IdleOn - Idle RPG: Automation Arm Unlock and Upgrade Order

To unlock the Automation Arm in IdleOn - Idle RPG, enter the World 3 town Construction menu, place high-build-rate characters and directional cogs onto the cog board, and fund the project using early refinery salts and base monster drops. Once constructed, prioritize Tier 1 (Auto-Restock Food) before spending refinery salts on the Smeltery forge or anvil deposits. Auto-restocking prevents characters from running out of healing food and losing AFK gains on difficult World 3 and World 4 maps.

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How to Unlock the Automation Arm

The Automation Arm is a utility building inside the World 3 Construction interface. Building it requires three core components:

• Construction Build Rate: Assign characters with high build efficiency—such as a Blood Berserker or Divine Knight—to the cog board. Surround them with directional and EXP-boosting cogs to accelerate project completion.
• Refinery Salts: You need continuous production of rank 1 Redox Salts and rank 2 Explosive Salts. Reserve your early salt batches specifically for key utility structures rather than crafting optional gear.
• Base Materials: Stockpile basic monster drops and mining ores from World 1 and World 2 inside your central town storage chest.

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Upgrade Priority Sequence

Upgrading the arm requires refinery salts that scale in cost. Focus your materials on the upgrades that eliminate the most daily manual logins first.

1. Tier 1: Auto-Restock Food and Potions

Mob damage spikes significantly in World 3 and beyond. If a character runs out of equipped healing food while fighting offline, they die and stop generating AFK rewards entirely. This tier automatically restocks equipped food slots directly from your storage chest whenever a character enters town or triggers a daily reset. Keep your storage chest supplied with standard healing items and golden food to guarantee uninterrupted AFK gains.

2. Tier 2: Smeltery Forge Auto-Refill

High-tier gear, Alchemy bubbles, and stamps consume thousands of metal bars. Manually filling dozens of forge slots across an entire roster is easy to neglect. The auto-refill upgrade detects empty slots in your Smeltery and automatically draws matching ores from storage, ensuring your smelting timers never sit idle.

3. Tier 3: Anvil Production Auto-Deposit

Every character on your account passively produces smithing materials at the anvil. When their production capacity caps out, they stop generating both materials and Smithing EXP. This upgrade automatically collects and deposits those items into storage whenever you switch characters or hit the daily reset, preventing wasted production time.

4. Higher Tiers: Trapping and Refinery Automation

Later upgrades remove travel time by aggregating hunter trap collections into a single routine and keeping refinery vats supplied with base monster drops and logs. Delay these until your early combat roster is self-sustaining and your refinery can afford the higher salt costs.

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Sustaining the Automation Pipeline

The Automation Arm fails silently if the underlying resource supply breaks down. To keep your automation running without disruption:

1. Protect your Redox Salt generation: Never rank up secondary salts (like Explosive Salts) if the combustion cycle consumes Redox Salts faster than your refinery produces them. Redox Salt is the foundational fuel for subsequent tiers.
2. Assign 3D Printer slots to consumables: Dedicate printer samples to the specific mob drops and ores required by your refinery cycles and forge slots.
3. Monitor storage capacity: The Automation Arm cannot draw items that are not present in your central chest. Regularly check your primary food and ore stacks to prevent your characters from starving during long AFK sessions.