Getting Started

Everything a new arrival needs in their first hour.

Your First Session

The Golden Rules

Character Creation

You get 3 character slots per account. Creating a hero is a single decision across four fields — each fairly durable, though race, class, and specialization can later be redone with a Diamond Mall potion.

The Four Choices

Starting Condition

Every new hero begins at level 1 with 60 gold, empty equipment slots, and spawns at a fixed point inside their home zone's capital block. Your starting attributes come entirely from your race choice — there is no free-allocation pool at creation; your first discretionary attribute points arrive with your first level-up (3 points per level thereafter).

Attributes & Derived Stats

Hero’s Ark uses five core attributes. Every character starts at a base of 10 in each, modified by race, and gains 3 free points per level to allocate however you like — there is no cap or softcap on any single attribute.

Derived Formulas

All formulas use your effective attribute — base 10 + race modifier + allocated points + equipment bonuses — and your character level.

Where Points Come From

• Race: a fixed modifier per attribute, applied once at creation (see Races).
• Leveling: +3 unspent points every level, allocated one attribute at a time, permanently.
• Equipment: weapon/armor/accessory items can carry flat attribute or ATK/DEF/MAG bonuses on top of your base stats.

Combat System

Combat is turn-based and triggered by random encounters as you move, by attacking dungeon monsters, roaming World Bosses, or rival kingdoms. Every fight is you versus one monster (or, for kingdom warfare, army versus army — see Armies & Warfare).

Damage

Each side's hit is resolved the same way:

A fight ends when one side's HP reaches 0, or you flee. There is no accuracy/miss roll outside of Critical Hits and class control abilities — every attack that isn't dodged by an ability effect connects.

Monster Tiers

Every monster belongs to one of three tiers, which multiply its base HP/ATK/DEF (computed from its level):

Your Resource Bar

Once you've chosen a class, you fight with a resource bar that fuels your abilities: Mana (Cleric, Mage, Necromancer), Focus (Ranger), Energy (Rogue), or a bar that builds as you fight rather than regenerating — Rage (Warrior) and Holy Power (Paladin). Abilities cost 1–50 resource and unlock at specific levels — see each class's ability list in Classes.

Mana works differently from every other resource. Rage, Energy, Focus, and Holy Power start each fight empty and build or regenerate during it — but Mana persists between fights: you enter combat with whatever you actually have left, and it only comes back from kills (each victory restores 10% of your maximum), potions, or resting at an Inn. In exchange, the three Mana classes get Magic Bolt — a basic attack costing just 1 Mana that strikes with your Magic stat instead of your Attack, so a caster is never reduced to feeble weapon swings.

Fleeing and Defeat

You can attempt to flee most fights. If your HP reaches 0, you're returned to your zone's capital with your HP restored to half of max and lose a portion of your carried gold — a setback, not a full loot-drop.

Leveling & Progression

The level cap is 100 — a hard cap enforced on every XP source — and the world's ten zones ladder up to exactly that.

Experience

Every kill grants a fixed amount of XP (set per monster). When your XP meets the threshold for your current level, you level up — potentially several times off one big kill. Each level:

• Grants +3 attribute points to allocate.
• Advances you along a fixed 100-row level curve — the old compounding ×1.28 formula is gone, replaced by a hand-tuned per-level table that tops out at level 100.
• Recalculates your Max HP and, if classed, Max Resource — and fully restores both.

The Level Curve

A sample of the XP needed to clear each level (the full table has one row per level; roughly 2.43 billion XP separates level 1 from level 100):

XP Multipliers

All experience bonuses are additive on top of your base 1×:

Zone Difficulty Curve

Each of the 10 zones hosts monsters spanning one 10-level band, so the world doubles as a level guide:

Ability & Specialization Milestones

Equipment & Crafting

Every hero has three equipment slots — Weapon, Armor, and Accessory — filled with items crafted by your professions or dropped by monsters. Two specializations open a fourth slot: the Warrior's Guardian and Paladin's Protector unlock a 🛡 Shield slot (see Shield Smith), and the Rogue's Outlaw unlocks an Off-hand slot — a second weapon contributing at 60% effectiveness.

Item Tiers & Name Colors

Item names are color-coded by the level of gear they represent, so a bag or market listing reads at a glance:

Two special cases outrank the ladder: ✨ Excellent items (cyan) — superior rolls of a base item; Excellent food and potions stack to 10 per slot just like their originals, in their own separate stacks — and Unique items (gold), like the Potion of Forgotten Self and the three Jewels.

The Six Professions

You choose exactly 2 at character creation, both starting at profession level 1, and can buy more at the Diamond Mall — three additional at 500/1,000/2,000💎, plus Shield Smith at a flat 250💎 (free for Guardians and Protectors, granted with their spec). Profession levels rise by crafting, unlocking higher-tier recipes.

Materials

Recipes consume gathered/dropped materials — ore, wood, herb, gem, and meat — plus profession-specific components (like sharpening_stone or smiths_hammer) earned from monster drops. Each zone also offers a themed set of recipes at each of levels 10 through 100, named after that zone (e.g. an "Aldenmoor Blade" at level 10, a "Thornwood Blade" at level 20), scaled to match the zone's monster levels from Progression. Materials live in your resource bag (10 slots to start, expandable to 50; stacks of 99 per slot) — when it fills up you can deposit into a holding's stockpile, spend them crafting, or click a stack in the Inventory tab to destroy any amount and free the slot.

Crafting XP

Every successful craft grants profession XP toward your next profession level, gating access to that profession's higher-tier recipes — independent of your character level.

Rarity

Most crafted and dropped gear has no rarity tag at all — it's just judged on its stats. A small number of items instead carry a Unique rarity: one-of-a-kind effects that can't be crafted or bought, only earned. The Potion of Forgotten Self (see Progression and Achievements) is the first of these.

The 18 Races

Race is chosen at character creation, and changeable later only with a Potion of Rebirth from the Diamond Mall. Each sets a modifier on all five attributes, applied over a base of 10. Green is a bonus, red a penalty.

At a Glance

Race Compendium

The 7 Classes

Class is chosen once at character creation and sets your resource bar, armor type, and ability kit. At level 15 you also choose one of 3 Specializations for your class — resettable later with a Potion of Unlearning from the Diamond Mall.

Class Compendium

Every class has two abilities from level 1, unlocks more as it levels (through a level-75 capstone), and some gain a specialization-exclusive ability at level 20 — shown below tagged with the spec that grants it. The three Mana classes additionally always have Magic Bolt. Each entry lists its unlock level, resource cost, effect type, and power — the coefficient applied to its scaling attribute (e.g. ×1.4 INT means the effect scales with 1.4× your Intelligence). Buffs, debuffs, control, and party-wide aura effects have no direct magnitude and are described in the Effect column.

Fighting as a Party

Fights are individual, but support crosses them. While in a party with allies on the same map (and same dungeon instance), several abilities gain a target picker:

• Ally healing — Clerics and Paladins casting any heal can choose themselves or an ally. Ally heals are server-capped by the caster's INT (20 + INT × 4).
• Renew as a heal-over-time — a Cleric's Renew cast on an ally becomes a 10-minute blessing that mends them at the start of every enemy turn (per-tick amount capped at 5 + INT).
• Ally shields — a Cleric's Sanctuary or Divine Shield can be raised over an ally: for 10 minutes they begin every fight with that many absorb points (capped at 20 + 4×max(INT,VIT)).
• Party auras — the Warlord's Battle Shout and Herald's Blessing of Might grant 4 + level÷5 STR to the whole party for 10 minutes. Auras stack with feast and elixir buffs on the same attribute rather than overwriting them; recasting only refreshes the aura layer.
• Taunts — in shared boss and dungeon fights, a Warrior's Taunt or Paladin's Challenge turns the enemy's fury onto the tank.

World Map & Regions

The world is 10 separate 25×25 tile zones, each scaled to a 10-level band of monsters (see Progression).

Reading a Zone

Each 25×25 zone is carved into 5×5 blocks. The center block (block 2,2) is always the Capital — the zone's single highest-value, highest-tax holding, and where every new hero in that zone spawns. The other 24 blocks are ordinary Kingdom plots, free to claim until a player takes them. Tiles are also marked Wall (impassable), Travel (safe waypoints), or Dungeon entrances.

Adventuring & PvE

Three sources of PvE combat exist beyond ordinary wandering encounters: random field monsters, instanced Dungeons, and roaming World Bosses. Exploring also turns up hand-placed Quests.

Random Encounters

Moving onto an unsafe tile can trigger a fight against one of that zone's field monsters (Mob, Elite, or Boss tier — see Combat). Kingdom, Capital, and Travel tiles never trigger encounters.

Dungeons

Dungeon entrances lead to an instanced layout with their own monster roster, separate from the open zone. Entering marks your return point, so you can step back out to exactly where you left the overworld. Every zone now has one — ten in all, each a 14×24 layout stocked entirely with Veteran and Blessed variants of that zone's own monsters:

Killing your first monster inside starts a 60-minute clock; if it runs out before you clear every monster, you're sent back to the entrance. Clearing a dungeon (and clearing it fast) is rewarded — see Achievements.

Daily Dungeon Chests

When the final monster in a dungeon falls, a 🎁 treasure chest appears on that tile. Opening it pays gold scaled to the dungeon's level (top monster level × 20, plus up to ×15 more at random) and a scatter of all ten materials — each rolling 0–25, heavily skewed toward small amounts, with a rare jackpot. You can open 3 chests per day (6 with an active Subscription); the allowance resets at 4am CT.

World Bosses

Every overworld step has a 1-in-3,000 chance to spawn a World Boss somewhere on that zone, if none is already active — so an active zone sees them regularly. The boss is built from the zone's toughest monster and styled «Name» the Ravager, scaled up dramatically: 5× its normal HP and roughly 2× its Attack/Defense — with gold and XP rewards to match (10× normal). It never lands on a Kingdom, Capital, Travel, or Dungeon tile, and despawns after 30 minutes if not defeated.

The Boss Radar (a 500💎 Diamond Mall unlock) lists every active World Boss across all maps in your compass and can ride you straight to one, provided your mount is strong enough to cover the distance.

Blessed Monsters & Unique Jewels

A Blessed monster variant (marked ✨ on the map) turns up among a zone's field monsters and fills the dungeons alongside Veterans. Every Blessed kill makes three independent 1-in-1,000 rolls, one for each of the game's Unique Jewels. Any that drop are delivered to your mailbox and announced in Global chat, and each grants a small permanent boost when claimed:

Towns, Services & Trade

Beyond monsters and kingdoms, every non-dungeon zone has a handful of fixed service tiles clustered near its center, plus an account-wide Diamond economy that spans all your heroes.

Service Tiles

The Realm Bank

The Realm Bank holds three separate vaults, each with its own slot count:

• Personal vault — this hero's own storage (10 slots to start), identical on every map you visit.
• Account bank — 5 slots to start, shared by all the heroes on your account, so it's the way to pass gear between your own characters.
• Guild bank — a set of item vaults (one per item type), plus shared gold and resources, gated by your guild rank's permissions (see Guilds).

Personal, resource-bag, and account-bank slot counts can each be expanded up to 50 at the Diamond Mall.

The Player Market

At the 🏪 tile you can list any item or material from your bags for sale, priced in gold or Diamonds. Listed goods are held in escrow — you can cancel a listing any time to get them back — and you can keep up to 10 active listings at once. Gold changes hands between heroes; Diamonds, being account-wide, move between accounts.

Auto-Battle

Outside dungeons you can hand grinding off to Auto-Battle, which spends Auto Tokens to fight for you. Each hero holds up to 100 tokens, refilling over time; capacity can be raised permanently at the Diamond Mall (in bundles of +100, +200, +500, or +1,000). Preferences let you choose attack vs. Magic Bolt as the default action, use potions to auto-heal below 40% HP, and eat food to keep a Max-HP feast running — food is only eaten when no food buff is active, so automation never overrides a feast you picked yourself.

Action speed comes in three tiers: 2.5s for everyone, 1.5s with the Staff of Haste, and 1s with the Staff plus an active Subscription. With the Gloves of Sticky Fingers, your hero also auto-harvests any resource node they're standing on mid-grind (spending a token, same as an attack).

Rankings

The 🏆 Rankings tab tracks five realm-wide leaderboards: Highest Level, Most Kingdoms Owned (capitals flagged separately), 🚧 Top Construction Donators — every resource donated to an Airship Port earns 1 point of Construction Effort — Master Crafters (one board per profession), and Fastest Dungeon Clears — each hero's best run, timed from first kill to the final monster's fall.

The Diamond Mall

Diamonds (💎) are an account-wide premium currency shared across all your heroes. You earn them from achievements (100 apiece), the daily Subscription bonus, or buy them directly (via PayPal): $1 → 100, $5 → 550, $20 → 2,400, $50 → 6,500, $100 → 14,000. They can also be converted into gold: 100💎 → 1,000g, 500 → 5,500, 2,000 → 24,000, 5,000 → 65,000. Everything else the Mall sells is a permanent, account-friendly convenience — never raw combat power:

Subscription

A $14.99 / 30-day account-wide subscription — a one-off purchase, not auto-renewing, and buying again stacks more days. While active it grants:

• 💎 100 Diamonds every day you log in
• ✨ +100% XP on every hero (stacks additively with Inn and Jewel bonuses)
• 🎁 6 daily dungeon chests instead of 3
• ⚡ The 1-second Auto-Battle speed (also requires the Staff of Haste)
• 🔨 Multi-craft — craft 5× or 10× in one click

Quests

Quests currently take the form of Diary Pages — journal entries hidden around a zone that unlock a short piece of story and an XP reward once you track them all down.

How Diary Pages Work

Seven diary lines exist today — one in each of the first seven zones. Each is 10 pages, read in Quest Log order rather than the order you stumble across them, and each caps off with an achievement for finishing the set.

Aldenmoor Heartlands: A Stranger's Journal

Ten pages scattered across Aldenmoor Heartlands tell the story of a mage who wakes with no memory of who he is, and studies the zone's monsters — the only other living things around — to try to find out. His path runs from waking up, to raising Heart of The Lands as a controlled place to study them, to finding the crossing west into Thornwood Reaches. Completing all ten is worth 975 XP and unlocks Light Reading.

Thornwood Reaches: The Wellkeeper's Pages

The second set, ten shredded pages found across Thornwood Reaches, follows a darker thread beneath the green — the orcish wellkeepers, the things that do not bleed, and the script written beneath the skin — before pointing on toward Ashen Vale. Completing all ten is worth 3,280 XP and unlocks More Strange Pages.

Ashen Vale: A Chapter on War

The third set turns to open conquest — marshaling a host, breaking a vanguard, raising siege towers, and taking a throne — across ten pages in Ashen Vale. Completing all ten is worth 5,005 XP and unlocks A Chapter on War.

Mirefen Lowlands: The Jewelhunter's Notes

The fourth set follows a hunter of the three Unique Jewels through the bogs — the glow in the reeds, the witches' hoards, and the horror that swallowed a star — before the trail runs north. Completing all ten is worth 6,475 XP and unlocks Shiny Object Syndrome.

Frostpeak Highlands: The Warden's Watch

The fifth set is a frontier warden's log of the things testing the gate — readiness, iron against giants, and the cold beneath the cold. Completing all ten is worth 7,200 XP and unlocks The Gatecrashers.

Sunscorch Wastes: The Ascendant's Ledger

The sixth set is a climber's ledger of self-improvement in the wastes — raw materials, real blades, and the sum of what one carries. Completing all ten is worth 8,115 XP and unlocks The Last Percent.

Gloomdeep Hollow: The Perfectionist's Journal

The seventh set descends into obsession in the dark — feeding the forge, the arithmetic of perfection, and what it takes to climb back out. Completing all ten is worth 8,925 XP and unlocks Excellent, or Nothing.

Achievements

Twenty-seven achievements exist today: a clear and a fast-clear for each of the ten dungeons, plus one for finishing each of the seven diary lines. Each is one-time per character, and posts a Global chat announcement the moment you earn it. Every normal clear and diary completion pays 100 Diamonds; every fast clear (45+ minutes left on the clock) awards a Potion of Forgotten Self.

Dungeon Mastery

Diary Lines

Kingdoms

Each zone has 24 unclaimed Kingdom plots plus one Capital at its center. Claiming a plot opens the full economy and warfare layer.

Claiming

Any unclaimed Kingdom plot can be claimed by a character with at least 500 gold, which is spent immediately on claim. Claiming also provisions your first Generals (see Armies & Warfare). A plot stays yours until another player's army defeats your defenders down to 0 troops, at which point it falls back to unclaimed with a reduced starting garrison.

Buildings

Each holding can build and upgrade the following, at a flat cost of (next level + 1) × 100 gold per level regardless of building type:

Resources & Economy

Two currencies drive the kingdom layer: personal Gold (carried by your hero) and each holding's Treasury and Resource stockpile.

Resource Types

Production buildings accrue ore, wood, herb, gem, and meat at a flat rate of 2 per building level per hour, capped at 24 hours of unclaimed accrual — so there's no benefit to checking in more than once a day, but no penalty for checking in less either. Collecting moves accrued resources into the holding's stockpile.

Gold & Taxation

Every monster kill on claimed land pays a cut of its gold reward to the holding's treasury, up to a rate the owner sets:

Because every new hero spawns inside their zone's Capital block, a Capital owner taxing at the maximum rate collects up to half of every new player's earliest kills.

Deposits & Withdrawals

A holding's owner (and any guild member with the right permission — see Guilds) can move resources and gold between their personal inventory and the kingdom stockpile via deposit/withdraw actions, which also power the Barracks/Housing/Walls/Building upgrade costs in Kingdoms. The Collect Treasury Gold button on any holding you own — ordinary kingdom or Capital — empties its accumulated tax treasury into your hero's gold.

Armies & Warfare

Kingdom-vs-kingdom combat is asynchronous: you send troops under a General to raid a rival holding on your own zone, and the outcome resolves immediately based on both sides' strength.

Training Troops

Troops cost 10 gold each to train, capped by your Housing level (max troops = Housing level × 50).

Generals

Claiming a holding provisions your Generals, each with a Rank (increases with victories, granting +3% attack power per rank) and one of three specializations:

Resolving an Attack

You choose a holding to send troops from, a General, and a unit count (up to your available, non-cooldown troops). Both sides' power is randomized ±15% and compared:

• Attack Power = units × attacker's troop ATK × (1 + Rank×0.03) × specialization multiplier × random(0.85–1.15)
• Defense Power = defender's available troops × defender's troop DEF × random(0.85–1.15) + defender's Walls level × 5

If Attack Power exceeds Defense Power, you win: survivors return between 55–95% of sent units (better with a bigger margin), you plunder some of the defender's treasury (50 gold + 3 gold/unit sent, capped by what they have), and the defender loses 20–40% of their troops. If the defender is reduced to 0 troops, their holding is sacked — it falls back to unclaimed. If you lose, survivors drop to 10–60% of sent units, and a loss so lopsided that your Attack Power is under half the defense counts as a Rout.

Cooldowns

A General and the troops they led become unavailable for 8 hours after any attack, or 48 hours if the attack was routed.

Guilds & Communication

Guilds are simple, permission-based player groups with a shared bank and chat channel. The guild bank — a separate item vault for each item type, plus shared gold and resources — lives at the Realm Bank.

Guild Basics

Any player can create a guild or join/leave an existing one. Guilds have ranks, each independently configurable with these permissions:

The guild master always has full access to every bank type regardless of rank. Newly created ranks start with no bank access until the master ticks the categories they should have.

The Guild Bank

The item side of the guild bank is split by item type — each type has its own storage with its own slot count, so filling one never eats into another:

Potions and food of the same type stack up to 10 per slot; gear takes one slot each. Unique items can't be stored in the guild bank. Shared gold and resources sit alongside these vaults, with the resource bag holding up to 25 stacks of 99.

World Chat

Five channels are always available:

• Global — every hero in the realm
• Trade — buy/sell discussion, realm-wide
• Guild — your guild only
• Party — your current party only
• Whispers — private messages between two heroes (click any name in chat to whisper them)

An ⚙ Options button on the chat tabs opens display settings: choose how many messages each channel shows (10–50), or hide the chat dock entirely from the world-map and dungeon views — the dedicated Chat tab always remains. Settings are remembered per device.

A sixth, read-only System Announcement channel carries admin messages in a distinct gold-bordered style with a realtime toast notification — players cannot post to it.

Player vs. Player

Hero’s Ark does not currently have live, duel-style PvP. Player conflict happens entirely through the asynchronous kingdom-warfare system described in Armies & Warfare — sending troops to raid, plunder, and potentially sack a rival's claimed holding.

Glossary

Quick definitions of the terms used throughout Hero’s Ark and this guide.

About This Guide

A complete, self-contained reference for Hero’s Ark, ready to drop into a guide site.

What's Inside

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