Medal of Honor which are used to purchase important items like blue gacha slips from your assistant.  Finishing all three board quests each day also rewards you with Mora Coins.  We'll discuss what those do later when they become relevant but make it a point to complete these each day since you'll really want a ton of these coins for later.

More information on board quests can be found in Assistant & Dailies.

Farming with Chains

On the topic of meteor chains, this item can be consumed to grant you a buff that speeds up combat time usage by 4x while increasing loot and expereince by 4x.  This is a great way to burn through a lot of combat time fast.  This drop increase also affects cards so if you luck out on a rare card drop you'll get four of them!

You can consume as many chains as you want which will store more time.  There seems to be no limit as to how much time you can store and this time is only consumed while you spend combat time.  Once you run out of time for the day you can continue to farm your adjusted combat time but it will not be affected by your chain and your chain will automatically pause until the next day when you have time again.

Details on chains can be found in Combat Time if you still haven't looked at this.

If you've come here looking for hearts origin that old system has been discontinued.

Level 20 - Rift Challenges

Around level 20 you'll unlock Rift Challenges.   This is a source of starter gear and provides you with some exp and materials to advance your Heart's Origin system.  Since you're just starting out you should run this a few times to get some starter gear.  You can run this three times per day with greatly enhanced drop rates but it consumes 60 minutes of combat time.  Once you have a full set of this level 20 starter gear you can probably avoid this until the 60's when the next tier opens up.

To access the instance menu tap the More button, then tap instances, then select Eddga's Roar and the difficulty you wish to run and select either Matchmaking or Challenge.

Accessing the Instances Menu

Example of queuing for Eddga's Roar on Novice difficulty

The gear that drops from here functions as Ancient Equipment, a new type of equipment that is enhanced differently than gear found on the exchange and is very newbie friendly.  Right now this is not important since you lack the materials to start enhancing this gear but as you get higher you'll be able to start investing in this type of gear so I'll dive a little deeper into this topic when the time comes.

For now, focus on getting gear for your primary armor slots from here then focus on farming monsters.  As you level you will unlock higher level versions of these rift challenges which offer better equipment, drops, and experience.

Feel free to read up on Rift Challenges for more details.

I tested this on a brand new 21 archer and needed to use First Aid to keep from dying but it was fairly simple.  Matchmaking will take forever so you're probably going to have solo this which is easy on Novice but may be more of a problem if you try to bump the difficulty up so you may need to find some help.

Crafting Rift Challenge Gear

If you have bad luck or have lots of spare starter materials like Feather's and Jellopy then crafting this starter gear will save you some combat time.

The crafting station for this can be found in Prontera City by all the crafting NPC's.  Head over and tap on Adventurer Treasury and select Equipment Craft to create some of this gear. 

Location of the Ancient Treasury

Example of the Crafting Menu

This station crafts gear for level 20, 60, and 100 but only the novice versions of this gear.  Better gear drops from higher difficulty rift challenges which may also have augments that further strengthen that gear.  This crafting station also allows you to use Material Extraction to convert materials to Fantasy Ember.  These embers are used to slot and refine ancient equipment between levels 20 and 100.

For now don't worry about slotting and refining as it's not important this early on in the game.  I will bring this up again when you need to start thinking about it.

Adventure Rank - Scout

While outside in West Prontera, take pictures of each monster and photo points until you hit Adventure Rank 5.  You can check this by opening your Adventure Handbook and looking at the number in the gold medal at the top center of the screen.  

You can see your adventure level by opening your Adventure Handbook.  At the top you'll see a gold medal with a number inside it.  That number is your current adventure rank.

Viewing your Adventure Rank in your Adventure Handbook

Once you're rank 5 you'll have a green quest in your log called "Upgrade - Scout".  Head to Prontera City and speak to Kakaro in the northern part of Prontera City to initiate the advancement quest.

Location of the Quest NPC

This quest will send you out to West Gate where you'll take a photo and killing a whole bunch of rockers.  Once complete you'll be sent back to Kakaro in Prontera City to complete the quest and rank up.  Speak to the Adventure Skills NPC nearby and you'll notice a bunch of new skills are now available.  

You'll want to purchase two skills immediately: Stay Alert and Ghost Camera.

Stay Alert opens up the ability to stand still while farming on Auto.  Even if you're using a melee job this is something you'll eventually use if you multijob and some melee classes gain ranged options later so you never know when this will come in handy.

Ghost Camera will allow you to take photos of ghosts allowing you to attack them and more importantly, lets you add them to your adventure handbook.  You'll need this later for one of your Adventure Rank advancement quests as it requires you to take a photo of a MINI, Ghostring.

Adventure Skill "Stay Alert"

Adventure Skill "Ghost Camera"

Events

By now the New Event option should be available up at the top next to the Daily Button.  This opens a menu containing several features related to events, cash shop features such as Gachapon, and more.  All Gachapon machines give you one free pull every time they rotate out and you get several coupons from events that you can use for even more pulls.

Furthermore, event quests should be shown in your quest log as Pink quests.  Event quests should always be your first priority!  These quests give you lots of free rewards ranging from Runes, Currencies, Gachapon Slips, and even Headwear.  This headwear is specific to the event so you always want to do these events to get as much as possible since this goes into your adventure handbook, increasing your stats.

New Event Menu and Event Quests

The New Event menu is important right now but I'll provide a quick summary of the menu above:


Several of these are only shown because of the current event so expect some of these to be missing from your list.  There are a few things you'll care about as a F2P player but I won't cover them in detail here so here is the cliffnotes version:


For now focus on completing your dailies and just save up your Gachapon slips and Assistant Medals.  I will cover the important features later on.

Daily Lucky Bag from the Recharge shop

Changing Channels

You may also start farming monsters but are in a zone full of other players.  It's hard to find groups of monsters when people are crowding your space.  Every zone has multiple channels, multiple versions of the same map.  Changing to another channel makes it easier to find a quiet place to farm as much as possible.

To change channels tap your Minimap to bring up the map.  You can see your current server at the top left, for example NA1.  Tapping on the icon to the right of the server will bring up the channel change interface.

Select the language of the server from the dropdown on the left, then tap on the "Enter Line #" circle on the right side and type in a number.  Click "Change Channel" to switch to that server.  You can do this in town and out in the field which makes it much easier to find a farm spot these days.

Change server Icon at the top left of the Map

Change server interface

Daily Music Box

As mentioned in the Combat Time section you can listen to the Jukebox every day to earn another 90 minutes of Combat Time.  Since this increases the amount of experience and zeny gained every day and you're going to need to start farming mobs to level since the next quest starts at level 33 you'll probably want to start doing this.

Head south out of Protera City and find the Jukebox near the top of the zone.  Standing here while music is playing gives you another 3 minutes of combat time for every minute you stand idle.  So you only need to stand there for 30 minutes to gain all of your daily time.  You can find a Jukebox in several places such as your Guild Hall, however the one outside of South Prontera on Channel 1 (NA1 in the case of global) will always be loaded up with music.  Someone has to spend Zeny to load up the Jukebox with music and usually NA1 has tons stored up so you won't have to spend anything, it's very convenient.

To check how much you've earned open the More menu and select Settings.  Then tap the information icon at the top right of the game settings menu.  This will bring up a help dialog that shows battle duration and the amount of time you've earned from listening to music.

South Prontera Jukebox

Finding your Accumulated Jukebox Time

Daily Routine

At this point you should be doing the following each day:


If you've run out of combat time and want to work on something useful then focus on Adventure Exp.  There are some great skills at higher ranks like a way to respec for free, a skill that combines all your buffs into one, additional skill pages, and many other goodies.