Tundra Ruins — a guide

1. The in-game rules, word for word

The "Tips" screen inside the event (translated from the Russian client):

The whole tactic grows out of these four points, so let us take them one at a time.

Point 1: you only pay up to the exit

The moment you find the exit, every remaining block opens for free and you still get all the prizes inside. So a level does not cost you ten blocks — only the ones you cracked before hitting the exit. Find it on the first try and the level cost one Ice Pick. Miss until the last block and it cost nine.

Point 2: level N costs N Ice Picks per crack

The client only says "the higher the level, the more". Measured across four events, the growth is exactly linear: one crack on level N costs N Ice Picks. On level 1 a crack costs 1, on level 10 it costs 10, on level 50 it costs 50.

Point 3: the choice chests

Chests do not come on every level, only on thirteen specific ones:

The step of three levels holds up to 35, then it goes 35 → 40 → 50. Thirteen chests in total. Each one lets you pick one reward out of six or seven.

Point 4: Ice Picks do not expire

This matters more than it looks. Unspent Ice Picks carry over to the next event, while your level progress does not — next time you start from level 1 again.

Which means stopping early is not a loss. Ice Picks you save simply stay in your bag, and you spend them at the next Tundra Ruins.

2. Where Ice Picks come from

The main and, in practice, the only reliable source is buying them with diamonds: 100 diamonds per Ice Pick. Every figure below uses that rate.

Some Ice Picks come back as level rewards during the event itself: 5 on level 4, 10 on level 9, 15 on level 14, and 5 more on every fifth level after that. Up to level 14 you get 30 back.

3. Double and triple value

Diamonds spent on Ice Picks also count towards other events. That means part of what you spend comes back as prizes from those — and it is the most underrated thing about Tundra Ruins.

Double value: the diamond consumption task

Tundra Ruins is paired with a diamond consumption task: it counts the diamonds you spend and pays out its own prizes for them. You buy Ice Picks with diamonds — so part of what you spend comes back from there.

There is no moment to catch: the task sits on exactly the same weekend the Ruins run on. This one you get for free.

Triple value: Alliance Showdown

Alliance Showdown has a diamond consumption quest, and its points go into the alliance total. Per the Fandom wiki it pays:

4. Where to click: the field is not uniform

The ten blocks sit in a 3–4–3 grid. Numbering them left to right, top to bottom:

Green — corners, red — middle row, yellow — neither

If the exit hid uniformly, every block would be the exit 10 % of the time and all four corners together 40 %. Across five completed events (115 levels) it did not work out that way:

The gap is hard to write off as luck: the odds of a corner skew that large happening by chance are about one in ten million. And the corners repeated in all five events in a row: 64 %, 70 %, 70 %, 71 %, 88 %.

The clicking order

The logic is simple: block 10 first (the most frequent one), then the other corners, then 2 and 9, and dead last the middle row, which is the coldest part of the field.

Block 8 sits fourth rather than higher even though it is a corner: across the combined sample it delivers exactly its 10 %, meaning it is no better than an ordinary block.

On the accumulated frequencies this order averages 3.9 cracks per level against 5.5 for blind clicking — 29 % cheaper. Both actual runs came out better still: 3.3 cracks on the main account and 3.0 on the new one. But budget on 3.9 to be safe.

What was tested and does not work

• The sequence of exits does not repeat between events. Checked three times — writing down "where the exit was last time" is useless.
• "Click the same block as on the previous level" loses to just clicking 10. There is a box on this below: the temptation is strong and the rule is harmful.
• The game does not move the exit away from your clicks. Three first-try hits in a row happened — impossible if the game were adapting. The exit is placed when the level starts and stays put.

5. How deep to go

With the corner strategy a level costs about 3.3 cracks instead of the 5.5 you get from random clicking. Past level 15 the corner advantage weakens and a level runs at about 4.5 cracks — the cumulative cost below uses those two figures:

Now compare what you get for it. Levels 1–14 give four chests (60,000 diamonds by the Fandom wiki estimate) plus the ordinary level prizes of those fourteen levels (another 75,000 or so). That is roughly 135,000 diamonds of value for 34,700 spent — about four to one.

After that the return halves: levels 15–17 give around 40,000 of value for 21,600 diamonds, levels 18–20 around 57,000 for 25,700. That is about two to one, not four.

Three sensible exit points: 14, 17 and 20

All three are chest levels, and all three are far better than going deep. But they are not equivalent — the return falls off steadily:

That last row is not an estimate but a measured fact: the author once ran the event all the way to level 50, and it cost 5,488 Ice Picks. That run is where this whole section comes from.

What if you are short on Ice Picks

"Go to level 14" assumes you have roughly 350 Ice Picks. If you have 40, the rule is different.

The reason is that a chest you did not reach gives you nothing at all. Progress resets, and every Ice Pick spent approaching that chest is gone. It is not half a reward, it is zero.

A live example from the run on the new account. After the chest on level 8 there were 39 Ice Picks left:

• The next chest is on level 11. Clearing levels 9, 10 and 11 costs about 119 Ice Picks.
• The spread is huge: against a mean of 119 the deviation is around 47. Even after buying Ice Picks for 10,000 diamonds, reaching level 11 would work out roughly two times out of three.
• The remaining third: no diamonds, no Ice Picks and no chest.
• Whereas that very same chest costs about 45 Ice Picks at the start of the next event. Half the price, and no risk at all.

So the run stopped at level 8. Not "ran out of money" but a calculation: two chests for 106 Ice Picks, i.e. 53 per chest — the best figure of all five runs.

How much this actually saves

Clearing 14 levels by random clicking would cost about 578 Ice Picks. With the corner strategy the last event cost 344, of which 30 came back as rewards. That is about 230 Ice Picks saved, or 23,000 diamonds — on one event, on the first fourteen levels alone.

Or per chest, across every run so far:

The earlier you stopped, the cheaper each chest turned out. The pattern holds right back to the very start.

6. Common mistakes

• Cracking blocks "for the prizes inside". Do not: once you find the exit, every remaining block opens by itself, for free. Every extra crack is Ice Picks thrown away.
• Going deep "because the prizes are fatter there". They really are fatter, but the price per crack grows faster. Look at the return per diamond, not at the size of the prize.
• Buying Ice Picks to "reach" the next chest. If you run out between chests, stop. The remainder carries over and buys you twice as much next time.
• Starting from the middle row. This is the single most reproducible finding across all four events: blocks 4, 5, 6, 7 are the coldest. Keep them last.
• Burning diamonds on the Alliance Showdown quest midweek. Tundra Ruins only runs at the weekend, and the Consume Diamond task sits there too. Take the diamond quest on a Wednesday and you pay for it separately and for the Ruins separately. Take it for the weekend and one lot of spending covers everything at once.
• Believing the event "owes" you. It does not. Every level is independent; an unlucky streak compensates for nothing.

7. Short version, if you have no time to read

• Solo event. 50 levels of 10 blocks, one Ice Pick = 100 diamonds.
• Find the exit and the rest of the blocks open for free. The goal is finding the exit, not cracking more blocks.
• A crack on level N costs N Ice Picks. Cheap levels pay, deep levels do not.
• Clicking order: 10 → 1 → 3 → 8 → 2 → 5 → 9 → 4 → 6 → 7. Middle row goes last.
• The order reproduced on a second account in a different Realm (corners 7 out of 8). It is still one person's data though — yours may differ. Trying it costs nothing: on a uniform field every order costs the same.
• Do not trust block 10 straight away on a new Realm: on the second account it never came up in 8 levels. Corners are hot everywhere; which corner, check for yourself.
• Go to level 14 and stop — four chests for roughly 35,000 diamonds. The only sensible exits are 14, 17 and 20, and they are not equal: 3.9× / 3.1× / 2.8×. If you go past 14, aim straight for 20 rather than 17.
• Short on Ice Picks? Stop at the nearest chest level. A chest you did not reach gives you nothing, and the same chest costs half as much at the start of the next event. Stopping at level 8 produced chests at 53 Ice Picks each — the best figure of any run.
• Do not run it to level 50. The author did it once — 5,488 Ice Picks, nearly 549,000 diamonds, a 1.4× return against 3.9× at level 14.
• Unspent Ice Picks carry over to the next event, level progress does not. Stopping costs you nothing.
• Tundra Ruins always runs at the weekend — which is where the diamond consumption task sits too, so that part comes for free. The Alliance Showdown diamond quest, though, you have to deliberately take for that weekend rather than midweek: then the same diamonds work three times over.