Loop Hero: Beginner’s guide to delving the depths

Fine, I’ll admit it. Loop Hero was a bit difficult to understand — at first. Only after quite a bit of trial and error, do some of the game’s underlying strategies begin to surface. It certainly left me with a bad taste in my mouth, which I would rather all of you avoid.

So, how about we save a few hours, cut out the middle man, and bring you a hot load of hints, right off the burner? Here are just a few of the ways to maximize your adventuring in the wasteland.

You can’t use potions?

As crazy as it might sound, battles are not the only thing that happens automatically in Loop Hero. I was shocked to realize that I have no control over potion usage, either. Instead, there is a small arrow over top of the health bar that you can see in the screenshot below, circled in red. That little blue notch is the key to understanding how potions are applied. Simply put, any time your health dips below that position, a potion is automatically applied.

Additionally, the notch will change position depending upon how many potions are remaining in your pack. Initially, the notch is positioned at slightly less than half health. The fewer potions in-hand, the lower the notch slides down the bar. For this reason, it’s critical to always remain aware of where you are, health-wise. The number of potions in your pack and their overall effectiveness may evolve over time, but this core mechanic always remains the same.

Bundling your tiles

One of the key concepts to succeeding in Loop Hero is the strategic positioning of different tiles that complement each other. A fairly straightforward example is grouping a certain type of environmental modifier tile like the swamp, cemetery, or forest with either one (or a series of) road lantern(s). This helps to prevent any of the monster infestations from becoming excessively overwhelming.

Better yet, you may want to consider grouping your environmental modifiers as an exclave, wrapping around your lantern. Positioning it in the manner shown in the screenshot below (circled in red) is the ideal way to utilize this sort of loop formation, and fully maximizes the entire area of effect for the lantern. Also, remember that the effects of lanterns can stack, so feel free to tightly group them if you’re having difficulty keeping a particularly difficult batch of beasts at bay.

Combining tiles

This topic is probably ripe for its own guide, later on down the road, but here are a few tile combinations that I encountered organically. As mentioned in our Loop Hero review, any combination of rocks/mountains in a 3×3 grid will form a mountain peak. This provides an additional 125 hit points automatically, and can be chained to directly adjacent mountain/rock tiles for an additional 5 points per tile.

Another interesting environmental tile is the Meadow, which is somehow 50% more effective when placed next to anything other than another Meadow. Time to invest in that Meadow checkerboard design. One last unit to embrace is the Treasury, which can produce extra resources for every other tile directly adjacent. Pro tip: If you manage to completely surround a treasury on all four sides and the four additional diagonals (think a 3×3 grid, with a treasury in the middle), there will be one last, huge dump of resources. This is a payday that you won’t want to miss out on.

Embrace Oblivion

A side effect of placing tiles throughout the map is the random generation of troll encampments. These settlements pop up, directly adjacent to the path, and block all progression until the trolls are cleared out. These nasty little bastards will continuously generate hordes of opposition, for as long as it remains unaddressed. In enters the Oblivion tile, laying waste to everything in its direct vicinity.

The Oblivion’s description states, “Erases any established tiles,” which I originally interpreted as clearing out any tiles I had personally placed. Unfortunately for me, I was very wrong. In fact, the Oblivion tile will clear out any tile on the map. This also includes any items that were placed by the Lich, such as the randomly spawning troll encampments. Don’t be a dummy like me. Be smart and nuke those jerks back to the stone age as soon as they appear.

Loop Hero is currently available for purchase via Steam. For more help with games, check out our other guides.