This guide provides some very high level explanations on most aspects of Cadria. It is not very detailed and if you have been playing for a while you will probably know most of it already.
Before you reach shop level 12 or so, some early game things that are good to make and sell (because they start at a decent price but don’t take too many materials to make) are: Shield of Honor, War Horn, Blue Hood, Wisdom Potion. Most of the heroes in the early part of the game will take one or more of these items. You have not earned this achievement yet. Log in to view progress.
Guild
20 players max per guild. Each guild has a daily commission that always starts the same time. Join a guild for which the daily commission time suits you, there is not much point in creating a guild yourself as high ranked English guilds are often taking players with low level due to small playerbase.
Possible commission times are 02:00, 08:00, 14:00 and 20:00 UTC. You can buy extra purple guild gems for 200/300 gems – 6000 token rewards, but most guilds are maxed on thsoe already.
If you join a guild with a lower level the missions are usually easier – but rewards presumably lower too. Try to open an item for every faction order you are doing to the guild as people helping you will get additional guild tokens.
Guild token spending
There are a few blueprints that are considered as good money makers. Otherwise you should probably focus on getting trophy decorations as well as red carpets.
Resource box is still a question mark for me. I did not buy enough of them to know if it’s worth it.
Praise
You can increase the maximum praise by upgrading your reception desk.
You can use praise to surcharge an item by up to +25% – if you have upgraded corresponding blueprint. Only the latest one is taken into account so if you research +10% then +25% the item surcharge is 25%.
Praise can also be used to sell another item to customers. The cost to surcharge is higher if the hero is not proficient with that item (yellow / red instead of green).
You can raise praise by giving a discount when selling items but the best way is to craft a lot of cheap low level items like daggers / staves, upgrade corresponding racks so that each item sold brings 6 to 8 praise.
During fevers racks do not have any effect. During fevers you will usually want to maximize the amount of money you gain through surcharge. One way of doing so is to surcharge customers one by one (but not selling items) before you start fever, then rebuild praise up to its maximum. That way you can start a fever 4 items sold with surcharge fever price straight away while having full praise.
Level up
Leveling-up your shopkeeper does not only bring advantages.
Pros
Unlock higher tier of buildings
Unlock additional craft / adventure slots
Unlock additional decorations / bins
Higher diamond reward from shop orders
Cons
The shop orders are more difficult
More items required in shop orders and faction orders
If you level-up too fast, you will be stuck due to lack of crafting parts / diamonds to upgrade the crafting tables.
At some level you unlock town quests which can block your mines until you complete them
For heroes, increased level makes them buy and sell items with a higher level. The main downside is that lower level gears will break more easily on that hero and that this hero will no longer buy the very cheap weapons without you suggesting them.
Exact range unknown but probably along the lines of -7 level up to +7 level.
Specialization?
Not something I would recommend as free to play because of table block that hits relatively early. I went with even spread so the below thoughts are purely theorycrafting:
If you specialize in some item types only you have to find a spread that uses various resources. However you will probably still need almost all tables and crafts.
You could potentially focus on items necessary for 4 or 5 shop orders and skip the rest. This could be quite good with a goal to increase shopkeeper level relatively fast without failing the shop orders since you have less BPs to unlock due to less amount of blueprints to unlock.
Robot
I did not check it myself but I was told that the robot can reach level 120. Maximum stat for a given craft type is 100, which means that eventually (but I’m not close to that point yet) the robot will just be doing pre-crafts.
Robot can be upgraded with diamonds to have additional slots (up to 6). It can also be upgraded to able to craft compound items without crafting each pre-craft item first.
The priority for that one should be relatively low, unless you find yourself blocked by blueprint unlocks. The main strength of the robot is to queue multiple long items and come back with all of them done so that’s quite nice for blueprint unlocks.
You can also use the robot as a way to temporarily store more resources, just request multiple items and resources, you can then cancel them later and get the resources back, as long as crafting of that item didn’t start.
Shop orders
Shop orders appear every 6 hours (after you accepted the previous one). You can have multiple orders on-going at the same time. Orders have a 24 hours cooldown after you finish it or you refuse it.
It’s usually best to only take an order if you can complete the 3 items, in order to get the diamond reward.
Shop order difficulty is presumably based on shopkeeper level.
Faction orders
Faction orders difficulty increases with your own shopkeeper level. It is also based on the number of troops in faction.
Faction orders refresh at a fixed time every 2 days. Also once you complete one of them you have to wait 48 hours for a new one to be available for corresponding faction.
The main use of faction orders is to get keys which can unlock very strong equipment from the highest level chest.
It is debatable whether doing these orders is still useful once you reach high level: the crafting times become really prohibitive and the rewards are no longer that great compared to items you can craft yourself.
Bank
In the tavern, just put the maximum of money here regularly. The income is significant over time and there is no drawback (such as experience gain) associated to that one.
Adventure
Gears have chance to break in adventure (only 2 of them though, so if you do 5 heroes adventure you will still have only 2 items broken maximum).
To reduce the break chance you should use items around the level of your hero, and with higher quality. Legendary / mystic items are unbreakable.
Another strategy is to farm low level items using heroes without equipment. A last option is to use very low level gears (with low quality) just to benefit from the 7 green items bonus while keeping low repair cost (such item will rarely exceed 500 gold in repairs)
Team compositions: Pay close attention to leader skills (which are applied only if the corresponding hero is the leader), unique skills (only the highest level one from the team is applied). Swift souls is better than Healing light at same level as it applies both to adventure time and rest time.
Farming set equipments
You can get random equipments through adventure, the level of equipment depends on which adventure you do. Which means that you can find low level items even when you have very high level heroes. This is slightly unreliable though and it will likely take months before you can complete sets that way.
Resources
Most commonly used resources, but it obviously depends on what you are focusing on:
Iron / Gem / Mana
Copper (early game, much less late game)
Less used:
Leather / Wood
Bin size increases once you upgrade them past level 10, but you should still have enough room to place all bins lvl18 + a couple of racks.
If you won’t access the game for 5+ hours you ideally want to have current resources at the cap, but bin storage empty so that once you get into the game you have both your own resources at the cap and the bin completely full.
Decoration points
There are 3 types of decorations – with limited space available for each of them so what will matter after a while is how many points per tile they bring:
Floor: most common one, at lvl27, I’m not even using the 21 points per tile.
Walls: a bit less common, maxed out on those as well, lowest one at 18 points per tile.
Carpets: lots of space available for those, they have lower points per tile reward but you can fit a lot of them in your shop and it will take a long time to get the whole floor filled with those (I’m still far from having all the floor covered with those).
A few decoration have special effects – paid ones as far as I’m aware – such as Shield of Guardian.
You can earn extra decoration points from alternate Herooutfits (they don’t need to wear the outfit for you to benefit from the decoration points) and paintings from trials
Trials
Trials are rather endgame content. The only rewards are some books (which give additional hp in trials), decorations and painting pieces which give additional decoration points.
Sending the team has a fixed cost (100 food at lowest level) and then each dice roll costs 8 per character in the team.
Rest time of the team is 1 hour at easiest level, 4 hours at medium level.
I would recommend to do the easy trial everyday (with 3 heroes usually unless you need less than that), and once in a while – ideally when there are 3 portrait rewards – do the medium difficulty one.
At easiest difficulty, there are 3 reward chest at the end of easy trial, one of them contains the art the other starweave crystals. First one is free, the other are 30 gems each so I usually open them until I find the art piece.
At medium difficulty, there are 6 chests, first 2 ones are free and next ones are 40 gems each.
Buying the 1/2/3 movement roll for 15 gems can be useful as those help to get out of annoying loops. The first thing to do is probably to increase your max food to 1200 though.
Discord
There are 2 main discord groups for the game: cadria and cadria inn. Through these discords you can also have access to a spreadsheet giving you detailed information about almost everything in the game. Also you can get support from others by asking questions there.
Faction wars
There are 2 faction wars per week, each war consists in a preparation phase followed by a battle phase. Each phase can bring you 200 diamonds so you should at least aim for that if you are playing free to play as this can be your main source of diamond income.
Although I would recommend to push for legendary item as they are quite decent – espeically at the beginning – and unbreakable.
During preparation phase you have to craft items and submit them by batches of 5. Sometimes it’s good to do a mix of both items because they use different resources, sometimes one item is much less expensive (resource wise) than the other so it’s better to craft only that one.
During battle phase you have to send soldiers to defeat the boss, like an adventure. This one can be difficult and time consuming when you don’t have a very high level yet. Also, it’s probabilistically better to do 30 minutes 80 points fight at 80% winrate, than 20 minutes 30 points fights at 95%.
Do not forget to collect the global objective – faction decoration for preparation and faction blueprint for battle – once the goal is met. If you already have the faction blueprint you will get 200 diamonds instead which is nice although this rarely happens due to lots of blueprints available.
Temporary events
This game has regularly seasonal events that you can access by clicking on “Events” button (only present if an event is going on) below the “Board” button in your shop page.
You earn event token by doing various tasks such as spinning daily the event wheel, spending diamonds or getting gacha decorations.
Check what the rewards are, sometimes there is a hero or outfit here which is what you should get first. Then there are usually some blueprints / gears, check if there is a reward for completing a set for this event. In which case you should probably aim for the items (or blueprints if you’re completionist but most of them don’t have any use for crafting once event is over)
Gacha
Cadria Item Shop Cheat Table
You get one free decoration every 45 hours, don’t forget to collect it, even though after a while it’s not very useful.
Cadria Item Shop Wiki
Business level
Cadria Item Shop Artisans
Business level is increased thanks to achievements and weekly challenges. It unlocks some nice rewards – especially with the business pass DLC – including a chest, the eternal set (unbreakable items as long as you have all of them equipped), a master artisan and a lot of decorations / diamonds.
If you complete the 5 weekly challenges you get extra 20 points so it’s best to do all of them. The most painful ones are completing 2 faction orders (if you’re unlucky and corresponding faction is at 7000+ points then you probably won’t be able to do it) and 3 shop orders from a specific shop. There is also one for 15 fevers and another one for getting several gacha decorations.
So you could wait for weekly reset before finishing a faction order, as well as saving fever tickets / gacha, just in case.
Daily quests
You can reroll daily quests – even if you completed it, as long as you didn’t collect rewards.
Try to aim for 3 crafting tools per day – although re-rolling for 4 times or more is probably not worth it.
Cadria Item Shop Reddit
There are 3 difficulty levels, with reward of 2 / 4 or 7 improvement tools. If you have 3 medium difficulty quests you will get 3 crafting tools. You can also reach 4 crafting tools if you are lucky (2 hard quests + 1 medium difficulty) but I don’t aim for that usually.
Some quests require you to spend diamond (heal party or accelerate crafting), you can do it when the item is almost crafted so that it costs you only 1 diamond, same for healing.
Spending diamonds
Cadria Item Shop Wiki
Assuming you are free to play or almost free to play.
1) Upgrade slots (crafting / adventure)
2) 6th crafting slot
3) Crafting tables. This depends on your speed compared to daily quest crafting parts income, also pay for the tables in the last section (magical) using diamond and keep your crafting parts to upgrade tables in first section (blacksmith). This is because the crafting part / diamond cost ratio is not the same depending on the section.
4) Trials
5) Outfits providing extra decoration points
6) Upgrading low level gears? If you want to get the Mystic crafting achievement mostly.
Spending real money
Just some thoughts as I did not try all of that, I just got the business pass.
This game is quite free to play friendly especially since there is not many rewards available only for paying players and no ladder with rank based reward system.
1) My recommendation is to buy the Business pass DLC first as its cost is relatively low and offers a lot of nice rewards once you progress in the game
By clicking on Board > Cadria Mall:
2) You get access to funds which can give you access to a few diamonds for relatively low price once you level up.
3) You also have the possibility to get some “sale”, the cost is actually much higher for those but you can get exclusive heroes there or decorations with special effects. These sales change regularly.
4) Diamonds directly, seems to be same rate as sale but without the additional items you get in the sale.
5) packages, resource one seems close to useless. Tool one might be better than buying the diamonds then buying tables with diamonds, I haven’t checked.
6) blessing of gods DLC: reduced crafting time doesn’t seem very useful. Resources and rare resources seem to be limiting factor end game, but if they are not for you then this one can be more useful.
Cardia Item Shop Wiki
More of this sort of thing: