Survivor.io guide - Seven tips to get through through the hardest waves

It may seem easy enough to equip your character. Just check the character tab and equip whatever is rarest, right? Well, hold your horses as just because something is rarer doesn't mean it's better. While it may be worth focusing on more generic gear at the start (which boost your ATK, HP, DEF etc.) if you really want to succeed you'll need to pick and choose equipment that boosts a narrower range of stats.

And remember that equipment is expensive in terms of Coins to upgrade, so pick one stat to focus on and stick to it. Attack is one you can't go wrong with, but play around to find which works best for your build.

In every single stage, you will be given the option to pick from a number of different skills. Depending on what enemies you're facing and how each stage is, you might be tempted to pick the same skills that worked before in every single instance. While SOME of these skills might be good (for example, Guardian), not all of them are made equal.

Since with some enemies, it's not ideal to get in melee range, you want to make sure you're eliminating them before they reach you. In that case, the Forcefield Device can work pretty well. However, you can't always rely on it, so you need to understand how to pick the best skills for each chapter.

In the stages where you need to get up close and personal with the enemies, you want to either use Guardian, Forcefield Device, or even the Drones (Type A and Type B). Additionally, the Boomerang or the Drill Shot can be good for dealing with enemies that are slightly far away and create a pathway to escape from tough situations.

Most of the time when you cannot get close to the enemies (take the butterflies, for example, which leave a toxic gas behind), you want to tackle them before they get too close and corner you. In that situation, the Drill Shot and the Lightning Emitter are great, but also the RPG and Molotov. These can cause periodic damage to enemies (or intermittent damage, if you will?) and they can allow you to also have some upgrades to the Katana or Kunai.

Some of the best skills we've found in most situations are the following:

• Drill Shot
• Guardian
• Lightning Emitter
• Forcefield Device
• Ronin Oyoroi
• Eko-Bracer (especially with Guardian)
• Energy Drink
• Sports Shoes

These are some of our favourites, but of course, you can pick your own and you should always adjust the skills and evos you pick based on what you currently have and what you need to further pass the stage.

One of the things that tends to trip people up in the Survivors-like genre is the huge waves of enemies. You may dread seeing them appear, but don't fret because it's easy enough to avoid them. You'll want to always be moving, as the AI in any Survivors-like is very simple, and enemies will just move in your general direction. So staying still means that they can approach you from any direction, meaning it's easy to get surrounded.

In comparison if you're moving they will only alter course to head to where you currently are, not where you're going to be. This effectively means that you can dodge and trail the hordes no matter what, so long as you don't go pulling an 180-degree turn back into the hordes. And since the outline of your character is smaller than it appears, it's even possible to dodge your way through small gaps among enemies.

There are five main items dropped throughout stages you'll want to keep your eye out for: EXP, Coins, HP potions, Magnets and Bombs. Of course, you will have the occasional elite mob chest drop with a free upgrade (or three, if you're lucky), but leaving that aside, we can focus on these five drops.

EXP or energy is what allows you to get more upgrades. Make sure to pick up as much as you can, since that will help you achieve your goal and ultimately pass each chapter.

If you've ever been in a situation where your health was low and you noticed an HP potion on the ground, you probably let out a sigh of relief. That HP potion can turn a battle in your favour quite often, so try to remember their locations and pick them up when your HP bar drops.

Coins are not such a wow factor in the game, but you will need to get as many as possible so you can upgrade your equipment. So, you need to try and open the cardboard boxes and pick up as many as you can!

Magnets will draw all the drops you can see on your current screen. There is a slight delay between when you pick up the magnet and when the items are drawn to you, so you should use that delay to quickly reposition your character so you will have a lot of drops on the screen. Keep that in mind because later on, when you're facing huge waves of monsters, that can really come in handy by giving you a one-up or two-up even.

Bombs essentially eliminate all opponents currently seen on your screen. If you don't have a lot of enemies on the screen at one moment but there is a bomb around, you can try to lure them towards you and then walk over to pick it up. It would be a waste to use a bomb just for a handful of zombies.

This is obviously great, and you need to pick them up every chance you get. They can give you one free upgrade, or three if you are lucky. Whenever such a chest is available, a pointer will appear on the screen leading you to its location.

While it may be nowhere near as unintrusive as Vampire Survivors, it's entirely possible to play Survivor.io with a minimum of ad interruption. However, as with VS you can choose to watch ads in order to acquire some free offers over in the shop. Free Gems and Coins are nothing to be sniffed at, and nobody said you actually had to listen or look at the screen.

The 'Noob' and 'Pro' chests are free goodies. But while you can open the former multiple times a day you can only unlock the latter once. So be sure to check in often and open these, usually by watching a few ads, in order to get some goodies. The more often you manage to open them the easier it'll be to nab more potent gear.

In case you're not sure what to do with all of the grey equipment you've received from the boxes, we have just the solution for you - merge it! Three pieces of the same equipment can be fused into a higher tier one, so you should always save all the pieces you get and use them when you have enough. All you need to do is tap on the equipment piece you want to upgrade, tap on Upgrade, and a menu will automatically open where you can see how many pieces of said gear you own.

Getting full purple gear will take a while if you just upgrade the pieces since the quality is as follows:

• Grey (normal) -> Green (good) -> Blue (better) -> Purple (excellent) -> Yellow (epic) -> Red (legend)

That's our complete guide for Survivor.io. If you follow it, you're sure to max out your gameplay and get better at the game. For similar content, you can read the guide for Last Fortress Underground and Darkest Dungeon guide that will help you crawl those scary caves and dungeons without much fear for your companions!