Reverse: 1999 Leveling Guide — Insight, Level & Material Priority

Two systems work together when you power up an Arcanist, and confusing them is the most common way beginners waste resources.

• Level is the smooth, continuous stat gain. You spend growth materials to raise level, but every Arcanist has a level cap that blocks further progress until you advance their Insight.
• Insight is the tiered breakthrough. Each Insight stage lifts the level cap, delivers a noticeable jump in base stats, and unlocks the Arcanist's passive traits and additional skill effects. This is where the real power spikes come from.

Practical order: level up to the current cap, advance Insight the moment you can afford it, then keep levelling into the newly opened range. Don't hoard levels below cap hoping to 'save' materials — an under-insighted Arcanist is missing passives that often matter more than raw numbers.

Materials are always tighter than your wishlist, so spend them on a working team rather than spreading thin across your whole roster. A standard Reverse: 1999 team is one DPS, one Survival unit (heal or shield), and one Support.

• 1. Your main DPS first. This is where damage comes from, so it gets the deepest investment — highest Insight and level.
• 2. Your Survival unit next. A healer or shielder that dies or can't keep the team alive makes a strong DPS irrelevant. Keep them close behind the DPS.
• 3. Your Support after that. Buffers and debuffers amplify the whole team; they don't need to out-level the DPS but should stay usable.
• 4. Bench and utility units last. Raise these only as spare materials allow.

Keep Afflatus matchups in mind when choosing your DPS for a stage — it is one four-way cycle, not two triangles: Beast beats Plant, Plant beats Star, Star beats Mineral, Mineral beats Beast; Spirit and Intellect stand outside the cycle, countering nothing and countered by nothing. An advantaged attacker deals extra damage, so a slightly less-invested unit with the right Afflatus can outperform a favourite that's countered.

Leveling and Insight are only part of an Arcanist's power. Before you dump resources, know the other systems competing for them so you invest in the right order:

• Insight & level — the foundation. Do this first for any Arcanist you plan to field.
• Resonance — tuning that boosts stats. Worth investing in your core team once their Insight is progressing.
• Incantation upgrades — merging same-grade cards to raise spell rank in battle; a combat mechanic to understand, not a pre-battle material sink.
• Portray — duplicate copies that enhance an Arcanist; you can't buy these with materials, so they never compete for your growth budget.
• Euphoria — an advanced upgrade that reworks skills and appearance, available only to certain 6-star Arcanists. Treat it as an end-game goal, not an early investment.

Biggest waste traps to avoid:

• Deep-levelling an Arcanist you won't actually use — invest in your fielded team, not your collection.
• Pouring materials into a Psychube (the stat-and-effect gear) before the Arcanist wearing it is on your main team.
• Raising a low-rarity unit to its ceiling when a higher-rarity replacement is imminent; check your roster plan first.
• Ignoring Afflatus, then forcing a countered DPS through a wall by over-levelling instead of swapping to an advantaged unit.

If you want one repeatable loop, use this:

• Pick your three. Lock in a DPS, a Survival unit and a Support you enjoy and that cover a couple of Afflatus types between them.
• Push the DPS to the next Insight, then level to cap. Repeat this cycle before touching anyone else.
• Keep the Survival unit one step behind so the team never collapses.
• Top up the Support whenever the first two are at a comfortable cap.
• Layer in Resonance and Psychubes for the core three once Insight is well underway — not before.

This keeps a battle-ready trio moving up together instead of leaving you with one over-invested star and no one to protect them.

Insight and level materials don't only come from stages and shops — your Wilderness home base (unlocked in Chapter 2) generates a steady trickle of them just by existing. Four core buildings do the work:

• Paleohall — upgrading it unlocks the other buildings' higher tiers. Its own upgrade materials drop from stages 2-14, 3-15 and 4-21, plus a stockpile of 330 Traces gathered from around the Wilderness.
• Dust Bell Tower — generates Dust passively, capping at 16,200 Dust every 16 hours once fully upgraded.
• Sharpodonty Market — generates Sharpodonty passively, capping at 7,200 every 16 hours once fully upgraded.
• Wishing Spring — crafts materials for Insight, Wilderness itself, Resonance and Psychube upgrades, turning surplus resources into whatever category you're short on.

Both Dust Bell Tower and Sharpodonty Market cap out well before a full day passes, so the single biggest efficiency loss is simply forgetting to collect — check in roughly twice a day rather than once, or you're leaving output sitting idle instead of accumulating.

Placement tip: once you unlock Wilderness in Chapter 2, place as many islands and buildings as you can as early as possible — more placed structures raise your Wilderness output and character capacity. Don't hold back waiting for the "perfect" layout: rearranging your Wilderness later is completely free, so there's no cost to committing early and reshuffling once you have better structures.

Wilderness isn't just a resource farm — it also holds your Crew Members. Placing characters there lets them generate Bond passively over time, and once collected, high-Bond characters unlock a Wilderness Conversation (bonus flavour content, separate from combat investment). A fully upgraded Wilderness with high Vigor (raised by placing more buildings and islands) can host up to 14 characters at once — another reason to build out your layout early rather than leaving tiles empty. None of this competes with the Insight/level priority order from earlier in this guide: Wilderness income and Crew placement run entirely in the background while your actual grinding time still goes to your DPS, Survival unit and Support.

How much attention Wilderness actually needs: collecting output takes seconds, and layout changes cost nothing, so treat it as a two-visits-a-day habit rather than a project. The only real decision point is Paleohall — since upgrading it gates the higher tiers of every other building, prioritise its materials (stages 2-14, 3-15, 4-21, plus the 330 Traces) over squeezing extra levels out of Dust Bell Tower or Sharpodonty Market alone. Everything else in Wilderness is passive income that rewards showing up, not active optimisation.

In short: visit Wilderness regularly, don't ignore it, and don't turn it into a puzzle to solve — the biggest payoff comes from the habit, not from clever technique.