That guide is for complete beginners, but if you've been struggling with your first tower or want to be walked through some of the thought processes involved in playing Tactical Nexus, check it out:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3292902362

The DLC does not make the game easier. This game's DLC is purely of the 'additional content' variety.

Each DLC package (a 'chapter') adds new towers, which are generally bigger and harder than those in previous chapters. You should not buy the DLC until you have played through previous chapters and feel ready to move on and see new stages and mechanics.

The DLC is worth it for the sheer amount of play time it adds to the game, but you have absolutely no reason to buy it prematurely. (There used to be a FOMO pricing model that encouraged early buying, but thankfully that's gone now)

Ctrl+X+Z for turbo undo.
Ctrl+X+Y for turbo redo. (Might require using two hands)

Either press F and then use the cursor keys, or use PgUp/PgDn at any time while you're in a tower. To leave floor-view mode, just press F.

You can hold C while in this view to see the original state of the floor for comparison, too. If you also press Space, you can see the stats for all enemies on the floor in its original state.

This is an extremely common misunderstanding among new players.

When you earn sunstones or medals, you have them permanently. Nothing in-game can ever take them away from you. When you spend them, it is only for that run - any time you start a new tower or restart the current one, you get your medals and sunstones back. This is how the meta-progression works: your baseline level of starting power increases over time. You can either do the same thing more efficiently, employ more aggressive strategies, tackle greater challenges, or do entirely different routes that wouldn't be viable with lower resources.

Both of these are spent in the "Medal room", which is where you go when you press the M key or click the medal icon. Medals are spent on the medal doors. A medal can open any door of an equal or lower tier, so a gold medal can open one gold, silver, or bronze door. (The game will always use the cheapest possible medal to open a door.) Sunstones are spent at Sunwishers, the large chalices that have sword/shield/heart icons over them. These give much smaller incremental rewards, but they add up over time as you get more and more sunstones.

You should always spend sunstones, even if on certain towers (P, for instance) you may not want to spend them at the very beginning of the tower. However, spending medals touches on a different issue, namely...

This is another very common question among new players.

A "pure" run means that you did not spend medals. You can and should spend sunstones - all of them. You can even kill enemies in the medalroom. By contrast, an "impure" run is one in which you spent at least one medal. That's the difference.

In most towers Impure is required in order to see the full tower by completing the "Nexus" area, which is usually but not always entered via the tower's medal room (the place you go when you press the M key). Medal doors block off stairs or keys or some other thing needed to enter the Nexus area, forcing an impure run.

The benefit of Pure runs, on the other hand, is that you get an additional sunstone for every tier of medal you earn: 1 for a pure bronze, 2 for a pure silver, 3 for a pure gold, etc.

Pure runs also score as Impure at the same time. Therefore, if you manage to overscore (exceed the highest medal by a certain increment; more details are further down in this giude) in a pure run and beat your best Impure score, you get 2 sunstones instead of 1 for each overscore increment: 1 for the overscore on Impure, and 1 extra for doing it Pure.

When starting out, you should run all towers Pure to get yourself as many sunstones as you can. This will only get you so far, since many of the higher-tier medals are impossible to get on pure runs. As a rough guideline, you want to amass somewhere between 20 and 50 sunstones before you start doing everything impure. Tut2 is the most common tower for a player to get their first Diamond medal, but there are others that are doable once you have the medals to enter the corresponding Nexus.

This does not factor in one of the bonus towers, Beach. Beach throws off this progression by offering a way to score extreme amounts of sunstones regardless of your progression. That's not to say you shouldn't play it, just try not to factor in Beach stones when you're thinking about your progress.

If you haven't seen Beach on the tower list, then take note...

In most towers that have HP levels, the formula for how much HP you get is 2000 + (500 * LV). So 2500, 3000, 3500...

This is affected by your HP multiplier. So if you picked up a 20% crown, level 1 would be worth 3000 HP instead of 2500. (2500 * 120% = 2500 + 500 = 3000)

Scroll down to the bottom of the tower list, and you can find several "bonus" towers. They do not offer any medals, only sunstones, but can typically be attempted at any time. They are part of the base game and do not require any of the DLC. At the time of writing, these are: Beach, Mystery, 24 Minutes, and Ruin. There's also Flip and Kawarari Dojo but you can ignore those at first.

Flip is made for experienced players, but the rest of them can be attempted by new players. In fact, many of them have little to no scaling with your progression by either not having Sunwishers or by having very poor returns on medals/stones, so coming to them later will not benefit you. They're an excellent way to improve your early sunstone count and to learn a few things about how to play the game.

- Beach: You can play Beach at any time since its sunwishers are locked behind medal doors. Just beware that you can get massive amounts of sunstones from this tower, throwing off intended progression.
- Mystery: 4 floors long, Mystery is basically a puzzle. Pure +3 is the best score you can get from this. It has Equipment and Orbs, two mechanics from later towers, but lets you experiment with them. Hint: You should be able to get a 32000% XP multiplier before fighting anything.
- Ruin: This is a fairly short tower and an homage to Tower of the Sorcerer. The best recorded score is Impure +7 / Pure +6, but Pure +4 or Pure +5 is reasonable to aim for with a bit of experimentation.
- 24 Minutes: So named because that's how long the devs spent making it. Pure +2 is the highest you can get from this and it's only a few floors long so it shouldn't take long to get. Hint: Don't fight the burgeoner blocking the clear tile, just swap him out of the way.
- Kawarari: This is a raw sunstone check for unlocking late-game stuff (Chapter 6 and beyond). Come back when you have a few hundred sunstones.

If you get Mystery Pure +3, 24Min Pure +2, and Ruin Pure +5, that's 20 sunstones right there, to say nothing of the valuable lessons you'll learn along the way.

On the tower select screen you can see the score thresholds needed for each medal. You'll also always see a sunstone with a score listed that starts with a "+". This is the 'overscore' threshold, and for EACH increment of that many points past the highest-tier medal on that tower, you get an additional sunstone.

For instance, on Tactical Tutorial, the highest medal you can get is a diamond, at 10,000,000 points. For every 1,500,000 points past that, you get an overscore sunstone, so at 13,000,000 points you get 2 sunstones.

In the community this is noted with just a +X where X is how much you overscored by, so the above example would be a Diamond +2, or just "+2" since overscoring automatically implies you got the maximum medal. On the "All Medals" screen in-game, the left number is overscore (how many sunstones you got from overscoring).

Scoring isn't infinite - there's only so many items and enemies in a tower - and some towers scale better than others. The bonus towers are short enough that the community has reasonable confidence in their maximum scores. But for regular towers, new high scores are being found frequently by top-level players.

Essentially this gives a reason to optimize play merely beyond scoring the highest medal, rewarding you for better performance, and gives a reason to return to earlier towers with better medals and more sunstones.

"Tactical Trip Mini" (or just Mini for short) is a very early tower and is one every new player should absolutely play and try to optimize. With as little as 10 sunstones you can get a platinum medal somewhat easily, and since it's such a small tower you can quickly iterate on new ideas. This lets you learn a ton about the game in a short period of time and is a valuable experience for any new player.

Mystery, on the other hand, isn't intended to be a good orb tutorial, but is anyway. You have to use all six basic orbs to get the +3 overscore, but it's also very short, only 4 floors that are mostly empty. To a lesser extent this tower also shows the power of some pieces of equipment and their use for scoring.

...and in fact, you probably shouldn't, though roughly following the order is a good idea. The towers aren't in a strict ascending order of difficulty. Don't pay too much attention to the difficulty ratings on the level select screen, and don't be afraid to skip ahead and try out other towers. Especially if you get stuck - it can be more helpful to skip over a problematic tower and come back later when you've learned more about the game.

Stepping onto a floor for the first time reveals it permanently, even if you undo, load a save, or start a new run! You can view it using the floor view mode (when you press F) at any point afterward.

As such, it can be extremely useful to scout ahead, doing reckless things like fighting strong enemies or wasting keys/orbs, just to reveal new floors, and then undoing those actions or loading a save. Knowing what's coming lets you plan ahead.

The "Giant Slayer" weapon and "Champion's Belt" accessory can both be acquired in many places that don't have their little hint tile with them, so a new player can be left wondering what these do.

A "giant killing" is when you kill an enemy with a level higher than yours (equal does not count). Do so, and you get +1 ATK (if you have the Giant Slayer) and/or +1 DEF (if you have the Champion's Belt). That's it!

Only your current level is used for this calculation, even if you have pending levels that you have not yet claimed. How you can make use of this is left as an exercise for the reader.

While you are in the floor-viewing mode (when you press F) you can right-click on a door to reserve it. In the normal gameplay mode, you can hold A and use the right mouse button to reserve a door.

All this does is mark the door as reserved, and put a counter on your key list, to help you remember to keep a key available.

You can also reserve medal doors in the medalroom, which is useful for planning your medal spending.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just load your doors from a previous run instead of having to mark every door you open with a note? You can! That ghostly apparition of Purple at the start of every tower, called "Memories from 0" by the devs, lets you pick a save file to load door reservations from. Every door that was opened in that file will be marked as 'reserved' in your current run. This is especially helpful on "grid" towers like G and P.

Not just on a clear tile!

You can either mouse-over your level number on the UI, or hold the L key.

Pavement Orbs are useful on other tiles too:
- Pop steps, to keep that tile permanently accessible.
- Arrow tiles, to grant free movement.
- Water tiles, to make a bridge.
- Stairs. There is at least 1 place where this is actually useful.
- Clear tiles. This one is actually totally useless, but it is amusing.

Things you can't pave:
- Unpaveable Walls and Unpaveable Pop Steps, marked by the 🚫 symbol on them.
- Completely empty 'sky' tiles, like those found in Nexus entries and Nexus levels.
- Key and Medal doors.

The shortcut is 1. It also lists items dropped by enemies, but not (at the time of writing) items in dig blocks.

As of August 3rd 2024, you can use Space+Z (the old shortcut) to instead see the Item Catalogue, which shows the totals across ALL floors in the tower, floor-by-floor. As with the 1 single floor view, this does not (at the time of writing) list items in dig blocks.

Make sure to click the gear icon in the bottom right and check out some of the available options under the "Control" submenu, including:

- Battle Skip. You don't have to just hold X through the combat animation, you can skip it entirely. And sooner or later you WILL fight an enemy with a ton of health that can't damage you, but you're only dealing 1 damage to them: https://rumble.com/vl4ln9-be-thankful-for-battle-skip.html
- High Speed Dig. Lets you dig through a block without having to repeatedly move into it. (You can also mouse-move onto a dig block to take it out in one action). As a bonus this also only writes 1 action into the undo log.
- Faster Activation of Orbs. Shortens the animation a bit if you don't like waiting for orb animations to play out.

There is a "Dig on contact" option that saves you from having to hold the D key, but this means you could potentially accidentally dig just by bumping a wall when you didn't intend to.

By default when you go over an arrow tile the game doesn't count this as an action. So if you do it accidentally and then undo the action, you'll be sent back to the last item you picked up, enemy you defeated, door you opened, etc.

If you want, look for the "Register Arrow Step to undo log" option and enable it. This only adds an entry if you were actually moved by the tile, so if you run into an arrow step from the side it's pointing to (and thus, you don't move at all) nothing happens, so you don't need to worry about filling the undo log with useless entries by mistake.

By pressing the N key you can leave a note on the tile you are currently standing on. The note can be viewed by either standing on that tile or hovering your mouse over it. Some special symbols don't line up correctly (such as shift + number keys) as it's expecting a Japanese keyboard layout.

Some other note-related features include:
- There are also tower-wide notes you can make (up to 20) with the icons at the bottom of the screen.
- You can place a 'status stamp' which is basically a written record of your current stats, equipment, key counts, etc. One use for this might be placing these in a clear room, so you can compare attempts against each other more easily.
- You can change the icon on a note to something else to help remind you of what it is. Icons include numbers, orb icons, dig routes, and other things.
- You can edit a note on the floor you're on by shift-right-clicking on it.

You can find it at the following (link obscured so that bots don't scrape it):

discord (DOT) gg (FORESLASH) zEMVzXkETs

Players of all skill levels are welcome. Whether you're still trying the free levels or you have four digits of sunstones, you can ask questions, get advice, and share your strategies and scores.

https://tnwiki.net/

It doesn't have absolutely everything in it, but it can be extremely helpful for new players.

It starts about halfway down the devs' website for the game, and has been machine translated from Japanese, but it does exist: http://temporenup.fuyu.gs/tacticalnexus.php

Among other tidbits about some of the items and equipment, you can learn that the player character is a fox and his name is Purple.

• Arrow Keys - Move
  
• Hold Right Click, then Left Click - Move to clicked tile if possible
  
  • If you mouse-move to a key door you will be prompted if you want to open it.
    
  • If you mouse-move onto an arrow tile you will be moved across it.
    
  • If you mouse-move onto stairs, you will take them.
    
  • If you mouse-move into an enemy, you will fight it and then move into its tile, taking its drop.
    
  • If you mouse-move into a dig block (first seen in Tactical Tutorial 2), you will dig through it if you have enough mattocks.
• Hold D + Arrow Key - Move and dig through dig blocks in the way.
  
• Shift + Arrow Key - Change direction without moving
  
• Hold Ctrl - Show action log.
  
  • Ctrl+Z - Undo. Hold to repeat (this applies to all undo/redo commands).
    
  • Ctrl+Y - Redo
• Hold X - Turbo mode (speed up the game)
  
  • Ctrl+X+Z - Turbo Undo
    
  • Ctrl+X+Y - Turbo Redo (you might need to use two hands for this)
    
  • Hold X+D+Arrow Keys - Fast-dig through a line of dig blocks.
• C - Go up/down stairs you are standing on, or use floor warps
  
• M - Warp to/from the Medalroom
  
• S - Tower-specific warp, not present in all towers.
  
• Esc - Quit the game (you'll get an "are you sure?" prompt)

• Q, W, E, R, T - Tower-specific level-ups. Q for ATK, W for DEF and E for HP is the most common one but there are plenty of variants.
  
• Y - 'Active' level on a weapon (Tactical Tutorial 3 onwards) such as Red Legend.
  
• U - 'Active' level on an accessory (Tactical Tutorial 3 onwards) such as Thief Bandana.

• F - Enter/exit floor view mode.
  
• Up/Down in floor view mode - Change floor being viewed.
  
• PgUp/PgDn - Enter floor view mode if not already in it AND change floor being viewed.
  
• Hold C (in floor view mode) - Compare current floor to its original state.

• Hold A, then Right Click on door - Reserve/unreserve door
  
• Right Click on door in floor view mode - Reserve/unreserve door

• A+Left or A+Right - Change selected orb
  
• A+C - Use selected orb
  
• Left Click on orb icon - Uses that orb.

• Hold L - See your level-up stats. (Same as if you stand on a clear tile or mouse-over your level)
  
• Z - Ping your current location and highlight all reachable tiles on the current floor.
  
• Space - Show enemy stats for the current floor.
  
  • Can be combined with floor-view mode to see other floors.
    
  • Hold C while in floor-view mode to view enemy stats for the initial state of the floor.
• Hold 1 - Show item counts for the current floor.
  
• Hold 2 or Hold Space+Z - Show the "Item Catalogue" of item counts for all floors in the tower.
  
  • Note that, at the time of writing, this doesn't show items in dig blocks.
    
  • Can be combined with floor-view mode to see other floors' item stats.
    
  • Hold 1+C in floor-view mode to see item stats for the initial state of the floor.

• F1/F2 - Adjust volume. Hold to adjust faster.
  
• F10 - Pause/Resume.
  
• Shift+A - Show/hide memos. Requires enabling this command in the options.
  
• Shift+Home - Activate Memories from Zero.
  
• Shift+Enter - Save the memo you are currently editing.

I want to give my thanks to the Tactical Nexus Discord, both for being awesome and welcoming people, and for giving feedback and offering suggestions on what to include in this guide.