Simulation Gate

Simulation Gate is a brand new content released during the 6 month Anniversary of the game and serves as the Solo Leveling’s take on the roguelike genre.

The game mode features a variety of encounters, ranging from Shop stages to Boss fights, with some event encounters where no fights take place every now and then.

The mode features a shop where you’ll find a bunch of mats to upgrade the already existing gear systems, like Substats enchantment, Core leveling but also Hunter Exclusive Weapon Designs as well as Special Player’s Weapon Design, a new kind of Weapon crafting material that can be used to craft newly released SJW weapons.

All of the items in the shop are refreshed on a weekly basis except for the Special Player’s Weapon Design which only refreshes when a new “Period” comes out.

We currently do not know how long each period lasts, but we still advise players to go for the rarer weekly rewards before securing the SJW weapon mat, unless you’re only missing one of those in order to craft a weapon.

The Missions are also weekly based, and are easily completed simply by going through the Simulation and beating it twice fully, so no need to pay them too much attention.

This is a Tree of passive effects that can be progressively unlocked by spending Memory Chips, a new kind of currency exclusive to the Simulation Gate. Those are awarded by going through the Simulation.

The order in which you unlock the first few nodes isn’t all that important as you’ll need to progress through every path to unlock the later, stronger nodes.

We still recommend picking the right side first as it contains powerful and universal damage nodes, while the cooldown reduction might not feel potent enough depending on your team comp.

Now onto the meat of the game mode, the Simulation itself. The difficulty is chosen at the start, and is broken down into 15 Tiers. The higher the tier, the greater the rewards but the greater the danger and the TP requirements.

It is possible to skip some Tiers to kickstart your ascension to the higher Tiers, but be careful not to bite more than you can chew as the TP penalties also apply to this mode, making most of the damage buffs you will obtain much weaker due to them scaling off your diminished stats and damage.

Once you’ve chosen your Tier, you enter the Simulation and are shown a map of the possible encounters. Note that unlike most roguelike games, the choices you make do not set you on a “path” that you can’t diverge from, instead you always have access to every choice in the future crossroads.

At this point, you can still ‘End the Simulation’ and get your entry back, but the moment you finish setting your team the entry is spent and won’t be returned to you even if you quit halfway through.

For now the Simulation is played only with Hunters, and without Shadows and Monarchs. There’s still a way for your Shadows’ TP to be counted, by making a duplicate of the team you intended to bring with Shadows (or a brand new one that you want to play) and then switching to it (the “Shadow” team cannot be the one that is picked automatically when you enter the team selection page).

The fights themselves are self explanatory, as it’s all about beating the enemies within the time limit, although more points are awarded by beating the Simulation faster. Each of the fights reward you with buffs that belong to certain categories, such as Core Attacks, Basic Skills, Defensive, etc…

Same thing for the Episodes, they give you 2 options with both pros and cons and a certain probability to fail them.

The good thing with this game mode is that it’s currently possible to reset your options until you find the ones you want, and you can do that by closing the game while you’re on the page to select the buffs. Doing so makes you redo the fight and pick among new options. On the stages with multiple buffs, only the one where you closed the game will be re-accessible, the previous ones are saved and set for the rest of the Simulation.

In terms of strategy you really want to get into the Battles as much as you can, but Maintenance stages are also valuable depending on your run. Even though one such stage is guaranteed before the final Boss, at higher difficulties you might want to secure Legendary Codes before the Special Battles. Episodes on the other hand have high variance.

Divided into 6 categories, the buffs officially named Codes have more or less value, with huge variance within the same category but also compared to other categories:

• Boosting regroups buffs that affect your Basic Skills (Skill 1 & 2) or are triggered by them.
• Core does the same as Boosting except for Core Attacks
• Overclock is the category specialized in Ultimate and QTE related buffs.
• Firewall specializes in buffs related to Defensive tools like shields, heals and damage reduction.
• Overload Codes are triggered either by the enemy having a Break Gauge or breaking said Gauge.
• Hologram Codes are extra attack types of buffs, triggered mostly by hitting a certain amount of time.

When it comes to the Codes to pick, there is one that stands out above the rest: Damage Proportional to Current HP. If you’re not way stronger than the Bosses, this is the Code to aim for. With the ability to retry fights repeatedly, you can use this Code to cheese your way even against the strongest Bosses, so long as your TP isn’t vastly inferior to the enemy otherwise you might not be able to finish it, or even tank more than a couple of its attacks.

Warning: Given the way it works right now, we expect the Code to get nerfed as multi-hit Ultimates can proc as many instances of it as their hit count.

For the other Codes, Ult recharge works great with that setup or with Ult spammers like Thomas, but if you want to go for the more traditional setups, Core and Boosting are the most valuable depending on your carry.

Firewall can also be surprisingly effective with shield spammers like Thomas (yeah, he’s a spammer of just about everything he sets his mind to…), with for example the Damage Dealt increase upon proccing a shield that can snowball Thomas’ damage insanely fast when combined with his Ult supercharged attacks.

On the other hand, Overload is harder to use as certain Bosses simply do not have any Break Gauge, making most of the buffs of that category useless.

Likewise, Hologram struggles to find its place, as the damage is separated from other Codes making it much harder to buff exponentially.