The Tower - Idle Tower Defense Beginners Research and Priority Guide
Unlocking and Researching on your Labs in The Tower - Idle Tower Defense is essential for long-term progression. Lab research helps to get additional multipliers to the stats, unlock new game features, upgrade cards and Ultimate Weapons and get some Quality of Life upgrades.
This The Tower - Idle Tower Defense Labs Research Guide will help you to figure out the best Research to get at each game stage, get the research priority for the labs and see available Lab Research. It's part of The Tower - Idle Tower Defense Guides series, where you can find the rest of the guides on the game.
We covered the basics of Workshop Upgrades in the The Tower Ultimate Beginners Guide, in this article we will go into the detail of each upgrade and will explain how to manage your Labs to grow faster and have better efficiency.
Lab Basics[edit source]
The main idea of the Research Lab is that researches act as an additional multiplier for stats, unlike Workshop where you Upgrade things, so you won't have to buy them in the run.
Each Research costs Coins and takes specific amount of time. Research time and Costs increase as you research more levels. Overall Labs are a very long-term Progression mechanics where you need to plan ahead and have patience to succeed.
You will start with only 1 Lab and you can unlock extra Labs with Gems. You can visit The Tower Gem Guide for more details, but essentially you would like to unlock all the Labs as soon as possible. The unlock costs will increase with each lab:
- Lab 1 - Free upon reaching milestone at wave 30 in Tier 1
- Lab 2 - 100 Gems
- Lab 3 - 400 Gems
- Lab 4 - 1400 Gems
- Lab 5 - 3000 Gems
Once you unlock additional Lab you can run multiple research simultaneously.
There are several ways to increase research speed, you can do it through special research, relics and other means, but you can also use Elite Cells and Gems.
It is not advised to use Gems for research Rush while there are other ways to spend them, but spending your Elite Cells is a good option. In order to get more Elite Cells you need to farm Elite enemies like Vampires or Scatter.
You can use "Speed Up" button to open interface where you can spend Elite Cells. Here you can set duration and speed multiplier. Duration scales linear, meaning that longer research will cost the same amount of Elite Cells/hour, while speed multiplier is not, and every next speed multiplier costs more and more Elite Cells per Hour Per Research speed gains.
| Speed Up | Cost Per 2x Speed | 1h Cost | 8h Cost | 24h Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.5x | 36 | 18 | 144 | 432 |
| 2x | 96 | 96 | 768 | 2304 |
| 3x | 360 | 720 | 5760 | 17280 |
| 4x | 960 | 2880 | 23040 | 69120 |
| 5x | 2550 | 10200 | 81600 | 244800 |
So using speed up for faster research speed isn't as efficient as getting multiple slower speed ups for many labs. When you speed up the lab it will have green background and speed up timer. The actual research timer will stay the same, so it will be up to you to recalculate it using the multiplier you used for speed up.
Beginner Labs Guide[edit source]
What to research in the Labs when you just started out? It's actually pretty simple and straightforward. You need to focus on Game Speed, Attack Speed, Coins/Kill Bonus, Labs Speed and some Damage and Health research to help your runs.
The thing is that early on you can go for anything that might help you to get to the higher tiers or make your runs better, as long as it doesn't take that long. You can check The Tower Ultimate Beginners Guide for more details on early gameplay.
As you unlock more Labs you will be able to dedicate them to more research that matters for your early-mid game.
| Lab | What to research |
|---|---|
| Lab 1 | Game Speed. When maxed Attack Speed at least to lvl 50 |
| Lab 2 | Main focus on Lab Speed. You can insert other Research from time to time like Health, Defense %, some Damage Research etc. |
| Lab 3 | Economy Slot. Coins/Kill, Golden Tower Bonus, GT Duration, Maybe Workshop Cost Reduction or Lab Cost reduction etc. |
| Lab 4 | Another Economy Slot. Anything from Lab 3, You will have to work on Cash Bonus as well to get more cash during the runs |
| Lab 5 | Flexible Slot. Anything from the previous slots or some qol research. Orb Speed for Blender Build, Light Speed Shots, Ultimate Weapons research, Perks, Perk Research etc. |
This will give you general guidelines that will set your priorities straight for the first couple of months into The Tower. Afterwards you will know what you need. In the rest of the article, you can find full list of Research with some tips on when and how to put them in the research queue.
Beginner Labs Video Guide[edit source]
This video explains the Labs, their unlocks, research priority and showcases good researches to go for.