Elvenar Diamonds: Free Play

So you’re a free Elvenar player, and you want to know everything you need to know about Elvenar diamonds? Do you want to know how you can get upwards of 1,000+ Elvenar diamonds per month – for free? Well, you are in the right place. In this article, you will find out:

• What are the diamonds?
• Why as a free player you should still care about diamonds?
• What you shouldn’t spend free diamonds on?
• What you should spend free diamonds on?
• How to acquire diamonds as a free player (that’s why you’re here, right? 😉 )
• Conclusion

What are the diamonds of Elvenar?

InnoGames describes diamonds in it’s knowledge base as this:

What are Diamonds and how do I get them?

Diamonds are the premium currency of Elvenar. You do not need to purchase Diamonds to play the game. However, with Diamonds you can get useful benefits that can for example speed up your progression in the game. Diamonds can be bought with real money, but can also be acquired through community contests that take place in the Forum, or our social media pages.

To purchase Diamonds, simply click the + button next to the place where your available Diamonds are shown in the top right corner of the screen.

This is generally accurate, even if not necessarily complete 😉 You can use diamonds for the great many things in the Elvenar – as a substitute for missing resources, time, research etc. You can also acquire powerful items and buildings that you cannot acquire any other way (more on that later). And indeed mostly the diamonds are purchased with real money – after all, this is how Inno makes money to develop and run this game.

Just to be clear, we’re definitely not against you paying for diamonds with your credit card – after all, this is what allows all of us enjoy this game by keeping Inno in business. But this is not the focus of this site. Paying for diamonds makes the game easier, so not paying for diamonds makes it more challenging as there is one extra constraint. And we love challenges!

Why you should care about Elvenar diamonds?

OK, so you have committed to a free play challenge. Why would you care about diamonds then? Two things really:

• There are some valuable things in Elvenar that you can only acquire with diamonds
• You can still get some limited number of diamonds without paying

What NOT to spend diamonds on

Here are some general guidelines, before we jump into specifics. As you will find out, free diamonds are a very scarce and not renewable resource in Elvenar, so you would want to spend it on things that are valuable, keep value over time and cannot be acquired in any other way that is more sustainable. With that, here are the things that you should not be spending your free diamonds on:

• Speed up of building time / production time / scouting time etc

  • These are notoriously bad value, even if you purchase your diamonds. I remember that sometimes they would charge you a few diamonds just to speed up that last 10 seconds remaining!
  • You can always wait to natural completion, as excruciating as it might be 😉 I don’t know of any scenarios where getting something done faster would be absolutely critical to progress (yes, you may miss certain items in the events, but these are never critical)
  • Even if you want to speed up, there are always time booster instants. These are quite useful, and can be acquired in sustainable fashion: crafting in the Magic Academy, winning from events etc

• Purchasing missing resources for building / research / crafting etc

  • Basically, the same as above – just wait until you produce enough resources naturally. It is a terrible waste to use free diamonds on that
  • In the case of coins and supplies, you can always use instants in a pinch, as these are renewable and you can get tons of those from events, buildings, crafting etc. Nowadays the same applies to guest race goods, as you have access to Portal Profit instants.
  • If you’re low on manufactured goods, you can temporarily ramp up production with Magical Manufacturing spells (also renewable), or beg your fellows for cheap trades 😉 If this is a permanent situation, you should review your manufacturing capacity and see if you need to add more production

• Magical Buildings – residences / workshops / culture

  • Now, spending on magical buildings is not that bad as on time / resources. Normally, you cannot get these any other way except paying with diamonds. Magical buildings are usually quite a bit better than their regular counterparts on a per-tile basis. So we already checked 2 out of 3 boxes (valuable and exclusive), what’s the issue then?
  • Well, the issue is that magical buildings do not keep their value over time. While these buildings look quite good in the same chapter, they quickly fall behind as you progress in chapters. For instance, chapter 3 magical residence gives elves 250 pop in 2×3 format. So that’s about 42 pop/sq. Well, L21 residences in Orcs are 900 pop in 4×3, meaning 75 pop/sq. Basically, your magical buildings that fall behind 1-2 chapters are just not that good.
  • And another crucial point is, you cannot easily upgrade magical buildings! To keep up, you need blueprints, and these are pretty rare (you get 1 per week if your Fellowship opens all 10 chests in a weekly tournament). This means you can upgrade 1 magical building by 1 level per week, or, you know, pay more diamonds.
  • Bottom line is, pay for magical buildings if you want. But keep in mind that you will either regret it later, or will need to pay more for upgrades. As a free player, it is just not worth it.

What to actually spend free diamonds on

Well, it sounds like there is nothing in Elvenar worth spending your free diamonds on 😉 Luckily, this is not the case. In fact, this is the whole reason why we even care about diamonds as free players. So here we go, these are the things that you should be spending your free diamonds on:

Premium Expansions

This is the most important reason to focus on diamonds, two others are more of the nice-to-haves

Space and Time

If you have played Elvenar for any period of time, you realize what is the most important resource in this game. This is not coins, not supplies, not manufactured or settlement goods. It is actually space (expansions) and time (speed of your progress). Both can be easily converted to more coins/supplies/goods etc, but space and time have some hard constraints in Elvenar.

Space and time are complementary – you can run a very compact city, but your progress will be really slow. Now, as minmax gamers we decided to optimize for the fastest progress we can achieve. Well, that means we need to maximize space that we have available. This usually comes into play in building huge guest race settlements as this is how you can make sure you’re moving as fast as possible.

We assume that you already maximized your available expansions. This means unlocking all the Research Expansions (from tech tree) and maximizing Province Expansions (negotiating the map).

But there is one last untapped source of expansions, and that is Premium Expansions. There are 33 of those, and you can only acquire them with diamonds. That’s right, even if you max out tech tree and the map, there is still 33 expansions that you can never get unless you use diamonds. So yeah, these are exclusive, valuable and they age extremely well. If anything, the more you progress, the more you can appreciate a few more expansions.

Worth it?

So premium expansions range in costs from 450 to 13,500 diamonds. Each subsequent one is ~300-500 diamonds more expensive than the one before. So as a free player it is unlikely you will get a ton of these, but you can easily get 4-5 early on, and you will see how helpful it can be. Last word of advice – on a periodic basis you will get offers of 10% discount on premium expansions. These pop up for 24 hours every 1-2 months. If you’re not struggling for space, you may want to time grabbing premium expansions under these offers. 10% doesn’t sound like a lot, but these add up, and free diamonds are not really a renewable resource.

Bottom line: premium expansions are your primary reason to get diamonds. Go for it!

Magic Academy upgrades

As a free player, you can get your Magic Academy up to level 2 in a regular fashion. However, upgrading to levels 3-5 requires diamonds – 250/500/750 per level. Upgrading MA does several things:

• increases number of slots in the spell queue
• speed ups spell creation
• increases output of spell fragments when disenchanting (this is new)

Before Crafting

Until recently, I didn’t care about MA levels at all – here’s why:

• MA could only produce 4 primary enchantments, and I either didn’t care about them at all (PoP, EE – coins and supplies are plentiful) or had more than enough from tournaments (MM, IM). So I was just slow cooking MMs (these are always useful as there is no cap on goods), also for quests where you needed to get some spells.
• Extra slots didn’t matter either as even with just 2 slots production cycles were 1-2 days, so definitely was not a constraint

After Crafting

But it all changed since introduction of Crafting. There are tons of useful things that can be crafted in the MA! I will write a separate post on what’s good and what’s not for crafting. So now setup is different, and MA levels matter.

I only cook Combining Catalysts now, non-stop, and I am always short as production times are just so slow. Catalyst is a 3 relic enchantment and as such here are production times for a single catalyst:

• L2: 19.5 hrs
• L3: 15.0 hrs
• L4: 10.5 hrs
• L5: 6.0 hrs

Basically, L4 is 2x as fast as L2, and L5 is 3x faster. I think we can all agree that this is pretty meaningful improvement. Just make sure that you’re not short on relics (I get tons from tournaments, so that’s not a constraint).

In addition to CC spells, you also need to get spell fragments in order to craft. These come from disenchanting unneeded spells and summonings. I usually disenchant PoP and EE spells that I get from tournaments, and spell fragments can be quite a constraint for crafting as well. If L1 MA disenchants at 100%, every extra level bumps it up by extra 25%, so L5 MA generates 2x spell fragments from the same inputs as L1 MA.

Worth it?

As crafting can provide some very nice perks (more on that separately), upgrading Magic Academy with diamonds past L2 makes sense. Upgrades are not super expensive either.

Bottom line: Magic Academy upgrades may be worth it once Premium Expansions become too expensive. I, for instance, upgraded MA to L4 (500 diamonds) after I placed 5 premium expansions, the last one costing me 1,500 diamonds. Good value.

Builders’ Hut upgrades

As a free player, you get your Builder’s Hut at level 2, meaning you can run 2 builds in parallel. Upgrading to levels 3-5 requires diamonds – 500/1000/1500 per level. With each level you get another builder that can work in parallel. Up until about chapter 6 (Dwarves) having only 2 builders didn’t feel like a big constraint – build times were relatively short, and build resources were a bigger issue.

Starting with the guest race chapters build times started to go up quickly. Some buildings (Main Hall, Barracks, some Ancient Wonders) can tie up your builders for 20 hours and more. What that means is that during that time you cannot place even L1 building unless you cancel the long build, or wait until it’s done.

So I contemplated upgrading from L2 to L3 for 1 extra builder (and 500 diamonds) for quite a while, and finally decided to pull the plug. I am glad I did. I feel that only 2 builders can start hampering your progress starting from the Orcs chapter. My 3 builders worked pretty much non-stop (no idling) for the whole chapter – except for the last couple of days, and barely covered all the planned upgrades (and I didn’t even fully upgrade T3 manufactories and workshops). So it feels like with only 2 builders I may not have had sufficient building capacity!

Worth it?

Now, these upgrades are not cheap – the next one would be 1000 diamonds. So now when I know how it works, I will see if I am falling behind on building progress, and if that would be the case, I will need to consider another upgrade. Until then, I will stay with 3 builders.

Bottom line: Builders’ Hut upgrades may be worth it once your overall build time of chapters become a constraint. Getting at least L3 definitely made sense to me as early as Dwarves. Good value.

How to get free diamonds in Elvenar

OK, so you’ve been looking forward to this section 😉 Alright, so now we established that you want diamonds, and you know what to spend it on, and what not to spend it on. That’s awesome! But how do you get those things?

The most obvious way is, of course, to buy those. There could be a separate topic on how to maximize value when purchasing diamonds, but we already mentioned that we want to stick to the free play. So this method is out. So here are the ways of acquiring Elvenar diamonds in the game without paying:

• Wishing Wells (600 diamonds per month for 4 wells)
• Quest rewards (200 diamonds per month)
• Recycling sign-up diamonds (600 diamonds per month with 6 worlds available)
• Social Media Contests (probably nothing 😉 )

Let’s discuss these one-by-one.

Wishing Wells

Elvenar has many buildings that produce all kinds of things – coins, supplies, goods, KPs, instants, broken shards etc. But there is one and only one building that can produce diamonds – a Wishing Well. This is a 3×3 culture building that every 12 hours randomly produces some coins or supplies or goods or diamonds. It is an expiring building that is good for 100 days. But basically, you don’t care about all the other attributes of WW, those are not important. The only important thing is that it can produce diamonds.

So here are some numbers. There is about 10% chance of getting 25 diamonds on every collection for WW. And level of the Wishing Well doesn’t matter. This means that over 100 days you will be able to collect about 160-180 times if you’re diligently picking up almost every 12 hours. On average, you’ll get 400-450 diamonds over lifetime of the well, or about 130-150 diamonds per month. And you can run multiple wells at the same time! I used to run 4 in parallel for more than half a year. So this could be about 600 diamonds per month.

Where to get Wishing Wells?

So Wishing Wells are awesome, but how to get them? You can’t build them, you can’t craft them. The only way is to win them from events. Luckily, they are almost always there in the prizes, at least for big events. It used to be possible to gain multiple WWs from a single event (e.g. as a daily prize) – if you see one of these, go all in on WWs and forget about other prizes. I’ve got 9 or 10 WWs from a single event back then.

But recent events are structured in a way that it is almost impossible to get multiple WWs from the same event. We’ll see if this will be a new norm, but in any case, when you see a Wishing Well as a prize – go for it. You’ll be glad you did.

Quest Rewards

Well, this one is fairly straightforward – you don’t really need to do anything extra, except making sure you’re keeping up with regular quest line. There are several quests that give you diamonds, you just need to make sure you get to them. Remember, you don’t even need to do all mandatory quests before these ones – as soon as you move into the next chapter, all mandatory quests for the previous chapter become declinable. You can just fast-forward to the diamond quests if you wish. Just make sure you don’t decline the diamond quests! 😉

So what are those quests? Usually, these are either rewards for researching Ancient Wonders tech, Advanced Scouts for the next chapter or dismantling portal of the previous guest race. So far, they all worth 200 diamonds. Here is a list:

• 06-chapter – Research Advanced Scouts (entering Fairies)
• 07-chapter – Research Fairies Ancient Wonders
• 08-chapter – Research Ancient Wonders of the Orcs
• 09-chapter – Research Advanced Scouts (entering Sorcerers & Dragons)
• 10-chapter – Gain 100,000 mana (entering Halflings)
• 11-chapter – Sell your Spring Grove (exiting Halflings)
• 12-chapter – Deliver 20,000 of each non-boosted sentient good (exiting Elementals)
• 13-chapter – The Story of the Amuni arc (5 x 40 diamonds)

As you can see, this is 200 diamonds per chapter. If you’re doing roughly a chapter a month, then this becomes an extra 200 diamonds per month.

Recycling sign-up diamonds

Remember how you’ve got 100 of freebie Elvenar diamonds after you completed tutorial quests when you just started up? What if you could get 100 diamonds just for running the tutorial again? Well, you can! (with some caveats 😉 )

Conditions

This method can be quite powerful depending on which region you’re playing in, and what other worlds you have active cities in. This method relies on the following:

• Each geography has more than one world to play in (e.g. US has 7 at the moment)
• Every user is officially allowed to have a separate account in a different world
• Cities in all worlds would be separate and cannot interact, except they share diamonds
• This means that if you gain diamonds in one world, you can use them in another one!
• This, and after about a month of inactivity Inno will delete your city unless you paid, or reached chapter 4

How it works

So this is how it works. You start with 1 (or more) worlds that you play in, and the rests that are inactive. When you login, it looks like this:

The more inactive worlds you have available, the more diamonds you can get. Here, we have 6. Now, go into each of the inactive worlds, start a new city and complete initial 18 quests. Here is the fastest way of doing this (about 1:40 per world, most of which you just wait and can do in parallel), but you can do whatever way you want, it won’t take too long. After you complete these initial 18 quests in all inactive cities, you get 100 diamonds per world, and you login would look like this:

Congratulations, you’ve just got yourself 600 diamonds (in this case), which can be done in less than 4 hours. Even as a one off this is not too bad, but we can make this repeatable! Here is how.

Potentially no longer working!

Note: As of April 2019, I received several reports of people unable to get tutorial quests in the new worlds. Just to be clear, this is what you need to see:

If you don’t see the 0/18 shield (circled yellow), you won’t get diamond reward. It has certainly worked as late as mid-March 2019, so perhaps game was updated in the meantime. This quest is still available for new accounts. I’ll keep this updated as more information becomes available.

How it make it repeatable

Keep playing in your active worlds as usual, and do NOT touch any of the worlds that you farm for diamonds. This means no logins whatsoever. After about a month, Inno will delete your inactive cities, and it will look like this again:

So now you can repeat the whole exercise again! But if you login, even accidentally, into any of the other worlds, 1 month timer resets and you will have to wait for another month.

This method obviously depends on how many worlds you region has available, as well as how many worlds you’re actively playing. But you can get up to 600 diamonds a month for less than 4 hours of play. Not too bad!

Social Media Contests

Well, I just add these for completions. I have never participated, and don’t know any people who actually won any Elvenar diamonds this way, but periodically Inno runs some event (such as liking their page on Facebook). This is a contest, so you’re not guaranteed anything – just some people who would participate would get some diamonds. Participate if you want, but don’t get your hopes high.

Conclusion

So here you have it, pretty much everything you need to know about Elvenar diamonds as a free player – at least as far as I can tell. Let me know in the comments if anything is missing, or if you vehemently disagree with anything, or if this actually helped you in your game play and developing your city. While you’re at it, make sure to check out other resources on this site – I hope that you find them useful.

GG