Idle Arks Guide: Tips & Cheats To Build Arks Quickly

Welcome to Idle Arks, the game where you must create your own ark from the ground up. A massive flood has drowned the entire world, and now you must set sail with only a few logs and hope. The world must be rebuilt, and it is up to you to save the day!

Sail from island to island in search for survivors with the help of our Idle Arks tips and tricks guide. We will go over the basics of game and how to maximize your wood generation, and how to be as efficient as possible. Let’s get started with our Idle Arks cheats, tips, and tricks strategy guide to build arks quickly!

Starting the Adventure

Your quest to rebuild the world in Idle Arks starts out on a lone beach and with Adam, your first survivor. Survivors are important members of your crew – without them, the arks will never be built and your raft will sink.

Your first course of action is to gather up some wood. There are two main currencies in Idle Arks: wood and gems, although gems are the premium currency of the game.

To gather wood, you have to rotate the camera around by swiping the screen. Look for driftwood floating by, then tap on it to make Adam swim out and retrieve it. Once he brings it back to the raft, it will be added to your overall wood count.

In addition to the wood, you may also see bottles floating around. These bottles contain random messages that offer you some insight about life, but they are otherwise worthless, so you can go ahead and ignore them if you want.

You are very dependent on random driftwood for the early portions of each chapter, so make sure that you keep an eye out for more as it drifts by.

You may even seen golden chests, and these are special chests that will reward you with a ton of wood but you have to watch an advertisement before you can open them. If you do not want to deal with ads, they can be safely ignored.

Complete Ark Missions

Since the game sort of just throws you into it, we will explain how to progress and ultimately beat the game. In each chapter you are assigned three “ark missions,” which can be seen by tapping the progress bar at the top right corner of the screen.

Before you can continue your adventure, you will need to ensure your raft is suitable for long-distance sailing. The three ark missions you get are focused on building up your raft, so completing all the missions should be your main priority.

Once you do, you may have to keep building a little bit afterwards, but soon enough your raft will be completed and you can complete the chapter.

If you are ever unsure of what to work towards next, looking at your ark missions is a good place to start. Also, as you complete missions, the progress bar will fill up to show you how close you are to finishing the chapter.

If there are multiple parts to a chapter, there will also be stars underneath the progress bar. When you first one section, you will receive a star. Get all stars to finish the chapter!

Building the Raft

To build the raft, you need lots and lots of wood. When you first start out, your main source of wood will be from the driftwood that floats on by every now and then. Be sure to keep an eye on it.

You can build using one of the two methods: tapping on the blue crystals, or opening the task list at the bottom right corner of the scree. If there is a blue crystal on your raft, that shows that you need to build something there next.

Tapping on the blue crystal will bring up the structure that needs to be built. To access a quick list of the planned buildings, you can tap on the task list. Using the task list is a little faster than individually tapping on each crystal.

For the most part, rafts are what you are going to building most of the time. To be specific, more raft space so that you can build more structures on top.

In order to build as efficiently as possible, you will want to build rafts until you unlock a structure of some sort, like a tree or a carrot farm and so forth. All of these structures boost your overall wood generation rate, making it much easier to earn wood faster in the long run!

Once you build the structure, then you can go back to building more rafts. This way, you will be generating more wood over time that can help you build the rafts faster. It is the ultimate plan to build your raft completely!

Keep an Eye on the Time

Idle Arks features day and night cycles where time passes as your survivors continue to work on the raft. There are four periods of the day: morning, afternoon, evening, and night. When it becomes night time, your survivors will stop what they are doing and turn in for the night.

When you are building the raft, be sure to keep an eye on the time. Once your survivors go to bed, you cannot wake them up at any point until it is morning, so make sure to finish up everything you wanted to before night falls.

To be exact, you should harvest all of your item structures (food farms, trees, etc) before the day is over. During the night, your item structures will probably be ready for harvest when morning rolls around, maximizing profits.

Utilizing More Survivors

Once you complete all tasks and get all stars, you will complete the chapter and you will move onto the next one. Unfortunately this also means that you must start over from scratch with a brand new raft.

But, to offset this, the game will often reward you with an additional survivor, which means you have more helping hands to go around on the raft. With more survivors, your raft can run more smoothly thanks to the extra help.

Your survivors will automatically take care of tasks aboard the raft over time. They will build things when you issue the order and harvest item structures when they are ready. They will NOT, however, swim off the raft to grab driftwood, so you have to do that manually.

You can queue up retrieval actions if you spot multiple items in the ocean. Tapping on an item will make it start flashing, meaning it is in the queue and someone will go fetch it shortly.

Golden Chests

Those random golden chests that you see floating by can be opened by either watching an advertisement or paying 10 gems. They get mighty tempting later on when structures begin to cost astronomical amounts of wood.

Since there is not really anything else to spend gems on, you can go ahead and quick open these golden chests to get a nice chunk of wood if you do not want to wait.

There is one thing to this though – it is better to start opening golden chests during the later parts of chapter than it is early on. The reason being is that the amount of wood inside the golden chests actually scales to how far you are in the current chapter.

So, naturally a golden chest at the beginning of a chapter may hold up to around 5,000 wood, whereas the later chests can have up to around 50,000 wood! Since the gem cost never changes, it is best to hold on for the moment.

That’s all for Idle Arks! If you have any other tips or tricks to share, let us know in the comments below!