Grim Clicker Guide: Tips and Strategies

What appeared to be a lackluster game from the 80s that I had zero expectations of ended up consuming hours of my life ever since I downloaded it. Grim Clicker is a deceptively fun game that managed to tickle the right parts of my brain and kept me returning to it for more dopamine hits. No wonder the game has had a cult following for such a long time.

In this guide, I’ll be discussing the basics of Grim Clicker and some of the mechanics to help you get started on this neverending grind for more power.

Game Objective

The main objective is to power up your character so that they can defeat progressively tougher enemies. Your character never dies or takes damage so the only goal is to scale them. Pretty standard stuff for a clicker game. Oh and if you love such games, then you must check out these underrated idle games for PC.

However, Grim Clicker has a very unique leveling and reset system, which makes for an interesting gaming experience.

Know Your Skills

Skills make your character more powerful. You receive 3 skill points per level and you can distribute them across the basic starting skill trees.

There are three skill trees at the start and you unlock more as you approach the end of the skill tree, but we’ll discuss that in another guide.

1. Strength – The strength tree focuses on raw and scaling over time damage.

2. Dexterity – Dexterity focuses on energy regeneration and critical hits.

3. Wisdom – Wisdom focuses on mana regen and magic damage amplifiers.

You can create any build at the beginning of the game, but as the enemies get stronger, you’ll need the right damage multiplier to defeat them effectively.

Spoiler Warning – The following guide contains spoilers. You were warned.

What’s the Best Weapon?

There aren’t ‘best’ weapons in Grim Clicker. What matters is that you build your weapons correctly so that you can take advantage of the in-game mechanics.

You can upgrade weapons and insert stones to make them more powerful and the best weapon to do this is the Noname Dagger. That’s because:

1. It’s your starting weapon, and it saves you the trouble of finding a weapon with specific stats (stats are important because the higher the base cost, the harder it is to lower it to 1).

2. Increasing its quality is easier than with other weapons, as it has a hidden 25% discount on Iron.

The goal here is to bring the upgrade cost of the Noname Dagger to 1 and charm it with a Stone of Excellence so that you scale your damage nearly infinitely. However, if you’re trying to have fun, feel free to use any weapon you like.

Flame Power

Before we discuss Flame Power, we must first understand the relationship between Candles and Black Wax. In Grim Clicker, bosses and elites drop candles when defeated, and when you perform a ritual, those candles turn into Black Wax.

The amount of Black Wax you get is multiplied by your Flame Power. You start off with 1.0 Flame Power and to increase it you must gather Black Wax before passing Zone 40.

So once you have a strong enough build, do not choose the “Accept Reward and Leave The Shard” option. Farm some Black Wax so that you can rack up more Flame Power going into the next Shard.

What is Black Wax and Why is it Important?

There is meta progression in Grim Clicker and you can use Black Wax to unlock more perks and level quicker.

You can ignore the Usurpation Return and Initial Damage perks and focus on the rest. I usually focus on the Experience Gain perk as it helps me level up faster and unlock more skills.

A Note on Shards

Shards are similar to worlds. Once you pass zone 40, you’ll have the option to leave your current Shard and travel to another one.

Some shards have additional modifiers, which you’ll discover later on.

How to get Shards (Currency)?

Shards are premium currency. You can use it to buy in-game items such as weapons, potions, stones, chests, and other stuff. There aren’t a lot of ways to earn shards in the game (other than paying for it) so spend them wisely. Here are a few ways to earn shards in Grim Clicker:

1. Completing Quests – Finishing quests gives you 4 Shards. Once finished, new quests will appear every few hours.

2. Eliminating Bosses – Bosses appear every 10th Zone and defeating them for the FIRST time grants you shards.

How to Get Singularity points

There are 8 shards within a Galaxy, and once you finish all 8 of them, you travel to another Galaxy through a Black Hole.

In Grim Clicker, you get 1 Singularity point for traveling through the Black Hole and you can use it to unlock Legacy skills that greatly buff your character.

To open the Singularity menu, select the Space icon to the right of Global Achievements and click on Info. You also get two free Singularity Point resets so use them wisely.

However, that’s super late-game stuff, so don’t worry about it now, and simply focus on completing the Shards first.

Beginner Friendly Builds

Although you can take different build paths, there are a few beginner-friendly builds in Grim Clicker that’ll help you scale efficiently through the early game. Once you have unlocked enough perks, feel free to experiment with different skills.

Raw Strength

The build is not polished and can be greatly optimized. I managed to whip it up when I first started playing the game, which was quite powerful.

This is a simple strength scaling build that focuses on brute forcing through the enemy and is quite effective for Shard 1. If you don’t deal enough damage to the bosses, simply put a point in the Fire Sword and it’ll take care of the boss.

Crit Build

This build focuses on dealing critical damage to enemies. The strength-focused build wasn’t scaling quickly enough for me, and although there was a viable build path using March and Indefatigability, I liked this one better. It may not be as fast as the strength builds, but this is way more consistent and by the end of Zone 39, I was dealing upwards of 10 trillion damage per critical hit.

The goal here is to sustain the Rage of Darkness indefinitely with Photosynthesis and boost the critical damage with Right on Target. I am also using the Wind King Mask to quickly rack up more crit damage from the soul bar (top right corner).

You can experiment with lots of builds. Some skills even unlock new character transformations that give you access to whole new skill trees in the late game. Good luck discovering all of them!