GemCraft Walkthrough

The tower defense game where a single wizard and his near-endless supply of mana is used to annihilate the incoming vermin that wish to bring ruin to his home, you must track down the source of the vermin and rid the land of them using your mastery of gems and their hidden powers.

The gameplay of GemCraft takes place on a field with a road. This road goes from a monster's den to your house, and the road is (sometimes) littered with towers that you can place your gems into. There is a small delay between placement and activation, so keep this in mind.

Gems are created by clicking Create Gem and then anywhere on the grid below, the gem color created is completely random, so a bit of luck is involved in this. The more sides a gem has, the more powerful it is. How Pure a gem is also has a factor in its power.

Gems can be combined by using the Combine Gem option, up to a maximum of three colors, after which, it begins to eliminate the weakest colors. The power of the gem colors are combined, but they also take a small penalty to the capabilities of their special ability depending on the impurity. When two gems of the same grade are combined, they are upgraded to the next grade of gem. Because of the randomness of what gems you get, it's smarter to mass-create low-tier gems and combine them from there since you don't save any mana creating high-grade gems.

You can build towers and trenches along the road. Towers house gems, and the trenches will slow down enemies which when combined with blue gems and red gems can get your enemies stuck in one place, allowing you to do massive amounts of damage quickly. The cost of trenches and towers increase with each subsequent structure.

As a wizard, you have access to two spells, one that increases your mana pool, and another that sacrifices a gem to obliterate your enemies. By increasing your mana pool, the maximum mana and regen speed, and thus the gems you can create, all increase, along with the cost of the actual spell. Gem bombs sacrifice a gemstone and do major damage to all enemies caught in the sizable blast radius. Proper usage of both of these are required to win in the harder stages.

When you clear a stage in Gemcraft, your points are shown. If you beat your high score, you gain experience, which gives skillpoints. These skillpoints can be used to increase your initial mana, give you gems at the start, reduce costs, and improve the power of your gems as a whole. There aren't many limits on how many points you can get on a single stage, but repeating the same stage over and over without beating your high score wont earn you any points at all.

Depending on things you accomplish in battle, such as combining certain amounts of gems or killing a certain amount of monsters consecutively, you can further increase your score on the stage, so go absolutely crazy when you need to get that golden frame.