Zad Archery Beginner Guide – Unlock Jobs, Crafting

If you’re just starting out in Zad Archery, the progression can feel a little confusing at first. You start with Arrowfall and a small skill tree, but before long you’ll be dealing with Jobs, Crafting, Mining, Shaping, and eventually Mastery.

The important thing is that these systems are connected, but they each use different currencies and solve different problems. If your progress suddenly slows down, the answer isn’t always another upgrade in the main skill tree. Sometimes you need monster gems from Jobs, a better equipment base from Crafting, ore from Mining, or a matching rune for your shaped weapon.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the verified progression route from the first Arrowfall all the way to the first Mastery unlock.

Zad Archery Beginner Guide – Unlock Jobs, Crafting

Before buying random upgrades, let one full combat attempt play out. I recommend watching what actually causes the run to fail instead of immediately spending whatever currency you have available.

Pay attention to where Zad stops, which enemies survive, whether your skills activate at the right time, and what happens when you reach the portal.

What is going wrong	Where to look first	What to improve
Basic enemies reach Zad too quickly	Main skill tree	Range, damage, or attack speed
One monster family keeps surviving	Jobs and Skills	Relevant projectile, hit, duration, or cooldown upgrades
A new equipment recipe is available	Crafting	Compare the new equipment base with your current gear
Combat is stable but later skill ranks cost too much	Mining	Collect and allocate ore
A shaped weapon isn’t doing much	Shaping	Pair it with a matching rune and improve its speed or damage
A Guardian does not appear and the King is locked	Version and restart check	Make sure you are on Patch 1.0.2 or later and restart

The currencies are separate for a reason. Gold, monster gems, boss skulls, crafting materials, ore, and shaping resources aren’t interchangeable.

So, if you have a lot of gold sitting around, that doesn’t necessarily mean your next upgrade should come from the gold tree.

Start With Arrowfall and Recruit Your Archer

The beginning of Zad Archery has a short manual phase. When using Arrowfall, try placing it where several enemies are grouped together rather than immediately targeting the first enemy entering the lane.

The early gold nodes improve things like stored calls, projectile count, refresh speed, coin output, and damage. You don’t need to clear the entire visible branch before moving forward. Instead, focus on reaching the Recruit Archer node.

Once you have the Archer, Arrowfall becomes more of a support tool. Let the automatic attacks show you where your build is struggling.

For example, if melee enemies are reaching you too quickly, damage and attack speed can help. If enemies are getting close before Zad even starts firing, range is a better solution.

If you’re reaching the portal but dying during its summon cycle, health, regeneration, and saving an Arrowfall charge can give you the extra damage window you need.

When to Use Manual Arrowfall

Even after unlocking automation, I wouldn’t completely ignore manual Arrowfall. There are still several situations where it is useful:

• Dense wave: Place it into a group to weaken multiple enemies at once.
• Ranged enemies: Use it to deal with a dangerous crossbow or caster hiding behind melee enemies.
• Portal summon: Clear newly spawned enemies quickly so your automatic attacks can return to the portal.

Later upgrades can automate additional Arrowfalls and allow Arrowfall to interact with active skills, but a manual charge still gives you control over which group gets removed immediately.

Reach the Portal to Unlock the Next Progression System

Normal waves give you money and monster-specific drops, but the portal is what pushes your overall progression forward.

A run can be excellent at farming ordinary enemies while still making almost no progression if you can’t deal meaningful damage to the portal.

Before each portal, ask yourself three questions:

• Can Zad and his summons survive the first group of enemies?
• Are your automatic skills available when the portal becomes targetable?
• After the adds die, does the portal actually lose enough health before summoning again?

If you can’t survive the first add wave, work on your wave-clearing setup.

If you survive comfortably but the portal barely takes damage, focus on single-target damage, skill uptime, or equipment.

If your important skills are consistently being used before the portal appears, cooldown improvements can be more valuable than simply increasing damage.

The current achievement list also gives you useful progression milestones. It includes achievements for destroying a target, recruiting the Archer, unlocking Jobs, Crafting, Mining, opening a chest, unlocking Shaping and Mastery, obtaining a legendary bow or armor, unlocking Guardian Perks, defeating the King, and reaching Level 40.

Use these as account progression checks rather than assuming every upgrade has to follow one rigid order.

Unlock Jobs and Start Collecting Monster Gems

Your first portal progression opens Jobs and Skills.

This is where monster families become their own resource pools. Different monster types can drop their own gems, and those gems are used to improve the associated job and skills.

This explains why you can have plenty of gold but still be unable to upgrade something like Multishot, Rapid Fire, Explosive Arrow, a summon, or later Sniper skills. You may simply be missing the correct monster gems.

Jobs don’t completely replace your previous class. The Archer’s skills continue working when you unlock additional jobs. Instead, each job adds another source of damage or control to your overall setup.

Pick Jobs Based on Your Current Problem

I recommend spending your gems according to what is actually killing your run.

If too many enemies reach your Archer:
Look for projectile count, area, repeat hits, and summon uptime.

If the portal survives after the adds are gone:
Longer Rapid Fire, lower cooldowns, or stronger focused skills can improve your portal damage window.

If ranged enemies are causing problems:
Range, piercing, or tracking skills can help you reach enemies that basic targeting struggles to select.

If summons disappear too quickly:
Improve their health and attack speed enough that they can actually buy Zad some extra time.

Don’t spread your gems evenly just because you want every skill to have a similar level. Job costs increase, so it’s generally better to fund the skill that directly fixes your current wall and then test the battlefield again.

Move to Crafting Before Overinvesting in Old Gear

Crafting adds another major part of the progression system. Here you need to pay attention to three different things:

• Equipment base
• Rarity
• Forge level

These aren’t the same thing.

A rare older bow isn’t automatically better than a newer normal or rare bow. On the other hand, a heavily forged older item can temporarily outperform a newly crafted base.

Because of this, compare your equipment whenever a new base becomes available.

A Simple Crafting Routine

When you unlock a new bow or armor base, I recommend doing the following:

1. Open the new equipment base and check its stats.
2. Craft one candidate item.
3. Compare its damage, health, attack speed, regeneration, and additional properties with your current equipment.
4. Forge it only if the candidate is already competitive or directly fixes your current problem.
5. Stop if a forge attempt fails or the next attempt becomes too expensive for the benefit.
6. Save your materials for the next equipment base if your current item is already clearing the portal.

During the launch sample, successful forging increased the visible plus level, while a failed attempt ended the forging chain but kept the last successful improvement.

Since this can change with future patches, use the live equipment card and success display as the final authority.

Don’t Ignore Armor

Armor isn’t just something you upgrade when you have spare materials.

If Zad keeps dying before your damage setup has time to work, health and regeneration can be important progression stats.

But if you’re already surviving the waves and reaching the portal comfortably, adding more defense may not solve the real problem. In that situation, increasing damage or skill uptime may be the better investment.

Unlock Mining and Build a Second Skill Budget

Mining adds another progression screen rather than starting a completely separate campaign.

In one verified retail run, Mining opened after the Level 7 portal. However, the exact gate can change, so the Prospector achievement and Mining sidebar are better indicators of whether you’ve reached this system.

Once Mining opens, collect your first ore manually and then return to combat. Your battlefield progression continues while you’re working through the mining system.

Automate Mining as Soon as You Can

For Mining, I would prioritize automation before trying to build a massive stockpile.

Hire the pickaxe when the option becomes available, improve pickaxe speed or reduce the required clicks when those are the main bottlenecks, and collect ore between portal attempts.

Later ore types have their own allocations. The launch interface states that you can choose up to five skill powers per ore type, so don’t spend everything on the first attractive upgrade without checking what else is available.

The useful approach is to amplify mechanics that are already working.

For example, extra Multishot projectiles aren’t very useful if Multishot isn’t firing before Zad dies. More bear health matters when the bear is actually creating a useful damage window. A faster Living Aim cooldown matters once the Sniper and skill are already active.

Unlock the mechanic first, prove that it helps your run, and then use ore to make it stronger.

Patch 1.0.2 Monster Gem Fix

Patch 1.0.2 fixed an issue where monster gems could fail to count while farming below the highest cleared level.

If you are clearly seeing monster gems drop but your corresponding balance isn’t increasing, check that you’re running the correct game version before changing your entire farming strategy.

Unlock Shaping and Pair Weapons With the Right Runes

Shaping arrives later in the progression and introduces weapons that work alongside your Archer.

The launch route first showed a sword, followed later by caster weapons and an additional weapon slot. Shaping also introduces runes that are designed for particular weapon families.

A shaped weapon and its rune should be treated as a pair.

How to Start With Shaping

I recommend following this order:

1. Create your first weapon.
2. Watch it through an entire wave so you understand its attack rhythm.
3. Create a rune and read which weapon family its effect belongs to.
4. Equip the rune to the matching weapon.
5. Choose attack speed if the weapon spends too much time waiting between attacks.
6. Choose damage if it attacks consistently but leaves enemies alive.
7. Only then start investing into another weapon family or the second weapon slot.

A weapon without the correct rune is only using part of the Shaping system.

Different weapons also solve different problems. A hammer that handles groups near Zad is useful for dense waves, while a caster projectile may be better for distant targets. Consecutive-hit and first-hit runes also perform differently depending on the enemies you’re fighting.

Reach Mastery and Audit Your Whole Build

The verified September 1 launch recording reached Mastery after the Level 17 portal.

The Grandmaster achievement confirms Mastery as an official progression milestone.

One visible Mastery option, Mastery of Momentum, could pull one randomly selected skill out of cooldown when a hit landed. Effects like this become much more valuable once your other skills are already strong.

Mastery isn’t meant to fix a weak build from scratch. It works best when there is already a strong progression stack underneath it.

Check These Things Before Buying Mastery

Before spending resources on a Mastery upgrade, take a moment to check your whole setup:

• Is your bow or armor still from an outdated equipment base?
• Are your Jobs skills properly ranked and active during the portal window?
• Are your Mining powers allocated to skills you actually use?
• Does every shaped weapon have a useful matching rune?
• Can the Archer survive long enough for extra casts or cooldown effects to matter?

If several of these answers are no, fixing the underlying system may give you more value than immediately investing into Mastery.

The verified route ends at the first Mastery unlock because the supplied launch footage does not independently establish the complete Guardian Perks, King, or Level 40 progression route.

Those remain official later milestones, but there isn’t enough verified information here to give you a complete step-by-step route for them.