Don’t put down your favorite Android controller just yet, because we have another action RPG similar to Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal joining the fray. Undecember is Line Games’ answer to creating the best alternative to Diablo Immortal. Players are kept busy farming for essential gear while deciphering the most optimized loadouts and working toward constructing the finest build to beat the core content. Considering the amount of content and demands immediately slung at your face when starting out, we’ve created a handy guide to overwhelmed players through Undecember’s early game.
Get started as a Rune Hunter in Undecember
You’ll have a few preliminary steps to follow before you can play. The first is selecting your primary login method; it’s crucial to ensure you don’t lose your data if you delete the app/swap your gaming device.
Next up, you’ll fight multi-waves of enemies during the tutorial phase, letting you test out three weapon types, melee, bow, and staff. Every weapon unlocks a different palette of skills. We recommend using this as a baseline to decide which set of skills/weapon playstyle you prefer to build for your Rune Hunter.
Creating your character
The character customization tools for Undecember are limiting, but at least it is implemented.
Select between a male and female; you can choose a face type, skin tone, and hair style/hair color. Once you’ve finished customizing your character, tap on Create.
Enter your name and tap Create to finish the character creation process. Congratulations, you’re now one step closer to beginning your heroic journey!
Battle system fundamentals
Red and blue orbs at the bottom of your screen are your health (HP) and Mana. Once an orb is emptied, your bar reaches zero; HP depleting to zero results in your character dying and returning to a teleport, and Mana reaching zero disables your magic use. Therefore, skills require using Mana and HP as basic survival measures. Thankfully you can restore your Mana and HP with potions, which is why you should always stock up before tackling a challenging quest.
The bread and butter of any ARPG game is tapping on your skills to perform actions, managing those cooldowns, and then reactively choosing how to begin your fight engagements/disengagements. Equipping a dodge skill (like roll and teleport) and playing to your weapon strengths is essential. Bow and magic wielders prefer to kite from monsters and spam skills, while melee builds will focus on crowd control and survival while in close contact.
See the gifs below for examples of the three available styles you’ll encounter in the tutorial.
Melee prefers close-quarter fights and using slashes to control the incoming waves of enemies.
Bow classes prefer a mixture of powerful blows to defeat enemies and use skills to support this playstyle.
Magic wielders have to manage Mana, but the access to elemental skills can quickly turn the tides of a fight and enable a versatile build for both supporting and damage-dealing.
Elemental types and resistances in Undecember
The game’s many monsters contain an elemental type and elemental resistances. Below we’ve listed all the elemental types you’ll encounter in Undecember:
- Chaos
- Cold
- Fire
- Lightning
- Physical
- Poison
The types and their resistances are important for boss fights and dungeons. Your loadouts should complement the type and resistance, especially for deploying spells and weapons that a boss or monsters won’t resist. For example, a boss might resist Fire, meaning you’ll do far less damage than you normally would with your Fire spells; in this case, you may consider Cold and Lightning attacks for your loadout.
Customize Undecember’s skill loadout using skill runes
Adding link runes is how you’ll enhance your skills; you can make your skills stronger or add effects.
To get started, you first equip skill runes on a hexagon grid. Essentially adding a skill rune to any empty slots effectively equips it, and you can add a link rune to the skill rune to enhance it. Link runes must match the skill rune’s slot color; otherwise, you can’t connect the runes.
Once you’ve finished customizing your skill runes, select a skill to register it under your equippable skill slots. You have two slot sets available, leaving you five equippable skills per slot. Mix and match to your heart’s content; remember that some skills are locked behind which weapon you have equipped.
Rune growth
You can level up your runes by selecting elements as material. Experience points transfer to runes of the same color, but only 80% of experience points are transferred to ruins of different colors. You have five elements to select: red, green, blue, earth, and light. You gain bonus experience by transferring elements of the same color as your selected rune during rune growth. However, earth and light will still give a bonus experience for runes of any color.
Leveling up runes increases the potency behind skill runes and linked runes. Be sure to collect element material while looting and dissembling gear, all while progressing through ten acts.
Classifying runes by type
To understand the rune system, it is much easier to break down the rune types you’ll encounter. Remember, not every rune is created equally.
- Skill runes: Hexagonal-shaped runes that carry your melee, ranged, and spell skills. These are the most essential runes included in your skill loadout and are enhanced by link runes.
- Link runes: Support runes that link with your skill runes, matching the color adds a supportive effect to your skill rune.
- Runestone: Runes that are equipped as enchantments to your skill runes; it adds bonuses to skills and grants passives. These runes are obtained from raids and are divided by grades.
Rune enchants
You can begin rune enchants after completing Act I: Scout in Trouble. Essentially you can change how a rune works when you’ve enchanted it; these include their grade, color, number of slots, and link locations (on the hexagons). To change, or enchant your rune, you’ll need to acquire essence. The essence determines the property change to the rune.
Visit Pauline in Malo Front to start the rune enchantment. Note: You need to buy and collect essences to complete the enchanting process.
Improve your Undecember builds with the Zodiac system
As you make progress in Act I, you’ll unlock Zodiac. Zodiac is where you’ll first improve the base stats of your character. You have the choice to invest in strength, dexterity, and intelligence.
- Bow-focused (ranged) builds will want to focus on dexterity.
- Melee-focused builds will want to focus on strength.
- Magic-wielding builds will want to focus on intelligence.
To level up one of the base stats, tap on the plus sign by the stat of choice, then select Apply > Ok.
You only have so many free resets (removing all invested points) until Act II; otherwise, it will cost Gold or Stardust of Oblivion.
Unlocking specializations
Once you have trait points, you can unlock specializations. Each specialization will have a separate constellation where you can add trait points for each starting node: moon, star, and sun. To access the other constellations, you need to meet the conditions of having spent a number of trait points in your previous Zodiac tree; for example, Leaf requires 15 trait points to access.
Similar to Zodiac stat points, you also have a limited number of resets with trait points; otherwise, it costs Gold or Stardust of Oblivion.
Obtain equipment and gear up
You’ll acquire new equipment from loot. Visiting a blacksmith grants you the option to disassemble or enchant your gear. Enchanting gear requires essence; dissembling gear gives materials like essence used for enchanting your gear. You’ll come across more essence from slaying monsters.
All your equipment has stat requirements (strength, dexterity, intelligence, and player-level checks). Your gear is separated into grades, normal, magic, rare, unique, and legendary; generally, the higher grade, the more enchantment options your gear has, but in some cases, it’ll already have some pre-determined effects.
Engineering your Undecember playstyle
Undecember is an ARPG with multi-player elements bringing in a fully customizable build experience that isn’t class-locked, which is different from similar ARPGs like Diablo Immortal and Torchlight: Infinite. You play as the main protagonist, a Rune Hunter, where you select and define your own path (playstyle) based on the tools (systems) handed out. The game has only recently launched, but new players coming from Diablo Immortal may find Undecember to be a respectable game in its own right. And if you’re ready to dive right into the grind, check out the app below.
