Getting Started

A 3-minute tour of Tower Craft. By the end of this page you'll know how to gather resources, place your first tower, and survive the first wave.

The two-panel world

Tower Craft's whole hook is the two panels you play simultaneously:

• Left panel — Resource World. Your character walks around, harvests nodes (stone, wood, copper, etc.), and feeds them into crafting stations to produce towers and processed materials. Click to walk, click a node to harvest.
• Right panel — Tower Defense. Enemies walk a fixed path from start to end. You place towers from your inventory to stop them before they leak. Each leak costs you a life.

You're playing both at the same time. The crafting clock is always running. The wave clock is always running. The interesting part is the juggling.

The basic loop

1. Gather raw materials from nodes on the left.
2. Craft them into towers at the workbench (and later, the furnace, anvil, enchanter, void forge).
3. Place the crafted towers on the defense board on the right.
4. Survive the wave. You earn 1 Research Point per wave survived, spendable in the tech tree to unlock new branches.
5. Repeat for 30 waves. Wave 30 ends with a boss — kill it for the win.

Your first wave

When the game starts you're in a 20-second prep phase. Use it:

• Walk to a stone node, click it, wait for the harvest bar.
• Repeat with wood. You need at least 5 stone + 2 wood to craft your first tower (a Stone Lobber).
• Click the Workbench. Queue a "Stone Lobber" recipe. Wait a few seconds for it to finish — it appears in your inventory as an item.
• Switch to the right panel. The board has 12 slots adjacent to the path. Click an empty slot. The placement menu shows your craftable towers. Click "Stone Lobber" → BUILD.

The wave starts when prep ends OR when you click START WAVE EARLY (which gives a small resource bonus). Enemies appear at the path entrance and walk to the exit. Your tower fires at them automatically.

You start with 10 lives. Each enemy that reaches the exit costs you 1. Hit 0 → game over.

Right-clicking is your friend

The right-click gesture is reserved for the inspect action:

• Right-click an enemy → opens the compendium with that enemy's full stat sheet highlighted
• Right-click a tower → same, but for the tower

This is the fastest way to look up "wait, what does that thing do?" mid-wave.

Tech tree

Press the beaker icon (top-left of the resource panel) to open the tech tree. Each unlocked node either gates a recipe (e.g. Iron Working unlocks Iron Cannon) or grants a passive bonus. Three branches:

• Physical (left) — Iron Working → Fortification → Steel Mastery
• Utility (center) — Advanced Smelting → Efficient Gathering → Logistics
• Energy (right) — Crystal Attunement → Arcane Towers → Crystal Resonance

Tier 4 (Void Mastery) requires any two Tier-3 nodes.

You can't unlock everything in one run. Pick a branch.

Path traps vs slot towers

Two kinds of placement:

• Slot towers sit in 12 fixed positions adjacent to the path. They're permanent and fire on cooldown. (Stone Lobber, Iron Cannon, Crystal Beam, etc.)
• Path towers sit on the path itself. They have HP and break after a limited number of triggers, but they can stack damage on enemies that walk through them. (Spike Trap, Wood Barricade.)

Click an empty slot to open the slot menu, click directly on the path to open the path-trap menu.

Where to go from here

• Towers — full stat sheet for every tower in the game
• Enemies — what each enemy does and how to counter them
• Strategies — build orders and wave-by-wave tips
• Multiplayer — co-op rules