Idle Colony: Golden challenge set guide

There are currently 3 golden trophies: ‘Speedrunner’, ‘No Colonists’, and, ‘Glory’, the latter is self-explanatory, you simply don’t purchase any colonists. With ‘Glory’ you need to invest at least 18 points into the rebirth upgrade. I suggest that both of these get completed once you get the maximum 23 glory points, or at least with enough glory points to spend on a decent rebirth configuration.

For this challenge you need to get the gold melon within 50 minutes; while there is another speedrun challenge, ‘Fast Player’, with an additional 45 minute (1h 35m) deadline, it would be better to do the one with a tighter deadline to save time. Also don’t try to do the other challenges since you don’t want to take chances even with an optimised strategy.

Triple whammy: simply do not purchase anybody from the town hall or from the buildings that spawn people, this is so that you can get progress for all of the character related challenges on each row on a single playthrough.

This also achieves ‘Triumph’ (instead of 18 glory points you need 12 glory points) if you didn’t complete that challenge. You have to get a golden watermelon with the specified amount of meta score multipliers (glory points).

This may not the best loadout configuration for the challenge but it should suffice if you don’t have enough glory points to spend on other upgrades.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/60333369115427007/0F123CB1ECC994AE9EB8853EFD10D5049A927A8B/?imw=256&&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

Most of these upgrades have good synergies, the types of upgrades can be broken down into 4 main areas: weather upgrades, colonist upgrades, tree upgrades and types, and mole & flower upgrades.

Obviously you will need ‘Mouse Hub’ because the tier and gather bonuses later on will be a massive benefit.

I chose Baobab trees because they produce a lot more fruits, it does take a while to water the seeds but once you get high yield:growth-rate, it no longer becomes an issue, especially once you start upgrading yield efficiency and stacking it with tier boosts. It does state that you lose 75% of potential fruit if you choose to chop them down but factor in the 900% bonus yield and the fact that once a decent tier is grown you can choose to dispose of the lower tier trees before you can effectively rely on mole boosts, it’s also useful for the fire modifier for a full load from saplings that you want gone asap.

One of the bonuses from this tree type is max fruit tier +3, this pairs very well with another upgrade called ‘Roots Caretaker’ where; instead of moles coming out of the ground for you to hit them for money, they give all the trees a chance to increase fruit tiers and because of the long lifespan of the trees this rebirth upgrade will keep scaling along with the run upgrades that exponentially increases the likelihood of multiple tier boosts occurring often. The standard mole activity does not help in the late game and barely keeps up in mid-game so ‘RT’ is pivotal in speeding up the operation. ‘Pop Fruit’ becomes very strong later on because of these other fruit tier upgrades.

The next rebirth upgrade I chose was ‘Flower Mole’, every time a flower blooms there is a 30% a mole spawns, reinforcing the already useful build by allowing more opportunities for the mole to work its magic. It does mean they don’t spawn during rainstorms but that isn’t too bad.
‘Lazy Mouse’ is the next upgrade to be involved because it allows the flower blooms to be done in the background while the more important things are being dealt with, and with additional flower combos and growth rate you basically get consistent mole appearances.

[Other useful upgrades]
Dry and Wet colonists both grant +1 gathermerge (merge fruits as they collect to speed things up), they do walk slower but with ‘we don’t need towers’ you can increase throw distance so they don’t go too far from the tree, also ‘rain power’ gives an additional gathermerge but makes the dry debuff even stronger.

‘Merging colonists’ so that you can use mega colonists, they spit out the fruits at great distance and can aim for prisms, which increases fruit tiers, which is why ‘prismatic bees’ can also help since it gives +1/every 60 bees, eventually it will be very useful because 2 spawn with each flower bloom.

Again, ‘Fruit Evolution’ is great because it skims time on fruits evolving in mid-air, pair this up with mega colonists and towers sending fruit to prisms or the wok.

Fertiliser upgrades are good stat boosts for the fertiliser money modifier once you are in an appropriate position to get the tier coin upgrade .

You will want to get access to mole and flower upgrades to consistently tap into the rebirth upgrades as quickly as possible for constant tier boosts but before you can, try to create a reliable gathering stream because the time it takes to grow the plant will eventually be compensated by how long it takes for those tree types to go away. The yield (fruit count) will easily reach into the millions if you have a basic sense of what you need to do and if you think the tier level is too low compared to the average level you can chop the tree down for immediate gains of the yield (reminder, the yield debuff from chopped trees is not really an issue).

Fruit tokens are acquired by reaching certain fruit tiers and you can purchase powerful upgrades with them, I recommend getting the Farmusician and the other one that gives modifier bonus for every fertiliser in the stack early on and then once you get bees from the flower building. Get the tier booster for the cursor upgrade so that you have a reliable way of actively speeding up the process on the best tree. Then you should get the prism upgrade, you can swap these two steps around depending on how fast the colonists are and if they are working on the best trees.

This is my first guide so let me know if I didn’t explain in a clear and effective way. I am assuming that those who use this guide have a good idea on how to navigate the game so I didn’t go in much detail on the very beginning of the run.

Speed runner and Fast Player were the only challenges that seemed to be what can trip people up if they didn’t have a good load out which is why I chose those specifically.
I might include a proper summary of the entire trophy showcase if it’s wanted since I mentioned a few others.