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Overview

• There are 33 Queen crabs that you can unlock.
• The cheapest, Shroud, costs 40 gold.
• The final and most expensive, Blood Guardian, costs 2.14 Fi gold (that's a number with 429 zeroes in it).
• Mutation Solar Flare Pincers reduces the cost of unlocks and upgrades
• Queens auto-spawn on a 4 second timer. Tapping has no impact on them.
• Mutation Orchid Blossom Pincers can increase the spawn rate of your queens, as can the Queen Frenzy talent Empowered Genes.
• If you have both the mutation maxed out, and Empowered Genes active, the queen's spawn rate will be 2.0 seconds.
• Crab Evolutions themselves do not have any impact on the queens, but the damage bonus from unlocking evolutions does have an impact.

Queen Contribution to DPS

• Each time you evolve your crabs, you gain a percentage of "Queen DPS to Dmg" - meaning a percentage of the damage afforded by your queens is added to the damage of your tapped and shadow swarm crabs.
• When your crabs are fully evolved, this bonus will be 9.0%.
• Mutation Violet Tipped Carapace increases the amount of queen DPS that is contributed, up to a new maximum of 10.5%.
• The Gene Lab added Evolution Gild which can add additional Queen DPS to Dmg bonus to your crab Evolutions. Highly recommend you read that article before purchasing any, however.

Queen Skills

• Each queen has eight Queen Skills that you purchase as you level her up.
• Clicking the picture of the queen crab, you can review her eight Skills and what they do for you.
• Each queen represents one of the three colours. Most of her Skills benefit all crabs sharing her colour.
• Some Skills benefit all crabs or another aspect of the game (Gold).
• The Statistics screen in-game will show the current sum of benefits provided by the queens.

Queen Evolution

• Upon reaching queen level 1200 you may Evolve her.
• The queen becomes significantly more powerful in terms of her DPS, but she loses all 8 Skills and you have to purchase them again between levels 1205 and 2000.
• The Queen Skills do not get any more powerful after you Evolve - they are the same 8 Skills.
• The lower, weaker queens are generally not worth evolving because their increased DPS makes no difference, and they are better off having their full set of 8 Skills active.
• Queens only evolve once (at 1200) - they do not evolve at 2000+

Walls

You may hear some refer to "walls" in the game. Other games might call them "hell levels", but the concept is the same - your progress is blocked. Most often this is because you need to either evolve your highest queen, or unlock the next queen to boost your damage enough to proceed down the riverbed. There are a few, but the most annoying is the stretch between 9700 and 10050 where you are trying to evolve Death Sickle. You will find all sorts of advice on how to handle this area, and everyone has their own opinions on what "works best", but in general it is all about your gold more than your damage.

Three New Queens

Patch 1.4 added three new queens. You can "generally" unlock Dynamo around 17.3k, Mammoth around 21-22k, and Blood Guardian around 27.5-28k. You'll evolve Blood Guardian somewhere around 30.5k and start hitting your new maximum somewhere between 32.3k and 34k. Much more than that likely requires pearls to reach.

Queen Auto-Buy after (Normal) Ecdysis

• Introduced in version 3.5.0 as a Quality of Life improvement that has been asked for since 2016.
• Automatically purchases queens after a normal Ecdysis, presuming you start with enough gold to do so.
• Ability unlocks when your cast's maximum distance passes 10km.
• Can be turned off in the Settings menu.
• After observing how it works for a while, Queen upgrade logic appears to be this:
  1. Unlock all possible queens at Level 1.
  2. Starting with Shroud, attempt to upgrade to level 2000, including skills.
  3. Repeat for each queen after Shroud.

If you do not like the auto-upgrade logic, it is suggested you turn the feature off and continue to manually spend your starting gold as you see fit. No automatic system will 100% satisfy every player.

The Crab Run worksheet has a Queen Autobuy area within the Stuff tab's Ecdysis section.