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Hustle Castle Gem Bay Super Grind Guide 2023

Hustle Castle Gem Bay Cover Image (Image Source: ASUS Fanaticos)
Read time: 14 min.

Table of Contents

Hustle Castle Gem Bay tips? It is available at TR8 and technically a venue for PvP battles that allow you to win a few items that open up new gameplay features:

Gems – Used to enhance fighter equipment

Dust – Used to enhance gems

Scrolls – Used in combining gems

hustle castle basic rules

It is one of the hardest features in the game for players to master it, so bear with us. It’s going to be a very long read.

Note: Do not confuse gems with diamonds. For a long time, the community has used those two words interchangeably. Diamonds are the game’s premium currency. They can be used to purchase just about anything that you want in the game.

Already know the basics? Skip right to the strategy for insane Hustle Castle Gem Bay strategies.

Fighting in Hustle Castle Gem Bay

You can enter Gem Bay once for free, twice if you have Premium. 

After your free journey has been used up, you will need to spend food to go on additional journeys at the Gem Bay. 

You may purchase up to 2 additional food runs, and subsequent runs will cost diamonds. 

We strongly recommend taking full advantage of the free journey. 

The only potential drawback to entering the bay for free is that you could end up expending spells faster than you can craft.

hustle castle start screen

When you enter Gem Bay, you are prompted to select up to 12 fighters to bring with you on your journey, and up to 9 spells.

Note: Players with a Premium account subscription get 2 free journeys per day, rather than one. You also can bring up to 12 spells on your journey with Premium, rather than the standard 9 spells from a non-premium run.

Fighters – For A Long Survival Game

There is no harm bringing a full squad of 12 fighters on your journey with you.

 You can only use 4-6 at a time depending on your TR level, so having 12 fighters can surely make your run last a little longer.

hustle castle start screen confirmation

You can pull fighters from any part of the castle. 

There is a handy “Deploy the best ones” button that you can click to select the 12 best fighters. The game seems to select the best based on the dweller’s fighting power. This is usually a good idea and can save you some time, but be aware that it selects dwellers based on their current equipment, and so it might not necessarily select the highest-levelled fighters.

You will need to equip your fighters as desired before you click the Confirm button. Once you confirm your journey squad, you will not be able to adjust their equipment.

Spells – They Can Be Used Here Too

The introduction of Gem Bay makes spells much more important. 

Previously they were only useful in PvP, PvE, and Portal. 

But now you can bring up to 12 spells with you on your journey.  These spells can be selected from both your Combat Spells (equipped) and from your Prepared Spells (inventory).

Any unused spells will be returned at the end of a run.

Mercenaries – Probably Needed For the Last Push

You can hire mercenaries during your journey to augment your squad. 

These mercenaries are very powerful fighters, and fairly inexpensive considering the returns from the chests. 

There are 5 pairs of mercenaries – undead tanks, goblin tanks, undead mages, good mages and evil mages. In addition to this, a solo archer is also available in the store.

The two fighters within each pair are similar to each other except that one is always stronger than the other. 

The weaker fighter always costs 9 diamonds to hire, and the stronger one always costs 29 diamonds. 

The archer is much higher in price at a whopping 99 diamonds to hire, however, he hits hard.

Hustle Castle Mercenaries for hire

Tank Mercenaries

  • Stephen & Mortal Joe – lower damage per second, higher health
  • Hyde & Thunder – higher damage per second, lower health

Mage Mercenaries

  • Bo’Reese & Bertrand – Focus on strong attack with occasional small healing of allies.
  • Valerie & Harvey – Focus on healing allies. Harvey has significantly higher health than Bertrand, but lower Crit.
  • Mr Sins & Heartless One – Focus on resurrection, with occasional stasis field to protect self. Heartless One also heals allies occasionally and has significantly higher health than Bertrand and Harvey, but lower Crit and Dodge.

Archer Mercenary

  • Vladimir Carrot – A bow-wielding archer that hits hard with a physical attack that stuns enemies. His preferred target is mages.

Gem Bay Spells – Enhanced Spells At Your Disposal

There are also 3 special spells that can be purchased in Gem Bay. 

They are similar to Portal spells in that they are unique to Gem Bay, and they can only be used in that setting. 

You can purchase them for diamonds after you start fighting, or you can purchase them before the fights with Kraken tokens in the Gem Bay Shop.

gem bay spells important for success

These spells cost 19 diamonds for a 5-pack or 850 Kraken tokens for a 3-pack in the shop, and they augment your own crafted spells in the following ways:

  • Unlike your crafted spells, you can take as many Gem Bay spells as you want into each battle.
  • You can still carry 6 crafted spells into each battle, in addition to whatever number of Gem Bay spells you equip.
  • The Gem Bay spells have a separate cool-down cycle from your crafted spells, which means you can cast spells more rapidly when you utilise both types.

Here are the spells available for purchase in Gem Bay:

  • Heaven’s Rage – Deals 12000 damage to all enemies hit by the explosion
  • Brave Lion – Increases ally damage by 175% for 4 seconds
  • Sturdy Armor – Increases ally physical armour by 35% for 7 seconds

Fun Fact: The game also periodically rewards you these bad boys from time to time, to get players to do Gem Bay runs more often.

Gem Bay Battles – Truly A Rough Journey!

During your Gem Bay journey, you fight a sequence of 20 battles of (generally) increasing difficulty. 

Each battle is against another player’s squad. 

But unlike in the Arena, the battles do not require your opponents entering Gem Bay at the same time as you.

They could very much be offline while you are put up against them.

Tip: You can even exit Gem Bay during your journey by clicking the red X in the top-right corner. If you do so, then you can come back at any time later to continue where you left off.

hustle castle gem bay waves

Notice in the image above that the battles are shown by a sequence of blue and yellow dots. The colour of the dots indicates the rewards that you can get from winning the battle. 

Battles on a blue dot will only provide Dust rewards. Yellow dot battles will provide Dust, Gems, and Scrolls.

Note: The rewards shown for each battle are just potential rewards. They are not guaranteed. Winning the battle doesn’t guarantee that you will get everything shown.

For each battle, you can select up to 6 fighters (out of the 12 brought into Gem Bay) to form your squad. You can also select up to 6 spells. You will be given the opportunity to both hire Mercenaries and buy Spells in between each battle.

If any of your fighters is dead at the conclusion of a battle, regardless of whether the battle was a win or loss, he or she can’t be used again in any subsequent battles. Whatever health your fighters have left at the end of a successful battle will be carried over to the start of the next battle.

Similarly, if you lose a battle, then your opponent’s fighters will start the next battle with whatever health they had left at the end of the previous one.

Squad Building Tips

  • You might want to use your weaker fighters early on in the easier battles so that your stronger fighters are fresh when things get tough.
  • Make sure your squad is strong enough. If you get wiped out on one of the early levels, then you will lose 6 of your 12 fighters. This can seriously limit how far your journey will go.
  • Beware of relying on resurrecting mages. If you win a battle while one of your fighters is dead, then you will lose that fighter for the rest of the journey. It can be a bit random and frustrating.
  • Have plenty of strong tanks available in reserve. The front-lines always die first.
  • Don’t pad your squad with weak dwellers such as cooks or treasurers. They will die quickly, and your mages will waste precious resurrect and heal spells on them.

Ending Your Journey

You can end your journey at any time, although we would usually fight until every dweller has been eliminated. 

It doesn’t hurt to try!

When you decide to end your journey, you will be presented with your potential winnings. Remember that you are not guaranteed anything that you see. For example, look at this haul from one of our journeys:

gem bay scam

Journey loot? … Don’t count on it!

Wow! Look at all the Legendary and Epic things you could get! (Please note that “Materials” are only available to TR11.) Sounds good, right? Let’s see what we actually got:

gem bay scam actual result

The actual reward.

What happened to the large amounts of Powder and the Scrolls? They never manifested.

The Gem Workshop

The Gem Workshop is where you will do all your Gem-related operations. You will need to build the room, but it doesn’t require much in terms of resources, and it builds very quickly. You won’t ever need to upgrade it.

Effects On The Gameplay

The Gem Workshop changes overall gameplay in the following ways:

  • Gold is much more important because every operation requires Gold; sometimes lots of it. Be prepared to do PvP battles to fund your Gemming efforts.
  • It provides another use for Shards. You can recycle them into Dust. Even orange Shards can be used for this! No more holding on to your legendary equipment forever…
  • It’s another place for your scientists to work. Recycling Shards into Dust takes time and can be sped up by adding scientists to the room.
  • It somewhat requires you to spend small amounts of diamonds. The only way to remove a Shard from a piece of equipment is to spend diamonds.

Gem Bay Market

As you can see at the end of journey chest posted above, you earn Kraken Tokens as you fight. The further you make it on your journey, the more tokens you get. 

These tokens can then be used to purchase various things from the shop. Please note that the contents of the chests, and the prices for all items, remain the same across TR8-TR11.

Extreme Gem Bay Strategy – It Takes A Lot Of Preparation!

Some called it the “extreme” gem bay build. 

The reason behind it is because it will stop you from farming other areas in the game. 

Only gem bay. 

It is also extreme because the amount of thought and preparation before doing the actual gem bay runs is just insane!

Since Gem bay is a real game-changer after TR8, it is better to be prepared from the very beginning.

Disclaimer: As of the update on 7/24/19, the extreme gem bay build might not work as well as before. The last 5 opponents in gem bay appear to be based on the level of your fighter training room, which means you would be facing higher level teams regardless of the historical power. Nevertheless, the build will still help you to maximise your farming but time will tell if it’s possible to do 20/20 still.

What is My Historical Power?

Historical power is calculated every time that your squad enters a battle. 

“Battles” refer to any PvE (story mode, invasions, portal) and PvP (attacks to other player’s castles, arena, gem bay) fights.

Basically, every time there is a loading screen before an attack, it will be considered into the historical power calculation. 

If you keep your level 40 squad for any of these actions the historical power will not be affected, even if you have other higher-level fighters in the castle.

Currently, deploying for clan wars does not affect your historical power (This could be changed in the future). 

You could have a separate team of 4 fighters at 70 and 1 at 69 and outfit every single fighter with the best items possible and still stay within the range for the build. 

Just remember to remove all the extra gear from fighters and keep them in any other room besides the barracks. You don’t want to increase your historical power by accident when attacking in other modes.

I Made A Mistake! Can I Reset My Historical Power on Hustle Castle?

No can do. Once your power has been recorded nothing will decrease it. You can only keep going up. It’s called historical power for a reason.

Build Prep Before The Storm

The purpose of this build is to farm enough gems and dust to go from TR8 to TR10 without having too much of a transition issue (ideally you should farm around 460 orange shards, to get 120 purple gems maxed). Please note that with the introduction of TR11 and Ancient Gems, the amount of orange shards needed has increased, that is, more than doubled.

The average player with a straight level build can usually farm up to 12-15 in a gem bay run. The reason behind this is that the average TR8 player with a team of 5×70 will have around 1m historical power. At this historical power, opponent 20 will be around 1.6m squad power, and more than likely contain fighters at level 85 or 100.

With this build, you should aim to complete gem bay runs or almost complete them all the time.

How Do You Actually Pull Off This Strategy?

There is a hidden mechanic in-game where higher-level fighters have a boost in dodge and damage over lower-level fighters. A level 70 tank against a team of 55, will dodge most of the incoming damage and at the same time crit more often. 

Even if they have the same stats on paper.

By staggering the squad fighter’s level and maintaining low historical power, you get a chance of having fighters that out-level your opponents in gem bay.

In short, as long as the opponents’ levels are lower than your tank and damage dealer, the level advantage (crit and dodge) will help you complete Gem Bay without breaking a sweat.

What Do You Need, Exactly?

Maxed out TR6s, have an average squad power of 400k (4×40) which is perfect for this build. If not, keeping historical power below 500k is almost ideal too.

Before you embark on this treacherous journey, you should do arena and portal farming first and achieve the following:

  • Under 500K historical power
  • At least 300 purple shards (for crafting)
  • At least 150 orange shards (from breaking legendary gear from the portal)
  • A minimum of 150,000 arena badges (each artifact and item at TR10 cost 25,000 and 15,000 badges respectively. We recommend having enough badges to purchase 4 different artifacts (backstab, abyssal summoning, time distortion, dusty antiques, etc) and 6 armours (reanimate/skeleton/stasis/etc.) The more badges you have the easier it will be in the long run.
  • 20,000 diamonds (To speed up training for fighter from 85 to 100). Slow but can be farmed from the portal.

Life Hack: Never purchase any in-game currency before? From time to time, there is a random chance of hitting the jackpot – 22,000 diamonds offer for $9.99 (this comes up fairly easy if you are a f2p player who has been consistently saying no to irresistible offers). 

Why Do You Need So Much?!

The idea behind this build is to farm all the items that you will need to skip TR7, stay in TR8 to farm and skip TR9 again to TR 10. 

This could take several months, and arena farming or portal farming will not be as efficient as before. 

It is highly likely that you will only get participation badges 95% of the time, as everyone in the arena will be a lot stronger than you. 

Fortunately, with the addition of arena ad videos, you can earn a couple extra badges per day without fighting a losing battle at all.

Notes On Controlling Historical Power

  • Each fighter skill level increases squad power.
  • Each item equipped increases squad power.
  • Items of higher rarity have higher squad power (event artifacts and legendary armours/weapons)

For instance:

A fighter with no equipment at level 70 is worth 25k power. 

Equipping him or her with a legendary weapon increases this number to 78k. 

Adding another armour and your warrior will be bumped up to a grand total of 140k. 

On the other hand, a fully geared fighter at level 70 (including gems, runes and legendary artifact) would have an individual power of 340k.

Therefore, the objective of this build is to: 

Equip fighters with only the bare minimum to maximise their potential and level up only to gain an advantage over your opponents.

The Nitty Gritty – Even More Life Hacks!

  • Once you have a substantial amount of badges and shards, you can increase your throne room level to unlock Gem Bay.
  • Leave crafting rooms at level 1 to utilise them for shard farming. The lower the crafting room level is, the cheaper and faster it takes to craft an item for recycling.
  • DO NOT RECYCLE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING GEAR:
    – Level 40 artifacts
    – Heal over time mage weapons (super rare and useful)
    – Resurrect weapons
    – Dodge archer armours
    – Heal over time tank armour
    – Stun bows.
    – Physical damage weapon with decrease armour
    – Mage armours with double or triple spell power (no other attributes or only one other)
  • Tank and archer should be at level 70 while mages stay at 40.

3 Bracket Rule Applies to Gem Bay Too!

When staggering, try not to have your squad’s top fighters span across three or more brackets. If not, the last opponent in Gem Bay will be at a 200% difficulty instead of the regular 150% markup of your base historical power. 

This is the same three bracket rule that all players would want to avoid when farming the arena.

One way to avoid this is to not increase your historical power at all. This will keep the last opponent at the same level of difficulty from the last time your historical power was recorded.

In the unfortunate scenario where your historical power is increased, the game records the new power including the levels of fighters. This breaks the 3 brackets rule, triggering the 200% markup difficulty.

You must then level your weaker fighters until the 3 bracket rule is not violated. This increases your historical power again, but the last opponent in Gem Bay will return to 150%.

The Bare Minimum Gear To Equip Your Warriors

Rings, amulets, artifacts are optional (as the squad power will permit)

Tanks & Archers: 

Weapons and armour should be legendary. Start out with what you have and move towards top-level items. 

Do not add gems casually, since this will increase the squad power exponentially, losing any level advantage. 

Rest of the team gear can be epic or rare.

Mages: 

Armor should be triple or double spell power (more healing/more hp after the resurrection). Mages must be protected at all costs for this strategy to be flawless.

Since your opponents are mostly TR7 or lower, there is no risk of getting backstab (unless the opponent uses unicorn artifact).

Inlaying only what’s necessary not only helps you with historical power but also keeps you from spending heaps of gold if you were to inlay every single gem slot wastefully. 

Remember, this will not be your final setup anyways!

Tanks: The main purpose of tanks is to survive, and not to deal with damage. Only inlay HP and Dodge gems.

Archers: Due to the lack of resistances, archers have to make up for it by inlaying only physical damage, critical and dodge gems. High dodge stats are especially useful for backstabbing teams.

Mages: Spell Power for high healing and hp after resurrections

Related:

Hustle Castle Arena Guide For Newbies: Basics & Strategies

Hustle Castle Throne Room Level 11 New Update – TR 11 on 11.11

BenQ EH600 Superior Digital Wireless Projector in Singapore – Tech Review

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