Weird, because if you open both of your runs on the high scores tab, you can see the same action summary message for both '531' and '603' runs: "High-management run with 5799 logged actions across 10 action types. Most common action was remove (2892 times). Logged telemetry reached level 602 by time 153681." This means that the game knows you've been on level 602.

I had a game crash at 531 (around 900MB of memory), reloaded the game successfully bringing my version to 0.9.5, causing my level to skip to 532 after a wave went by without picking any gems, the memory footprint reduced to 81MB, and upon refreshing the high score page, I realize it just gave me 2 high scores on which will stay at 531 when the game crashed, and a second high score which is showing where my current level is at.

Maybe that's why: https://imgur.com/a/jcj0sYF This option was enabled by default, it google chat says that it prevents fingerprint tracking.

Hmm weird.

@carlHR The saving is based off your Browser's Fingerprint which can change if you switch browsers or computers. I can add an account system but then players will have to login to create an session.

I can see a cookie, possibly yours was deleted? Loading 0.9.4 save to 0.9.5 worked, just lost 1 gem pick.

"I added saving specifically to try to find the root cause of this very strange crash", you say that but you did made an update against save scumming lol Anyways, I have a problem with this. I do recall that I stopped playing yesterday to resume it later, and today the game didn't shown the dialog to continue from my previous run. Is it related to the session id (which changes over time)? Or my ip address (I also use vpn, so also changes)? Or, perhaps, because the game has been updated? I don't see any cookies on this site, so I have no idea what factor you use to identify which run is from.

I do have a run going right now which is up to about level 300 right now and I think has the potential to reach level 1200 depending on the stability of the game on my pc, though it may take me awhile to get that far so we'll see.

If someone can test to see if they can get passed the 700ish level crashes using the Save/Reload, please let me know.

Sorry for the bugs with saving, I added saving specifically to try to find the root cause of this very strange crash. My best guess is the Phaser (https://phaser.io/) version back in 0.6.2 was more stable than the latest 4.1 but that's a guess right now.

Or create a 'Save' button that when pressed, it creates the file on the server, and it forces a page refresh preventing you from opening multiple tabs with duplicated data. Once you load a game, the file disappears from the server, forcing the game data to stay on the canvas. -------------- The only trouble with this approach is that you must remember to save your run, otherwise you'll lose data.

I guess I forgot one minor detail where you could have 2 tabs open and since they share the same seed you could use one tab to fish for a gem that looks good, and if you get a good gem, you could go to the other tab and and effectively place that specific gem at the location of where you want now that you know when it will drop. In that sense, I suppose save scumming can be somewhat broken.

hmm, opened game in other tab and got different gems - somehow one game got 1 more gold proc - could it change seed?

As for what I've seen when it comes to save scumming is, it is still somewhat limited in what you can fish for in a given level. You will always get the same gems for each repick regardless of tab as the seed is going to be the same on both tabs. As a result, the usefulness for save scumming is going to be somewhat limited, meaning if you're wanting to fish for a specific gem, but you don't get it after several repicks, refreshing the page won't give you any better results. It's basically not that different than when I used to start 10 new games in separate windows as a way to save time for finding a run that gives me good luck. Personally, I fine with some level of save scumming if it means we don't lose everything in the event of a crash. Personally, I think the only reasonable way to prevent all save scumming would be to make everything server side in a way where if you make a change in the game in one tab/window, it would automatically make that same change in the other window if you happen to have more than one tab open that points to the same game save. Or if you were to refresh the page and load the game, you would come back to the exact same (workable) state as what you had when you left the game.

I have a run going which is up to level 131. Seeing a new version get released, I opened the game in a new tab to see what would happen, and a new wave started at the same level as I was originally at, effectively causing the game to skip a level in the new tab without me picking any gems. After a bit mor testing, it seems to only let you skip a level that way once. After that, the load game seems to go back one level earlier to start a wave, bringing the game back to the same state it was before refreshing the page, meaning you can still open the game in multiple windows, let the wave go, and still effectively save scum albeit with a little bit of extra waiting.

@JonathanA Yes, tested at lvl 2 to be sure

Out of curiosity, if you click "upgrade chances" after you place the first gem, are the next ones affected by the upgrade?

That's.. another exploit... You can open new tabs and play different runs from a shared starting level, from different tabs at the same time.

Also, a reminder for the future: you may need some 'backwards compatibility' with your game files, otherwise we may close the browser, open it again only to find out that the game won't reload because a new version has been released.

Save exploit found: repicking changes seed for stun RNG - is possible to close game while flying wawe (bad stun RNG) and repick more than before to try again

@scgmeister, I had the exact same thought, wondering if the game speed boost isn't possibly causing the issue. I really don't think this is a RAM leak issue-- your game should never have crashed with only 880MB of RAM in use, if RAM use was the issue. After all, you used to be able to get to much higher levels, right? And the RAM leak was far worse before this year. I got to level 781 (and could have kept going for 300 more levels), and the game was only using 250MB of RAM. Anyhow, I had planned on testing whether the game speed boost could be related (I was already reducing to 1x speed before every level ended in my last run, but that was for the wrong version of the game!) If I get a good run going, I'll check in. Getting a great opal feels more important to surviving now than it used to, at least to me.

Hmm, I'm not sure if this would do much to help with the crashes, but with the speed option, I'm wondering if keeping the game speed normal, or even slowed down slightly during gem selection, then having the game speed back up to the preferred speed after about a second or so when a wave starts?

I'm well aware ai can have a tendency to hallucinate potential fixes to issues based on sites it looks up and how I frame a question/conversation, but every once in awhile it can still successfully point to a solution we may not have thought of. (hense my suggestion on looking into how gems with an aura overlap as I don't think anyone mentioned that yet). That said, it doesn't change the fact that my recent run using 0.9.3 had a higher memory footprint than it did on 0.9.2, and it also crashed before I was even able to reach level 500 to record my score as you can see on my recent screenshot at the time of the crash.

You know that Gemini is using our comments to pinpoint the cause of errors right? If everyone writes that the bug happens because there's a giant pink elephant on the screen, that's what the AI will start telling about this bug.

This time the game crashed at level 419 or something right after selecting a gem, which is worse than the previous version, the game's memory was at 866MB which, again is higher than what it was the last time I played. I also had the performance monitor open an running during the time of the crash. which did give me an error. It stated the debugging connection was closed. reason: render process gone. Here's a screenshot of the maze when I mouse over the crashed tab: https://imgur.com/a/B77lKrH

@carl, according to the crashes I've had, the page just goes white but doesn't display any dialogue box (error) letting us know what's going on. The tab basically just freezes to white (game canvas disappears) to where I can't even use the keyboard shortcut to tab away from the game, much less any other keyborard/mouse inputs. Hmm, I decided to post the issue into google AI to see what it says, and it mentioned something about overlapping auras possibly contributing toward memory issues. google AI also states with near certainty that this issue is not caused by an infinite loop.

Well, I ended my test run early at level 781, having learned nothing useful and not even managing to get a current high score logged, all because, somehow, maddeningly, Firefox was loading the prior version of the game, 0.9.2, not current version 0.9.3. Which means that I'm not actually testing the current game. And also that my high score was relegated to the "Historic high scores" tab, which frankly sucks considering I've been playing this run all day. But more important than not getting to log an actual current high score for a solid run, this means I can't even comment on whether the current version of the game still crashes. It might not-- at level 781 it was still only using 250MB or so of RAM, with no slowdown or glitched enemy movement at all. But this was also v 0.9.2 I'm playing, which did crash for people. @216 has a current high score in v 0.9.3 at level 267, but that's long, long before the game would have crashed if it's still prone to crashing. So I've learned nothing, and can share nothing useful, and didn't even get a high score out of it. This game. . . I'll probably try another run tomorrow. But for those who might experience the same issue, I guess make sure you're playing the current version of the game, or the same thing could happen to you! (The only way I know of to do this is to check the javascript code directly and do a text search for the version number "0.9.2" or "0.9.3".)

Okay. To everyone here that had experienced this bug or crash. What happens exactly? 1. Does the browser simply closes instantly with no warnings or hints? 2. Or does the following steps happen in this order a) The page goes white / grayed b) (Optional) A dialog may show up, saying "Page not responding. Close/Wait" c) After a while (it can be less than a second, or more), the page just closes. ---------------------- If its option 1: memory leak. If its option 2: infinite loop, which is basically starves UI.

@216: I think you're right that the crashes are not related to any memory leak at this point. I'm currently at level 605, and the game is still only using about 250MB of RAM. I got the great opal around level 120, and I went from leaking a minimum of 4 enemies every air level (and sometimes as many as 8) with just a perfect opal, to leaking NOTHING. That's terribly unbalanced, as far as I'm concerned, for a tower with pretty low odds on getting to build it. It's nice being able to play "normally" for a change, since there's no reason to play for maximizing turns by building nothing but paraibas if the game is going to crash somewhere around level 700. Flooded the map with Egyptian Golds, Ancient Bloodstones, and Enchanted Emeralds. Was able to actually build attack towers in the middle of the maze. Screenshot at level 605 (since I don't know when the game is going to crash): https://imgur.com/a/3jvqDAt And as @G said, running this at 4x speed practically makes it a different game. It actually affects what gems I pick and how often I repick when I don't have to wait 8 to 10 minutes between turns! I've been spoiled now. I will report back on when the game crashes.

CarlHR: I've tasted 4x speed. I can never go back.

Well then, in the worst case, rollback to 0.6.2 lol

About crashes: I dont think that memory leak is a direct reason. i tested in 2021 that nova/flamestrikes cause minor leak, resulting few GB in super high lvls ... but ppl in 0.6.2 were reaching 1200+ without that kind of crash (game simply was using more RAM)

Builing many EGs (1276 DPS) in the midddle is the right thing, also need multiple stun zones around.----- Other high (single-target) DPS towers: GAq (1870), GA (1534), ABS (760 + 500 per flamestrike active), uber stone(21k :)... but definitelly no paraiba (642 + 50). note: in flash version EE had decent DPS too due to x1.5 modifier for green vs amethyst. -----Exluding obvious uber stone, the highest dps gem is ... ABS if very long stunned target ( ~2.5 average flamestrike), Great Aqua otherwise. (calculation were for 4 armor, all buff towers: GO, BO, SYS and x1.75 amethyst modifier) ------- I dont get reson to play now with as few as 3 EGs (or ABSs) in high lvls, it must be really slow even at x4

Been waiting for the game to stabilize before diving in headfirst again, but I'm curious at what point my browser will crash due to whatever is causing the crashes everyone is getting. I suspect that, as with the memory leak in the initial javascript version of GTD, it will depend a lot on your PC specs. I'll report back if I can get a decent run going-- not getting a great opal early on feels (so far, to me) like even more of a handicap now than it used to be, so I may not be able to sustain a good enough run to play till a crash. And I don't think I have the dedication to keep trying run after run to get a good one going, knowing that it will crash. @JonathanA: I'm intrigued by whatever puzzle game you've developed there! As for high damage towers, unless something has changed recently, the most powerful towers are Egyptian Gold, Bloodstone, and Paraiba, with great amethysts and great aquamarines also being strong. None of the other great gems were worth building, at least in the old versions of the game. Maybe the great sapphire, because it covers such a huge area of the map, but it's otherwise not a strong attack tower. Great opals are of course the single most important tower in the whole game, but not for attack power, for their cooldown buff (50% vs 35% for a perfect opal.)

@JonathanA Lately I have been going for 3 Egyptian Gold, 3 Ancient Blood Stone, 1-4 Mystic Black Opal, 1 Great Opal, 1 Rose Quartz Crystal, 10-20 Lucky Asian Jade, and 50+ Enchanted Emeralds, with the rest being Paraibas. Currently the game is bugged and will crash before you can get to the 1000s though, so it's not as important to maximize Paraibas right now.

https://imgur.com/screenshot-DapA1eZ I made four stun zones (so far but i usually quit the game around this level...) to stun lock and i'm about to put all future EEs at the bottom as anti leak. I know yall have already figured out this game approaching level 1000, i'm just trying to understand the game from a lower level perspective. I put the gold in the middle as a nuke but i wonder which is the highest damage tower. i saw from a recent screenshot of scgmeister however i believe that really EE is the only important thing which makes sense, just fill the map with it, and eventually pariba to not run out of space. perhaps EE is too powerful, and could nerf air to make other towers more useful. Leaking at least 5 air every level. (but plenty of jade mitigates that problem of course.) Btw you can see in the screenshot i'm playing a puzzle game between the waves, that i made myself, let me know if anyone is interested xD I might make it available for download at some point. happy sunny sunday from ecuador!

hi friends - hope everyone is having a great sunday wherever you are in the world.

Just had another game crash to white on me. This time it was right after I started a new level when it crashed to white. The memory footprint was at around 850MB, at level 587, and I was focusing on paraibas late game. Refreshing the page allowed me to see the game again for a fraction of a second before having to start over from the beginning. In the end, while the new updates did help bring down the memory slightly, it is still unstable late game. I also confirmed that I am able to reach higher levels when I do not build paraibas. Hmm, I'm almost wondering if these crashes are somehow related to the fix that originally caused the game to slow down organically as the memory increased until the enemies eventually started vibrating in place.

It finally crashed to white level 735 at almost 1.2g of memory (v0.9.0) Interesting my game lasted longer this time around for me without focusing on paraibas late game. Now to see if 0.9.2 improves the stability (depending on if I can get another good run).

I don't know how useful this info is anymore as the game I'm running is version 0.9.0, but instead of focusing on paraibas, I'm filling the board with jades and the occasional emerald for now which minimizes on how much I have to repick each level. I'm also saving any perfect aquamarines that drop for filling in the final parts of the maze on the chance the game still doesn't crash by then. So far I'm at level 628, memory has been around 1GB for the past 40 levels now, and still no crash. Anyway, this is still an older version of the game, but it's interesting that I'm lasting a lot longer this time around since I'm not focused on fishing constantly for paraibas. https://imgur.com/a/uoAVOVl

I forfeited at level 136. By using ff dev options, the snapshot I got was around 17-18 MB, so nothing unusual so far.

@CarlHR I was told it might be the Phaser.Text for the Level, Gold, Lives and Time. I have switched them over to Bitmaps, please test to let me know.

If its a memory leak, the main obvious reason are JS closures. There must be some variable somewhere on your code that gets created over and over, and it holds some allocated memory, and that variable is never set to null. So, the garbage collector never releases memory afterwards. Coincidentally, I did made a question on stackoverflow years ago about this: https://stackoverflow.com/q/74007560/14956120 That's why programming in JS is weird haha. I hope it helps. Finding this type of bug is hard, even more given that the browser crashes and you can't catch any feedback.

@216 @scgmeister @carlhr thanks that means upgrading to Phaser 4.1 didn't solve the issue. I'll keep exploring what is causing the crashes.

0.9.0, freeze at 730 mid lvl (not responding, couldn't open console), waited few min and page went white(but only game tab this time). Like previous times chrome magically ate much (~15 GB) of DISK space, instantly restored after closing tab

Just had another crash to white, and here is the most recent screenshot before it happened including the memory footprint https://imgur.com/a/xCwJ5lC. Keep in mind this crash happened using the 1.8.10 version of the game. Hopefully the new version fixes these crashes.

I'm even more impressed for the fact that there are no ads, no DLCs, nor even account subscriptions, even when this guy owns this .com url address for years.

Awesome work - I've been intermittently addicted to this website for MANY YEARS! Super impressed that you came back to work on it again.

@hutchins @G I have migrated to the new game framework Phaser 4.1, I'm hoping that might solve some of the crash issues because I cannot find the root cause.

Crashed in Edge on a gaming laptop. 675. Admittedly I was doing like 10 other things in another browser... https://youtu.be/gnGUyr8G5IY

Another crash in chrome on mac, this time at level 735. Like the other times, the tab was using roughly 1GB of memory.

@Peter: Good idea i think - the most active part of game is around 20-100 (and new players won't even know about that lag).----- @CarlHR: this lag exist since 2 days only and is very small - around 0.1s, so on faster PC it might be invisible. I can see it already at lvl ~20, when main maze is build. Btw the maximum possible gems + rock on map is 341, so also i dont get that amount of sprites

I never noticed this sort of lag. But.. maybe that's because I never go on runs past level +100. When I reach that point and I haven't lost, I simply close the page (so I do not submit the score). I don't have the time to do it irl lol. So, maybe its something on the late game levels if I'm not aware? Or my PC runs too fast? Haha I also don't get the phrase "At late game this drops the rendered sprite count from several thousand to a few hundred", as we're talking about rocks. The map is of 520x520 pixels (anyone can download those textures using the correct url from assets), and check that a rock has 26x26 pixels size. So, the map supports a maximum a grid of 20x20 rocks on the screen. That is just 400 rocks, which, some of them, will be gems and towers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see it as something that causes too much lag.

@216 Its because of this change: Batched all "rock" sprites from past rounds into a single render layer instead of one sprite per rock. At late game this drops the rendered sprite count from several thousand to a few hundred and is aimed directly at the white-screen crashes Chrome players have been hitting in survival runs past level 500. I could batch the rocks only at say level 200+?

Noticed very short lag each time removing rocks in 0.8.10 - rather minor issue, but can be little annonying. --- In JS version only pink damage(most important though) is affected by weakness. Are all original(flash) modifiers for color/weakness planned to be restored?

Sorry fixed the rock placement issue, should be fixed now in 0.8.10.

Yes, being not able to remove rock while placing gems is actually very serious issue! (making well-placed GO is best example). Btw old, rather minor bug: armor reduction aura sometiems are not applied constantly(despite being in range), making armor changing fast( between 5 and 11 or 13/19 if no EG), Observed mostly near uraniums, possibly also happened outside burn aura - not sure though

@Peter, during the build phase, when you need to place gems on the map, you cannot click over the rocks to select them, in order to remove them with R. You can only select and remove rocks, during the wave, or after you place all gems somewhere else. Anyone can test it at level 2. Just click on the 'Place Gems' button, and attempt to select a rock afterwards, a prompt showing "Cannot build there" will be shown for a few seconds. I assume that at late games, there'll be no space left to build anymore if this bug persists.

A new version has been released which should reduce the memory usage at high levels.

Crashed on level 709 when I placed the fifth gem. Chrome on mac.

crashed at 766 didn't have network/console opened. was playing on chrome in mac OS. whole page went white

crashed around 775 to white frame. I'm glad that it's doing the auto-saving of scores though!

And the game just crashed to a blank white page at level 590 while repicking gems. Like the others, I'm playing on chrome, and I also tend to have a lot of tabs open which might be why it's happening on earlier levels than on others. No lag though that I could tell.

Looks like, I've got another good run going despite the lack of a great opal. I'm now up to level 324, and we'll see how long it takes this time around without the game crashing. https://imgur.com/a/8pdJUny

Another crash at level 651. Memory on the tab was around 1 gig as well. It happened while repicking gems again too.

Eventually chrome completly crashed...not only the game, other chrome window too. Both windows white screen and error pop-up. But something else was strange: I was running out of .. disc space. was 200 MB free when crashed, after re-opening chrome is 19,4 GB (probably it was like that before). Is possible that chrome store temporary files that take AS much? Anyone else observed disc space loss on long runs? (the game tab was using just 900 MB, and its RAM as i know...)

at lvl 673 finally i got a GO.. and another in 685. I hope it will crash soon, so that boring test won't be wasted. I noticed few very shot freezes, (0.1s-1s) but they might be my laptop fault. I started getting a console error basicly every action/placed gem, but game is still working

@carlhr As Chrome and all other browsers "background" tabs now when you switch away, I have added an explicit Pause to the game loop when the player switches to another tab.

It's situational, but I got to reproduce a crash. I'd post as an email, but I think it's cool that everyone here can also see it. This is all I do: 1. Open the browser 2. Open gemtowerdefense.com in tab A 3. Open viktor-n's gemtd in tab B 4. I click on tab B's canvas. 5. I don't even play the game. I just wait for a few minutes. 6. When I come back, I check tab A's canvas, and... it's blank. If the canvas is blank, it means it stopped working. The webgl context was lost. The canvas doesn't disappear from the DOM though. It's still there if you inspect the page. This is my output: https://imgur.com/a/sK4xXjk This is the error: "WebGL warning: texImage2d: Unexpected error <enum 0x0507> during upload" ------ If right now, after this error occurs, I attempt to refresh tab A, here's the console output: https://imgur.com/a/4sqsKpk The error: Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL creation failed: * tryANGLE (FEATURE_FAILURE_EGL_NO_CONFIG) * Exhausted GL driver options. (FEATURE_FAILURE_WEBGL_EXHAUSTED_DRIVERS) Keeps repeating until I close the browser, and open it again. ------ It's not viktor's fault of course. It's nice that I got to use his site to reproduce a bug though. It helps a lot. It's probably my browser's fault, as it's not properly handling two webgl contexts at the same time (even on different tabs). In other attempts through Gemini's answer, it said it could be an incomplete GL_FRAMEBUFFER that's being used to upload the texture. Now, why a similar crash happened on me before with a single tab... I can't say it. I have no idea. @Peter, did you ever attempt to use webgl2 instead of webgl-experimental? Idk, but it says on the internet that its deprecated.

I have added extra logging to determine the cause of the crashes. I have some theories but it isn't clear without data. Please try to reproduce the issue.

Wawe 44 always have been like that, due to speed jump - though its possible to kill all, its very hard(especially if no GO) and need good RNG to make about 4-5 EGs at this point (GA, GAq also welcome). 1-2 EEs also may be needed, but while later EEs are essential to kill flyers, wawe 44 is more burst-based - bloodstone/uranium helps a bit too. Assuming 13 special towers (39 of 44 turns used + some need for opals + initial malachite), for especially wawe 44 i would choose : 2 EEs, 5 EGs(preferable with decent amount of kills), 2 jades(slow) RC, BO, SYS, BS . But honestly i don't remeber when i last time leaked 0 in 44

Wave 44 always gets me, I never complete it without any leaks. Does someone have any hints to kill all the bats? Or is it just impossible?

I made it to level 689 before it crashed again while repicking gems. Zero lag or signs of issues prior to this. Using chrome on mac, browser tab had gotten up to about 1GB of memory by that point.

@Peter: Slowly increasing stun resistance + additional penalty for leaking enemy ( 2 lives cost might be enough). I suggest using x/(x+100) or similar formula for stun resistance ( example: lvl 252 has 52 points of stun resistance which means 34% chance to resist stun). But due to reported crashed maybe its good idea to temporary keep survival easy for testing

One suggestion I have would be to lower how much gems are able to slow down a wave in a way that you would need to build both a yellow sapphire and a uranium in addition to the typical gems in order to get the wave speed down to its minimum speed. Also I'm not sure, but I wonder if there was a way to prevent the snowflakes and fire icons from being able to overlap with itself (or possibly removed completely after around level 400) in order to reduce the sprite clutter and potentially helping with the lag/game going white in late game?

@216 What would you suggest for balancing the game past level 200?

Hit the whiteout glitch again, was around round 515-520. Was in the middle of repicking gems and then the screen just went white. Was a crazy run, got a dead center Great Opal in the mid 30s of rounds.

@Peter Hard to say, i did fast run yesterday, but ended it after 300, while crashes were reported at 600-700. Memory usage was about 300 MB - not very much, but little memory leak is still possible. Maybe others have long run ongoing. Sadly game need huge rebalnce after 200 - after lvl 200-250 you can build now random towers, rather no way to lose not intentionally - stun is not only issue, also late game gold generation is naturally high - with absurd amount of jades is possible to survive with 7 air leaks (if no more - slower killing ground units = more gold) every flying wawe after 44. (likely 2 lives cost after 201 would prevent such low stun + high gold generation strategies)

@216 Is 0.8.5 better now, I see you have the highest score for this version

@216 Requiring email was a mistake. I have fixed a few more late game memory issues, hopefully that helps. Also, the game won't ask for your high score name until after level 500.

@CarlHR I am using chrome version 145.0.7632.160 (arm64) on macOS monterry 12.7.6, noVM. I had just under one gig of memory on that single browser tab when it crashed. I've never seen this type of behavior before where the DOM disappears and there's nothing to inspect, and I have almost two decades as a web developer.

To everyone having this DOM error at late levels, what browser are you all using? Do you run the game inside a VM our outside it? I had an error back then, that made only the canvas stopped working (I submited a report by email), but the navbar, the buttons, the recipes list on the bottom were left intact on the page. By inspecting the DOM, the canvas was still there, but the rendering had stopped working giving the impression it had disappeared. I use a Firefox 150.0 64 bits, windows 11, no VM. I ask this because, its probably the browser saying: I got no memory.. crash! Get it? Like the windows blue screen of death.

Yes, why must we provide our emails when submiting a score? I mean, there's no login on this site. Our emails do not appear on the high scores board, so what's the point of providing this data to the server?

There should be an option to continue run without sending high score every lvl/start doing it later - lvl 100 is not high enough for many players. Also why forcing to fill "email"(typing anything works, though). I fell little uncomfortable when game ask me for email in order to continue mid-game. Also no option to change nickname after 100 ("name" field was often used for some short messages/ run comments) - - - Minor bug: sometimes one projectile remain visible after lvl end and stay in place even for multiple levels

I just had another run crash at level 711 while I was repicking gems. Same type of crash where the DOM is gone and I just see a gray screen. I had zero lag or any other signs of an impending problem. I used 4x most of the game, but toggled it occasionally to 1x or 2x.

That 702 run is what happens when you waay overtune for cash after barely hanging on in the 100s, and you also don't plant for the end game and scramble for space. That said, 4x the whole time, lots of idle hours, hibernation, and zero stability issues or crash warnings. Only dropped to 2x once, like halfway through.

@Peter I was on 4x when it crashed (and basically the entire game). My experience sounds similar to @DC's as well, with no lagging at all leading up to the crash.

@Peter I was on 4x from start to finish. Aside from the crash performance was really good throughout. None of the lagginess that used to exist at the later levels.

@dc and all. The crashes could be due to the speed ups, could everyone make note which speedup they were using when a crash occurs? Secondly, I will explore saving the high scores every X levels as a quasi backup. Finally, I will also explore save/load feature.

@G Not sure if exactly the same thing as you but my game also just crashed out when I was somewhere in round 670-680. First two random grey squares on either side of the game screen started flashing and then the whole thing crashed and the page just went completely white. I gotta just terminate one of these runs early on purpose so I can get on the High Scores at least.

https://imgur.com/a/vDDzSA1 Hahaha, finally the first sighting of Great Opal at round 580. I dunno you meant about the speed fix @216 (I didn't totally follow your convo with Peter) but I definitely feel the difference - never would've been possible for me to get this far without GO before, would've gotten run down in the mid 300s if not before. Also I'm building a lot more nonsense this time around than I usually would since the combination glitch has been removed - tbh it may still be possible to do pure PTs, especially with the gold generation I have going on. Went way overboard on EEs and Jades especially.

Jades weren't changed since dec 2021. But since speed is fixed, its little easier to kill flyers. Less leaks, more Jades = more gold left. But seriously, unless doing NEC no point of making 50 jades(~15 should be way enough, if many leaks - work on EEs positions then), just repick more for EEs, EGs, ABSs. - - - - - In early 2021 jades production was 2x higher, so you could upgrade jade asap then max chances at lvl 15 :) Then it got nerfed 5 times for few days - I managed to get (stable) past 200 with GO, but game was very hard before 100 -I (and every1) was losing without GO ( speed bug wasn't helping)

@216 I was going to ask, was Jade gold production boosted? I wasn't sure if it was just because I was building more of them bc a little harder to force EEs now but I swear my gold generation way outstrips what I was used to when I played before. In fairness I would also usually stop at around 30-35 of them and I'm currently in a midgame with like 50+ which has put me at 100+ million gold, absolutely nuts.

For late game, besides EGs and EEs also worth to mass build ABSs - flamestrikes do a lot on stunned targets. - - - However in current version defeating lvl 200 or 250 = win, gold production from jades in late game is very high in addition to fact that wawes gets *easier* after some point -eventually adding new stun tower overcome linear HP increase, which is only parameter that change after 41 (same speed, armor,...) I managed to "win" without single DE/EE (No EE Challenge, NEC) just by absurd amount of jades (7-8 leaks every flying wawe) at first try, without even GO. (Years) before combine exploit was fixed, i managed to do "One Jade Challenge"(1JC), with (early enough) GO. - - - Is stun OP? is first 150 lvls definitelly no, but with 20-25 EEs i can effectivelly stun and kill all flyers. Are jades OP? in early game little , then naturally in late game they should produce a lot, However penalty for late game leak fells a joke , even when life cost 100k gold ( In flash version 1 leak after 195 = game over). Likely, to balance late game, leaks *must* cost 2 lives ( possibly more), IN ADDITION to some stun resistance. Only lives cost - do nothing if i leak 0, olny stun resist do nothing, just make 100 jades and kill ground olny + 2 flyers. Even if potential jade nerf ( which may ruin early game for most ppl, though minor nerf may be good) late game gold (with 50-100 jades) will alllow for consntant ~5 leaks( instead 7-8), which fells unacceptable for me.

@WGW thanks for the tips. Yeah the level of fatigue/boredom with deleting rocks (I feel like in the old game you could shift-click to select multiple at a time to delete?) meant that there ended up being a slightly chaotic arrangement of perfect opals haha. I was trying to get decent coverage and then got OCD rage about spots that weren't covered XD So I ended up with way too many. But it did mean that later on I was going to have the option to get near total coverage with Black Opals which would have been nice if I chose to go that route. In terms of the Great Opals, I just got two opportunities to take them I think somewhere in the 200s or early 300s, they weren't perfect placement but I figured it was worth it, they are super powerful upgrades. Re: the Dark Emeralds, yeah I just repicked an absolute ton of times. I've had a search down and have now found your post on the combine special bug. I have observed that in-game, but was worried about it potentially working the other way round and consuming multiple Perfect gems so I haven't been using it (I mean it would also feel like cheating as well which would make the whole grind a bit pointless IMO). I hadn't put thought into the ordering aspect of it, I guess you can set it up like you say so that it never consumes the Perfect one? (Or could - I see from Updates that it was fixed on 15 April lol). The main key for success on this one for me was just an absolute ton of upgraded Jades as gold farms. Then being lazer focused on Egyptian Gold and Dark Emerald to the exclusion of almost anything else. A 'Surrender' or 'Resign' button would be very welcome. I do still think I experienced a bug where my level jumped from somewhere around 100 to 200! But could well be imagining it lol.

I got to level ~650 and then the browser tab suddenly went completely blank, like no DOM to view in the developer tools

@216 I understand now, thanks!

The chance of getting PE by placing 1 gem is 1:80. By placing 5 gems (including combine from 2 flawless) is around 1:13 . Max chances are at 22 or 19 , depends if You upgrade malachite first or no. So by lvl 400 you have around 380 turns with max chances + repicks

@216 sorry, I'm not getting that formula, would you explain it?

I can see nothing unusual with amount of emerals - assuming average 1 repick per lvl (380+400) / ~13 = 60 estimated perfect emeralds by lvl 400.