• Get Marlena to 10★ if you want her awakened in week 1. Hero Awakening is the era’s headline upgrade, and a hero has to be 10★ before it is offered at all. Marlena is first, in week 1; Cynthia follows in week 3 and Annie in week 5, so those two have more slack. Each awakening window is open for seven days and then closes.
• Get Claire to 10★ if you intend to ascend her. Same gate, different mechanic — and read Heroes: the three upgrades below before you decide, because ascension takes her stars back down to 6.
• Push Sanctuary as high as you can. Every level raises the hero level cap and the troop tier, and the era’s content is gated behind both. The prerequisites per level are in the Handbook’s Sanctuary section.
• Stop spending and start hoarding. Construction and research speedups, antitoxin, hero medals, recruit tickets, raven fruit, diamonds and plain resources — the new systems eat materials in quantities that make the current ones look cheap. Hoard from day one in the Beginner’s Guide is the same advice with a deadline on it.
• Finish what is in flight. A research or a build that completes during the era is a speedup you did not have to spend inside it.
• Do not start a long upgrade you cannot finish. The first week wants your speedups for the Lord’s Statue, and a half-finished Sanctuary upgrade competes with it.

• The Lord’s Statue is the hub for everything new. It produces the books the era runs on, holds the Resistance and Specialty screens, and pays the seasonal rewards. Upgrading it raises both the Resistance ceiling and the rate the books arrive at, which is what makes it the first thing to put speedups into.
• Soldier’s Rest resurrects a share of your fallen troops. It caps how many it can take in, caps how many it converts, charges resources to do it, and runs a long cooldown; upgrading it improves all four. No numbers for any of that have been captured.
• Choose a Specialty — Handyman or Legion Commander. See the fold below; the short version is Handyman while you are building and Legion Commander when you are fighting.
• Two currencies, and they do not convert. Green Specialty EXP Books raise your Specialty level; purple RES EXP Books raise your Resistance. Both come out of the Lord’s Statue and out of era monsters, and there is no exchanging one for the other.

• It decides whether your might counts. The era’s monsters carry a Resistance requirement, and under it your damage is cut hard rather than slightly. A squad that would comfortably clear a Blight on raw stats can fail one purely on RES.
• The game’s own description is two sentences and worth reading twice:“Higher RES increases damage dealt to era monsters. After the era ends, RES, RES Level, and RES EXP will disappear.”
• So it is rented, not bought. Everything you pour into Resistance stops existing when the era does. That is not a reason to skip it — it gates the rewards that do persist — but it is a reason to feed it the era’s own currencies and nothing you were saving.
• Where the books come from: collecting production from the Lord’s Statue, first kills on each Guard Blight level, and resource monsters. Raising your Specialty level raises the Statue’s hourly output, which is the part that compounds.
• The era-long target is 10,000 RES, which is what the Era Competition scores you against.

• Handyman builds, Legion Commander fights. Handyman cuts research and construction time and cost, adds free stamina, and carries the alliance-support skills. Legion Commander raises troop attack, defence and HP, rally size and war effectiveness.
• You hold one at a time, and switching costs an item. A Specialty Reset Book moves you between the two; a Skill Reset Book redistributes points inside the one you are on. That is the whole disagreement between our two guides — one says flip to Legion Commander before each war, the other says pick a stance and stay. They are the same advice at different supplies of reset books.
• Your Specialty level feeds Resistance. Levelling it raises the Lord’s Statue’s hourly RES EXP output, so the two systems are not independent: Specialty sits upstream of everything.
• The skills you learn survive the era. Resistance does not. That makes Specialty the part of the era worth over-investing in, and it is the strongest single reason to push it hard inside the window.
• Use the active skills on cooldown, and use them on other people. Several are cast on an alliance member and pay both of you.

The five alliance-support skills, in the game’s own words — quoted from captured dialogs rather than paraphrased, each at level 1:

• Help Building — “Use on an Alliance Member. Increases your and the Alliance Member’s building speed by 10%, lasts 60m (non-stackable). CD: 23.5h”
• Help Research — the same wording, for research speed. CD: 23.5h
• Healing Force — “Increases your and the Alliance Member’s Infirmary Capacity by 6%, lasts 240m (non-stackable). CD: 71.5h”
• Bond Shield — “Use on yourself or an Alliance Member. Grants the target 1h of shield (non-stackable). CD: 71.5h”
• Siege War Flag — “Deploys a [War Flag] on empty terrain. Allies within its range: Durability Damage +100 for 30 mins. CD: 71.5h. (Durability Damage boost stacks)”

Each week opens one headline item and leaves the era-long ones running underneath. The day numbers are the era’s own count, not the server’s — era day 8 is not server day 8. The full ladder, marked against the live era day once it starts, is Server Milestones in the Handbook.

• Week 1 — Marlena Awakens. Also Eliminate Threats: sixteen kingdoms in one group, seven days, ranked on the highest-level monster you kill and on who got there first, with anything below Lv.3 not counting.
• Week 2 — Daskal’s Exclusive Weapon, and Claire’s ascension opens.
• Week 3 — Cynthia Awakens.
• Week 4 — Louis’s Exclusive Weapon.
• Week 5 — Annie Awakens.
• Week 6 — Ulfrid’s Exclusive Weapon. Weeks 7 and 8 add no new hero; they are omni shards and the tail of the ascension window.

Running the whole time: the Era Competition (scored on reaching 10,000 RES), the Expedition League (the era’s version of Kingdom War — sixteen kingdoms, weekly performance rolled into one composite ranking, Sanctuary Lv.15 to claim from), the Era Covenant season pass, the Era Weekly Pass and the Era Bonus.

• Awakening raises a hero’s attributes and adds new skills. Marlena, then Cynthia, then Annie. The hero must already be 10★, each window lasts seven days, and the shards come from the daily quests — faster if you buy the pass, and hero-specific shards can be topped up with omni shards earned elsewhere.
• Exclusive Weapons for Daskal, Louis and Ulfrid, one per week in weeks 2, 4 and 6. Upgrading one raises the hero’s stats and adds effects to their skills.
• Ascension promotes an SSR hero to UR. Claire is the first. It is not a flag on the hero you already have — it is a different hero with different numbers, and the Hero Companion treats it as one.
• Read this before you ascend. The hero drops from 10★ to 6★, their skills reset, and they leave the Hall of Honor until they are 10★ again. Level and equipped gear are untouched. Skill badges and the shards spent in the Hall of Honor come back by mail; the shards spent taking them 0★ to 10★ do not. Climbing back costs twice the usual shards per star.
• So ascension is a loss for weeks and a gain after that. Leadership and the guide agree on the mechanics; nobody has published how long the hole lasts. The Hero Companion prices both versions — tick Ascended on the roster and compare.

• Seven heroes and one city skin carry era bonuses. Claire, Marlena, Cynthia and Annie each add +5% damage to monsters; Daskal, Louis and Ulfrid each subtract 5% from monster damage taken; the Greenery skin gives +100 RES.
• The acorn is free speedups. Anyone running the Greenery skin can be tapped for a gift, up to ten times a day, and it costs the owner nothing.
• Celia’s Hunting Day becomes Claire’s Inner Demon when the era starts — a new skin on the monster, the same fight. The Events tab still describes the fight.
• Resource Blights and the Guard Blight arrive with the era and leave with it, and with them the only sources of RES and Specialty books.

• You keep the Specialty skills you learned. Reported first as lost and then corrected with a screenshot of three learned skills still sitting on their cooldowns after the era had ended.
• You keep the heroes. Awakenings, exclusive weapons and ascensions are permanent — that is the point of the expansion.
• You lose Resistance entirely — the stat, the level and the books — by the game’s own description.
• You lose the era’s monsters, so there is no earning either currency afterwards. Anything you were saving to spend later cannot be.