New Ballbylon
New Ballbylon is your city. Everything you build here gives you permanent upgrades that carry into every future run. The game does not explain how the harvesting system works, what buildings to prioritize, or how the Market economy breaks at scale. This guide does.
How Harvesting Works
After every run (win or lose), you get one harvest. You launch worker balls into your base layout, and they bounce off buildings to extract resources. You only get one launch angle per harvest, so your base layout matters.
Three things control how much you get per harvest:
- Worker count: More workers means more bounces. Build housing to increase this number.
- Speed phase: Workers change color as they speed up (normal, then orange, then red). Faster workers extract more per bounce.
- Collision volume: The total number of times workers hit resource buildings in a single harvest. This is where layout engineering pays off.
You get exactly one harvest per completed run, regardless of whether you won or lost. Short, failed runs still give you a harvest. Never skip the base phase.
Building Categories
Extraction Nodes
These are your primary resource generators. Workers bounce off them to collect materials.
| Building | Resource | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Gold Mine | Gold | Your most important resource. Most buildings cost gold. |
| Farm | Wheat | Needed for housing and some utility buildings. |
| Lumberyard | Wood | Needed for early-game structures. |
| Quarry | Stone | Needed for late-game infinite stat buildings. |
Upgrading extraction nodes increases the amount of resources you get per worker bounce. Prioritize Gold Mines above everything else.
Character Housing
Each playable character has a matching housing structure. Build it in New Ballbylon to unlock that character for runs.
| Housing | Character Unlocked | Biome Blueprint Source |
|---|---|---|
| Sheriff's Office | The Itchy Finger | BONExYARD |
| Haunted House | The Repentant | BONExYARD |
| Cozy Home | The Cohabitants | BONExYARD |
| Veteran's Hut | The Embedded | BONExYARD |
| Villa | The Cogitator | SNOWYxSHORES |
| Single-Family Home | The Empty Nester | SNOWYxSHORES |
| Mausoleum | The Shade | LIMINALxDESERT |
| Mansion | The Spendthrift | FUNGALxFOREST |
| Iron Fortress | The Shieldbearer | FUNGALxFOREST |
| Laboratory | The Physicist | FUNGALxFOREST |
| Monastery | The Flagellant | GORYxGRASSLANDS |
| Theatre | The Juggler | GORYxGRASSLANDS |
| Rocky Hill | The Makeshift Sisyphus | GORYxGRASSLANDS |
| Captain's Quarters | The Tactician | SMOLDERINGxDEPTHS |
| Campground | The Radical | HEAVENLYxGATES |
| Falconry Hut | The Falconer | HEAVENLYxGATES |
| Party House | The Carouser | VASTxVOID |
The Mansion has a unique perk: it passively generates 28 Gold per minute while the game is running, even if you are not doing anything.
Infinite Stat Buildings
These are the endgame buildings. They can be upgraded forever, and each level gives a permanent attribute point to every character.
| Building | Attribute Boosted |
|---|---|
| Hospital | Endurance (HP) |
| Capitolium | Strength (Damage) |
| Others | Speed, Dexterity, Leadership, Intelligence |
The catch: costs scale exponentially. By level 22, a single upgrade costs around 570,000 Gold, 75,000 Stone, 150,000 Wheat, and 120,000 Wood. Each upgrade also requires filling a construction gauge that caps at 1,050 worker bounces.
Proximity Buffers
These buildings boost everything near them. Placement matters.
- Captain's Quarters: Adds a +1 multiplier to all stat buildings within its radius. Put it next to your infinite stat buildings.
- Iron Fortress: Gives +4 construction bounce points to all nearby structures. This means you finish construction faster on everything around it.
Utility Buildings
| Building | Biome Source | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| Casino | FUNGALxFOREST | Reduces the resource cost of level-up rerolls during runs by 20%. |
| Abbey | FUNGALxFOREST | 5% bonus to all XP gained during runs. |
| Necromancer | FUNGALxFOREST | Gives you one revive per run at 25% HP. Also triggers a screen wipe that kills all non-boss enemies. |
| Jeweler | FUNGALxFOREST | Your starting ball begins at Level 2 instead of Level 1. Saves an entire Fission step. |
| Gemsmith | GORYxGRASSLANDS | At the start of each run, you get to pick an extra ball immediately. |
| Guildhall | Shadow Update | Lets you re-roll locked-in character upgrade choices during a run. |
| Market | Baseline unlock | Lets you buy and sell resources at exchange rates. |
Trophies
Trophies are special structures you build after clearing biome bosses. They grant scaling stat boosts (HP, ball speed) based on how many unique characters have cleared that biome. The more characters you clear with, the bigger the bonus.
Resource Economics
The Optimal Extraction Ratio
At around level 15, the most efficient resource distribution for your base layout is:
| Resource | Target Percentage |
|---|---|
| Gold | 62% |
| Wheat | 16% |
| Lumber | 13% |
| Stone | 10% |
Gold dominates because almost everything costs gold, and the Market lets you convert gold into other resources when needed.
Market Exchange Rates
The Market building lets you sell and buy resources. Here is what makes it powerful:
- Hold Shift and click to sell in batches of 100x.
- 10,000 Stone sells for roughly 400,000 Gold.
- 10,000 Wood sells for roughly 100,000 Gold.
The exchange rate drops immediately after a bulk sale. It takes about 35 runs for the rate to reset back to profitable levels. Do not sell everything at once unless you need a specific amount of gold right now.
The Arbitrage Strategy
Because the Market's sell rates for Stone and Wood are so high relative to their extraction value, some players skip balanced extraction entirely. Instead:
- Focus your entire base layout on Stone and Wood extraction.
- Stockpile until you have 10,000+ of each.
- Bulk sell everything into Gold.
- Use gold to buy back the small amounts of Wheat and Lumber you actually need.
This produces more Gold per hour than pure Gold extraction, but it requires patience and 35+ runs between each bulk sale cycle.
The 10 Gold Mine Layout
This is the community-optimized base topology for maximum gold per harvest.
How It Works
The goal is to force your workers into a narrow corridor lined with 10 Gold Mines, so every bounce hits a gold source. To make this work, you need to trap workers inside the corridor using the collision boxes of specific buildings.
Key buildings for the trap geometry:
- Wishing Well: Has corner collision boxes that redirect workers into tight angles.
- Gatherer's Hut: Has a rounded edge that curves worker trajectories back into the corridor.
- Three-block corner buildings: Seal off escape routes so workers cannot exit the gold corridor.
Expected Returns
With this layout, a single harvest produces 2,300 to 2,700 Gold. Since launching workers costs gold (and that cost scales up), keep your launch cost below 2,200 Gold to stay profitable on every harvest.
Stat Building Placement
Place your six infinite stat buildings at the end of the gold corridor, right next to the Iron Fortress. The Iron Fortress gives +4 bounce points to everything nearby. Combined with the high worker traffic from the gold corridor, this setup fills the 1,050-bounce construction gauge in a single harvest phase.
Build the Captain's Quarters adjacent to your stat buildings for an extra +1 multiplier per upgrade. Combined with the Iron Fortress placement, this is the fastest way to push permanent stats.