These are the basic concepts to keep in mind throughout the entirety of your play through.

1. If your conveyor belt starts to get cluttered, line it with walls to force the belt contents to center.
   
   
   • You're going to have a lot of worms. You need a lot of worms. This is where your belt can start getting choked. The walls push the worm scale into line and you won't lose any off the side of the belt.
     
   • It's a good practice to line the belt with walls any place you might end up with a lot of product. Assemblers and other structures will also help to push overhanging items onto the center of the belt.
   
   
2. Flow your raw materials away from your starting island and into your newly purchased additional islands.
   
   
3. Only buy islands in one direction. Don't bother buying secondary islands with the same spawn types. Doing this will only cause you headaches later.
   
   
4. Offload unneeded resources and end products when you can.
   
   • With the exception of worm scale and spider webs, all other raw resources can be shunted to a tower any time you acquire a new assembler.
     
     
   • Most constructed resources can be shunted to a tower after they are created. The exception being what is needed for secondary constructions like coins.
   
   
5. To reduce clutter on your conveyor belt, build assembler constructions as early as you can on the belt.
   
   
   • Walls, conveyors, Bronze coins, and white potions only require worm scale to construct, so construct them early.
     
     
   • Walls, conveyors, and white potions aren't used to construct anything else, so offload them to a tower immediately after construction.
     
     
   • Bronze coins are used for making silver coins later, so both offload and re-belt these equally.
   
   
6. When you can, use area of effect attacks (gas tower / area damage) and line of effect (piercing turret).
   
   
   
   
7. Don't under estimate the value of the area slow to keep units under attack.
   
   
   
8. Before you settle on your final construction for each island, do a "look ahead" to plan for where the "output" of your conveyors should go.
   
   • Click on "Buy Islands" and you will see where your next purchase options will be.
     
     
   • Click on "Buy Islands" again without buying anything to make the preview disappear.
     
     
   • Now you will know where you want your conveyor belt to eventually "end" on this island.
     
     
   • You want to be able to send the output to the next island when you are ready to move on.

Worm island is your starting island. You will need to re-visit this island later in the game.

Just kill what you need to and move on to the next island as soon as you can.

To make the most of Worm island, you first need to unlock the skeleton island.

Spider island is the first additional island you will unlock.

Just like Worm island, you will need to re-visit this one later.

For now, just kill what you need to kill. It should take three crossbows to kill each wave of spiders (before you add more spider generators).

Don't use the area damage yet. Save this for later.

Construct what's needed to move on and buy the next island at your first chance.

Skeleton island is the 2nd island you will unlock. This is when things will get more interesting.

First, claim the chest in the middle of the island. There will be two crossbows and an area damage in it.

Before you un-pause create a pair of long corridors that span either the up-down or left-right of the island.

Skeletons can only be damaged by projectiles from the back, so after each turn place a crossbow behind the flow of the march. Remember the crossbows will also act as a wall to help funnel the skeletons.

It should take three or four crossbows to the back to kill a single wave of skeletons (before you start placing more skeleton generators.)

Remember that area damage from Spider Island that I said not to use? This is where you are going to need it.

Before you start re-doing Worm Island you are going to want to buy the island south of Worm island.

I know I said not to build off branches, this is one of the exceptions.

The new island will be empty, so you don't have to worry about being ready for new monster generators. You also need to construct one extra bridge minimum, but two bridges is helpful, and one more area damage. These should have unlocked when you purchased Skeleton island and transported some of the shields to your tower.

Once you have these items in hand, add one bridge near the worm generators. Add the second bridge off to the left of the island.

The goal is to flow the marching worms onto the empty island giving them a path across the second bridge to your tower.

It only takes two area damages to kill the worms no matter how many worm generators you have going. You want to create an S-turn where the area damage is at the turning points to maximize the worms time in the gas.



Now you might be wondering what is going on with the chamber to the left of the marching worms. I call this the "worm funeral home." It doesn't matter how fast your conveyors are, the worm scale will start to pile up once you have more than six or so worm generators.



The funeral home gives the worm scale a place to pile up and will take a long time before it back flows. It also provides a bank where you can pick up more worm scale if you need it to buy more crossbows or other weapons.

At this point in the game you may not have enough resources to fully farm the worms, but you can always come back and do it later. Prepping for that now makes it easier to farm.

Ideally you want your Worm island to resemble this.



You want Worm island south to resemble this.



Notice that I am building all the end items and immediately shifting them off to the tower on Worm island. I am only transporting half of the Bronze coins and the remaining Worm scale towards Spider island.

Like Worm scale, Spider webs are needed to build other starting items.

Worm scale and Spider webs are also handy items to bulk out your potions with. More on this later.

Like the worms, the spiders can be killed using only area damage. For Spiders you only need four area damages to kill all the spiders no matter how many Spider generators you have active.

Just like the worms you want to create an S corridor, only double S this time, to maximize the Spiders time in the gas.



Your conveyor belt should be getting pretty cluttered now, so use of the wall funnel is advised to get everything to the center of the belts.

You'll also need to build a Silver coin assembler, but I would suggest using a Smart Assembler here to not waste any of the Spider web. You can immediately shift these into your tower because you will not need the Silver coins to construct anything else.

You also want to build a couple of Sorter assemblers. You won't need the sorting function, but you do need the Sorters to build Gold coins on Skeleton island.

All other materials should be sent on to Skeleton island.

Here is where things start to get complicated.



There's a lot going on here and at this point in the game you are not going to be able to build a lot of the stuff you see here.

However, it is good to know where you want to get to so that you can plan accordingly.

My suggestion is to take this in stages. You're going to need a lot of shields so you want to farm as many skeletons as you can. Being able to kill them only from the back makes this one of the more complicated islands.

On your first pass you want to build the walls so that you maximize the long corridors and use the narrow areas for switchbacks. You also want to build so that your input and eventual output sides are clear. If possible your next island should be bought on a right angle like shown in the screenshot.

For now you want to use crossbows on the long corridors and cyclops on the short switchbacks. Crossbows fire further while the cyclops have a short range but fire faster. Also use the area slow to keep the skeletons in the longer corridors. Add area slows to the switchbacks if you have extra.

You won't be able to build more tombstones (skeleton generators) until you purchase the next island.

When you do purchase the next island you want to come back to Skeleton island immediately after stabilizing the new island. Then you can start adding tombstones and take it as a trial and error to see just how many tombstones you can have to kill each wave with however many crossbows and cyclops you can afford.



This is a little cleaned up version of the screenshot above. This makes it easier to see some of the tiles used.

When you do come back here:

1. Place a cauldron to farm shields into red potions. This isn't shown on the screenshot, but the spot to put the cauldron is kind of obvious.
   
2. If you are low on shields, you can funnel some of the extra spider web and worm scale to the cauldron to minimize the number of shields needed to generate a red potion. The cauldron will always make the highest ingredient potion.
   
3. The Advanced Sorters at the bottom of the island is set to remove Bronze and Silver coins from the conveyor and shift them into the tower.

The rest of the islands, including the liquid generator (which really gave me headaches) to come if there is interest.